Not just insects. Where I used to live even birds had left. A decade of stronger regulations and cleaning the closer by river made animals come back. And the river started to look less like a sewer and more like a river.
The pollution that kills insects is not good for humans either.
“Small birds are always vulnerable to predation from larger species. ... One reason that the larger birds do well in cities is that they are more likely to benefit from human-created foods (petfood, garbage, foodscraps and carrion) than small birds, which mostly eat insects.”
We feed crows in our area peanuts and when neighbors complained of crap on their cars we stopped for a bit, but they were really aggressive in asking for peanuts. Sometimes there are 10 of them on the wires near the street. They follow my wife home from a main roost a few blocks away--they seem to recognize her in her car. It's unclear if there's a connection to the article.
crows are super clever, when I drive brisbane to sydney they'll be in the middle of the road eating kangaroos and other dead animals, they dont fly away they just hop to the right of the line so I dont squish them at 100 miles an hour, watch me go by then go back to what they are doing - they actually know which side of the road I'll go past and that they will be safe.
A lot of birds are getting way closer to our windows than they used to be (lived in the same place for 40 years). These aren't angry bird (npi), usually they keep their distance with humans, but now they come very close very often.. I cannot not interpret it as a sign of risk taking facing higher needs.
A few evenings ago I went out on the deck and there was a huge owl just sitting on the railing. It looked at me like, “what are you going to do about it?”
We've seen the same phenomenon in multiple directions. Crows were usually near habitations, and we've seen a lot more deeper in the forest, and smaller birds that were hiding in the forest have been more adventurous and come to our balcony.
I don't know how good/bad of a thing it is, but surely there seems to be something going on.
For what it's worth, people also seem to have rediscovered the forest, and I hope will get more emotionally involved in its maintenance and preservation.
It might be something else, like temperature or wind making them move. Or maybe it's there food sources drying up. I can't say. I should ask knowledgeable people.
In the last month we've had 2 small birds (that don't eat peanuts we leave out for crows) come into our kitchen (wife leaves it open when she cooks). In 20 years here, that never happened before.
I wonder how much noise levels are playing a role in it. Habitat loss is an obvious contributor but it seems like noise levels would hurt songbirds efforts to find a mate.
Last year I had a jarring experience driving through some of the agricultural land near the Salton Sea en route to Bombay Beach coming down from JTNP, taking back roads.
The general region is desert, water and food is scarce, but through this agricultural zone there's this dense pocket of food and water on the surface.
I was in a Miata with the top down, and the amount of chemicals they were using to keep the pests/insects away from this lush green oasis in a land of nothing was noxious. I hadn't exited my car, just drove through these fields on the farm roads, and it left me feeling sick with a headache and nausea well into the next day.
Of course I didn't encounter a single insect, spotless windshield.
Yes it’s very bad and it doesn’t have to be that way. The mass chemical use must be profitable but there is a great cost to the land and the environment to do so.
This is why it is so upsetting that Bill Gates is pushing this kind of chemical intensive farming all over Africa and positioning himself to profit off the transition too. Once again harming the continent and its people for profit while telling them it’s good for them.
EDIT: He's also buying up all the farm land with water rights in the USA. He is the single largest holder of US farmland. So when drought inevitably comes and swaths of farmland become too dry to use, he will profit. If you apply to one of their foundation grants for agriculture, you will see a big emphasis on "bundled services", so they seem to want to build a "farm as a service" system where farmers don't own anything. It's a new enclosure movement where the lords own everything and everyone else pays them to use the land. We have enough in this world we can live pretty cheaply if we work together and share in the right ways. But control of the land is vital or we will all die in poverty from rents.
Since 1990, when the number of people living in extreme poverty peaked at 1.9 billion, we have been on the steady march towards eradicating extreme poverty. Despite the fact that there are almost 6 billion more people alive today than at the turn of last century, the number of people living in extreme poverty has reduced from 1.3 billion to 730 million [1]. Despite its flaws, the Green revolution and the modern system of agriculture has saved billions of people from starvation.
It's a popular narrative, but one that Jason Hickel argues falls short. He disputes the poverty thresholds used in these calculations as far too low - $1.90 per day today is lower than the consumption of 19th century US slaves, he argues:
As far as the Green Revolution, again this story that is has saved millions from starvation is a popular one. But we can look at Vandana Shiva for example who says it became a way for multinational corporations to take over the farms and food systems of India, leading to mass farmer suicides, erosion of the soil, and poisoning the land:
If I was one of the richest man on the planet, I would also invest in various fields, which would probably mean I end up one of the single largest owners in that field (through sheer fact I am one of the richest people on the planet).
