I think part of it is also the upper middle class moving out of larger cities, and buying a house with a big garden in the countryside, and then turning the garden into a sterile architectural monument.
What I increasingly observe in europe, is the opposite: diverse gardens with different flowers, bushes and trees.
The sterile garden type still exists, but has gotten very uncommon. And I have seen lots of europe in the last years. So it is really cheap, to target garden owning people, when you have large areas with monoculture and insect poison everywhere.
There are both kinds, some are obsessed with over-pruning/mutilating trees and mowing the garden like a golf green (another heresy), some let the nature develop. For example, France has many extended private areas, with forests
Btw. insects love deadwood. But yeah, most gardeners do not .. which is alright with me to remove, if it is a hazard in a tree, but deadwood lying in a bush could be tolerable.
Those gardens with pretty flowers and bushes are not the natural habitat of the insects. They look diverse but are in fact as sterile as a monoculture field. Insects thrive in the unkempt parcels between fields where man never goes, and those are disappearing, replaced by well kept gardens.
It depends. There exist the diverse looking, but sterile garden type (who do use pesticides and insectizides of all sorts to keep it sterile). But this is increasingly changing. All the garden magazines are full of it, how to make your garden more insect friendly, insect hotels, leave patches of grass uncut, flowers that have nectar for insects and not just pretty flowers. And people follow it, since years, as far as I experienced.
But even the most sterile looking garden with bushes and trees is far more insect friendly, than a dead field. Because tons of insects are living in the bushes and trees alone. A big tree can feed colonies of bees, when blooming, etc.
But I am of course also with you, that the fields need to get more small, with bushes between them and if possible, organic.
Sure, but when you say upper middle class I think - that must be a small portion of the population and thus not likely to be significant to causing a problem of this magnitude.
It is a small proportion of the population (5-10%) but it has a disproportionate effect because they take up the space that previously remained wild because too impractical to farm, and there was not that much of it.