Drove through Texas agricultural land in spring of 2016. Windows up, not a convertible, and I was still horribly affected for 2 weeks. My eyes and nose burned the moment we started driving by the fields, and my nose continued to run and drain for 2 weeks after.
The name of that road is extraordinary appropriate, though, so I imagine under the right conditions it could trap and concentrate quite a lot of the aerosolized chemicals from the croplands it opens onto just south. While on the twisties through the namesake canyon you could have been blasted with several times the concentration found in the open air above the fields themselves.
The canyon road snaking up through the mountains was odorless, only the roads immediately through the fields were noxious... but it wasn't a windy day.
For anyone unfamiliar with the history of the Salton sea and the effect all these chemicals have had on the surrounding areas, check out this documentary: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c
A part of me wants to visit just to fully take in the reality of it all. But I don’t think my family would be too happy.
I've done the same drive, thru the farmland and cattle ranches to the south of the salton sea by Brawley. God it was noxious. Despite the sea having a reputation for an awful smell, it didn't compare to the farmland below. My throat hurts thinking about it. You sometimes get a similar effect in the san joaquin valley.
Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.
This is a common anecdote, and a situation I remember as that's when I started driving.
Also one used in scientific study with seemingly dire results:
>The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.
Everytime this "the insects are dying" thread comes up, people come out of the woodwork with anecdotes like this.
But I am one of them! I remember getting my first car in the late eighties and scrubbing tons of splattered insects off my windshield every time I went to the gas station.
Now I barely even notice them.
Antecdote is not data, but I certainly believe people when they say the insects are dying.
Indeed. I've never seen more insects, birds, toads, and bats in PA than I did this summer. Some nights the katydids were deafeningly loud. The only thing that seemed to decline was spotted lantern flies, thankfully.
I remember in the 90s sitting on my grandmother's porch in rural PA at night. Huge moths everywhere. Luna moths being just about as common as mosquitos. Beetles bangings into the walls. Chubby spiders having so much food they couldn't even eat half of it. The walls were absolutely plastered with insects and you'd have to try to not get covered fireflies while walking through the grass.
Now there are some mosquitoes and crickets. Maybe a few moths sometimes. The walls outside are spotless.
Living in Asia now, I see insects about as much as I saw them back then. I have to wonder if there were even more back in the 90s, or if things are as good as ever here. But it's nice to see life.
Research says no: “The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.” From https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla... (Second hand comment from a journalist; actual research results may vary).
Insects getting better at avoiding cars in a much shorter time than we'd expect would certainly be a prediction of Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' theory.
The comment above yours was not saying what you're saying.
They were saying, IIUC, that it could be that the same amount of bugs are splattered across a larger number of cars, so that if you look at any one car, then it looks like less bugs.
There’s a road in my area (rural MN) where I don’t slow down if there are deer on the side of the road. It’s a curvy road with a ton of deer, and back when I was a teenager the deer would do the normal deer thing of potentially getting spooked and run across the road…or directly in to your stopped car.
15 years later they no longer do that, just on that road in particular. I don’t know if it’s evolved behavior or learned, but they absolutely changed.
that wouldn't be strange. I remember a friend telling me about scientists who visited a remote place twice and seeing fungus-caused dieoffs the second time and he immediately claimed that it was global warming. My first thought was "those bastard scientists brought the fungus in" (I've hiked through remote endemic-plant forests and they tell you to scrub yourself vigorously on your way in to prevent tracking non-native plant seeds)
Fellow biker here, with as small a windshield as I can stand (meaning my helmet stands above the windshield. I still carry a can of Honda Spray Cleaner and Polish in the tank bag for scrubbing the face shield on the helmet, as well as the windshield. I used to go through several cans a year. Now, for the same miles ridden, a can might last over a year. The one variable is the bike, but I've owned a variety of bikes over the decades I've been riding, and only in the last 10 years or so did I have to cut back on my standing order of cleaner.
Huge trucks and SUVs are really popular in the US. The aerodynamics are not going to compare favorably to typical 90's cars, where even the trucks are much smaller.
For me, I noticed the change over one year. I had a job where I commuted the same stretch of highway every day. For the first few years, every May/June the windshield was always badly crusted with bugs. Then suddenly one year, no bugs. Same car.
I mentioned this in a similar discussion on HN a few years ago. I used to own a Nissan Cube (a boxy car), and it would regularly get encrusted with insects every summer, when compared to other family members’ vehicles which did not.
Insects still get hit with aerodynamic cars, but the blows are glancing and less likely to cause a “burst”.
Are they, though? So many trucks, SUVs, and other cars that don't have sloping windshields. Also, I would expect even pastier windshields given that the nationwide speed limit was 65mph until 1995, and it took years for states to nudge it upwards to where it is now (85mph at some places in Texas).
Remember need to scrape off bugs from windshield after each trip thru I5 ~10 years ago. No need to do that anymore.....
On the other hand, in my back yard, I grow a lot veggi, strawberry with worm casting from kitchen scraps. I do still lot of insects. A lot of birds nested around my house. Produce 10-15 young birds. I found a very cool looking giant tomato worm a size of my biggest finger. It ate half of (7 ft height ) tomato plant in 2 days.
The Strawberry, cucumbers, other veggies grow with worm casting taste SO much better than from anything store .
I love creating little sanctuaries and do think they’re useful as pockets of support and diversity. Also, the Tomato Hornworm is an awesome creature and results in a Hummingbird Moth. I try to feed them vegetative branches and keep them separate if I can so that they hang around and we still get tomatoes.
YES. Drove with my parents to the Catskills in upstate NY almost every weekend in the early 2000s. The windshield was covered in bug splatter. Now - nothing.
I drive long distances through Europe every now and then since 2009-ish. That's only 12 years and much of my drive is through farmland and forests, no lights other than the cars for at least 1000km in aggregate. In 2009 the windshield and lights would need a solid scrub every couple hundred km. Now I don't bother cleaning when refuelling.
I recall my dad checking the washer fluid level before road trips because we ran dry on a previous trip and it was clear we wouldn’t make it home without hitting a gas station ASAP.
People aren't as densely packed in most parts of Texas, so it might be explainable that way. A lot of the state is also hay fields instead of food crops that are more intensively controlled for pests.
But I've noticed a big change in Texas in recent years. The last two years I haven't had to use pesticide in my residential vegetable garden. I've had to control for mold/fungal infections, but not for insects. And I live up against a nature preserve and try to keep most of my property as natural as possible.
The speed limit went up to 85 in Texas. It seemed to max out at 75 or 80 in other places. I'm not sure if an extra 5-10mph made the difference, but it could have.
This also stopped being a problem for me in the 90s when I started driving my mom's Dodge Intrepid, which was significantly more aerodynamic than other cars of the era.
We used technology to make the earth sick. The insects are fleeing to safe havens in places like my small backyard. Seriously all I did was stopped mowing, and instead use simple nudges to guide the manifestation of a natural system! So much abundance here, with some practice we all can make habitats for humans and animals (including attracting animals and humans by growing tasty food).
We will rebuild stronger together, nature abhores a vacuum and will repair with us if we allow it to manifest. Thank goodness.
I don't use any fertilizer or *cides on my lawn. I do mow it once every month or so. When I walk down the driveway in the summer, there's a constant hum of insects.
The only pesticide is a line of diatomaceous earth around the house to keep the ants from setting up shop inside.
I used to want a backyard wildlife refuge until I realized this also means having a backyard refuge for ticks. I'd love to know if there's a way around this
One way to lower your risk of ticks is to manage the parts of your yard you use most. Mowing paths into your yard instead of mowing the entire yard can help and allow the other parts of your yard to grow, planting patches of yard with native plants and allowing plants to grow instead of turf.
If you can find a way to attract Opossum they are net tick destroyers. Keeping out deer will only help so well, as small mammals(chipmunks, mice, etc) are primarily the sustainers of tick populations.
Do you get them even in the suburbs? If your yard is big enough, keep an area mowed short and a 3-5 meter buffer between that and tall growth. But that takes quite a lot of space.
My 85y old grandma got lyme this year and she hasn't left the city in more than 5 years. Birds can transfer ticks from thousands of kilometers away. Her garden is very nice though with the long grass and all that.
Up here in southern Maine we had many insects, including pollinators all summer long. Still have a few bumblebees hanging around in the few remaining wildflowers.
A strange one was a parasitic wasp that would harvest inchworms and leave them in piles in my shed! Took a while to catch it in the act.
Without the full article it's tough to say, but my refute would be about my local environment. There has absolutely been a MASSIVE decline in NATIVE insects (among other things). Instead we have more asian beetles, emerald ash borers, and japanese beetles than you can shake a stick at. So while yes, technically the numbers may remain neutral, I'm not sure we can call it a healthy distribution.
No disrespect taken. There are countless studies backing up the finding of insect decline. I was simply throwing out a hypothesis of how someone could claim otherwise - they simply aren't measuring the appropriate way and/or they aren't accurately representing their results.
That would be spread across a residence outside of the city, one inside city limits, and a cabin in the middle of nowhere.
The only insect I'm aware of that seems to still be in full force that is native are mosquitos. Dragonflies, lightning bugs, lady bugs, moths, butterflies, etc. are sadly all rare sightings.
“Wilson is now ninety-two and lives in a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts.
He’s the subject of a new biography, “Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature” (Doubleday), by the journalist Richard Rhodes. Rhodes, who’s the author of more than twenty books, including “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,”
I had noticed this decline anecdotally previous years, and this summer made a concentrated effort to plant wildflowers to attract pollinators and it did wonderfully. I saw more bees and butterflies than ever.
I plan to do this as long as I can and would encourage others to do the same! I was amazed by the difference.
I've been planting wildflowers at my new house as well and it's very fun to watch which plants different insects prefer.
I've noticed that Monarch butterflies ignore almost all plants in my area but they love Mexican Sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia). I wonder how much of that is regional, since they're supposed to like Zineas and Verbena but they've shown zero interest in mine.
At my place the Monarchs (a couple weeks ago) were all attracted to a plant I haven't properly identified.
It looks like queen anne's lace--crowns of many tiny, white flowers. We have a few similar-looking species in the region (Ozarks), and it could be any of them.
Maybe worth a shot finding out if you want some other options for them!
I'm not sure if this is the plant you're describing, but in New England, Monarchs are really attracted to Milkweed. The White Swamp [0] variety may be what you're describing.
I do believe I see a lot of that in the understory, where there is a canopy and shade.
In this particular case, though, it was a similar plant that I normally always see in sunny areas. On the edges of my mowed yard, I was seeing a lot of monarchs for a few days.
The loss of pollinators is scary. blueberries, cherries, every brassica (broccoli, cabbage etc), carrots, squash, melons, and many more are insect polliated.
A few other plants can also self pollinate, but with reduced yields.
Wheat and corn and a number of other plants are wind pollinated, so we won't lose everything. And we'll probably keep some plants that need bees alive in conservatories through manual pollination.
Still scary, in that a single disruption, like a new illness infecting crops, would have a much bigger impact.
I feel like if this were true we would be seeing a major decline in the sales of pesticides, at least on consumer-level volume. Has anyone dug into those numbers?
Pesticide use is down 40% since 1992 but it's complicated by a number of factors. The biggest being the chemical formulas, concentrations and dosages have not stayed constant over time.
A lot of pesticide use on the consumer side comes from pest control companies where people have a recurring service that preemptively sprays the entire yard and house. The customer just sees that they don’t have bugs, and assumes it’s because the service is working.
For there to be a decline in sales, consumers would need to be purchasing products only in response to an infestation, but with such a service, they aren’t doing that. And the pest control company has no incentive to tell people “by the way, you can cancel the service now because everything is extinct”.
I’m talking about pest control services, not lawn (i.e. mowing) services. Depending on where you live, it’s legal to “treat” the entire lawn area preemptively, not just the areas within a few feet of the house.
Part of the sales pitch is also “if we treat all your neighbors, then all those bugs are going to come to your yard”. They really have no interest in just pest control; it’s a hard sell to sign up another customer.
Not sure this would hold true. The most efficient way to manage insects in a home (consumer) environment has nothing to do with pesticides.
For example: Ants are best managed caulking ingress points. Silverfish are best managed by reducing humidity. Bed bugs typically require professional fumigation. Flies & roaches by removing/storing food sources, etc.
> I feel like if this were true we would be seeing a major decline in the sales of pesticides, at least on consumer-level volume. Has anyone dug into those numbers?
I just don't see the causative link as the pesticides are used prophylacticly. Fewer insects would tend, IMO, to reinforce the behaviour, not reduce it.
Albert Howard an English botanist observed Hindu / Indian farmers using Cow pat to fertilise their land. He dubbed this the Indore process, there was no need for toxic pesticides or fertilisers. All this modern science that at the time that was supposed to improve farming actually destroyed our biodiversity and insects.
> All this modern science that at the time that was supposed to improve farming actually destroyed our biodiversity and insects.
What is the distinction between “modern science” and “science”? Are you claiming that the development of the Haber-Bosch process and other fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides did not increase yields?
What is “improve farming”? It does not seem to be a small feat to go from feeding 1.5B people to 8B people in 100 years, at far more calories per person.
Granted, the long term effects very well may have destroyed biodiversity and insects, but the immediate problem at the time was hunger and malnutrition. Although, one can make the case that the loss in biodiversity and insects is inevitable with excess human population, in which case the development of technologies increasing yield would be responsible for leading to the possibility of excess humans existing.
The "puzzles" will keep pilling up. One year there will be no insects, the next year it will be a horror movie.
Global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass [0]. We are basically simply pushing the rest of the biosphere to a corner. It responds as the immensely complex, adaptive, system that it is: unpredictably.
That was due to the weather: very good in srping, no huge heatwaves killing insects and plants, enough rain, and in some places even too much and circumstances became superb for mosquitos.
I have no knowledge in how far there have been immediate effects but several neonicotinoids have become more restricted/banned in the EU in the last 2-3 years.
I'm fortunate to live with a wetland on the property, and find a lot of dragonflies and even bumblebees which have disappeared from several adjacent states and are now proposed for endangered status.
Yet, I now feel lucky to see even a few fireflies in a summer, when I remember loving to see fields of them blinking in the evening... wow I miss that.
Sometimes I get the sense that people hate that we exist, in the numbers that we do, because of our impact on the earth by merely existing. A self-hatred if you will. And before you respond with "if only we did X, it would be fine," consider that the difficulty of convincing/coercing lots of people to do things is also an inherent part of our existence. Also part of our existence is the incentive to cheat to get ahead (in whatever economic system you pick).
>We can't live like native Americans with iPhones.
We probably could in the next 100 years through automation, massive reduction in population, and making things to last instead of making things to be replaced. Building a society whose values aren't based around never-ending growth.
There is a good anti-growth counter argument/observation in Homo Deus. Population growth necessitates economic growth otherwise you end up with unemployment which destabilizes society and can lead to war.
If you don't have population growth you still need economic growth to provide upward mobility to people at the bottom. Without growth you have a zero-sum game which again can lead to war.
Ideally improvements in efficiency or a shift values/culture can create a world where we can have economic growth without increasing the burden on the planet.
>If you don't have population growth you still need economic growth to provide upward mobility to people at the bottom. Without growth you have a zero-sum game which again can lead to war.
OR you reset wealth upon death. You don't necessarily need unlimited growth if you prevent wealth from pooling at the top.
What does that look like, in practice? You have a family of four, and the father dies suddenly. What happens to the house? The wife re-marries, dies, and the second husband re-marries. At what point is this 'reset' occurring?
To whom does the wealth transfer when it is 'reset'?
population growth is starting to recede. Most 1st world countries are growing through immigration, with a birth rate that is too low to support our population.
We are trending towards having a smaller population in 100 years.
Not necessarily. Demographics indicates that developed nations seem to have near-replacement birth rates. Anything less than 1 and you get exponential decay. So a small nudge will eventually lead to large reductions in population, but the rate of decline need not be severe.
There are of course issues that a lot of the economy is predicated on growth, but again, I'm actually pretty optimistic that markets and humans are pretty resilient and adaptable given enough warning and time.
I don't know, Japan seems to be doing OK. There are all sorts of problems that are going to eventually arise simply due to the fact that our economies are built on endless growth. But IF they embraced it and were able to advance automation fast enough, most of those would be overcome. Mainly: who will take care of the elderly.
HA part of that could be easily solved if suicide weren't so stigmatized. If everyone could just agree that once you're past the age of 80, once you get to a point of being infirm you just take a magic pill and peace out on your own terms, we'd be far better off as a species.
From the article:
"In a 1974 United Nations population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating 'Development is the best contraceptive.'"
The problem is that we life under a system that demands endless growth on a finite plane.
It's pretty clear that the human population has grown beyond the ability of the planet to sustain a progression towards universal industrialization. Humans have nowhere else to live and we're eroding what underpins our ability to survive.
We more than tripled the human population in the last 100 years. In my own lifetime, the human population has grown by 42%. It's insanity to believe we can continue this without serious consequences.
I've read studies that show human population peaking around 2100 and slowly lessening until it finds a happy medium. This is due to increased access to birth control in developing nations as well as people simply having less children because automation on the farm replaces the need to have several workers (the kids) around to help with the harvest, etc.
Sometimes I get the sense that people would rather put their head in the sand than discuss the realities around human impacts on the Earth.
This has nothing to do with "hating that we exist", however, at a minimum we probably have a responsibility to study, discuss and understand our impacts on the Earth, and not just for what it means for other species, but for what it means for us.
There's a Radiolab episode about a subspecies of butterfly that only lives on and around this one US military base, and the 20 years of effort one ecologist spent trying to save the species. The ecologist admits that nothing else depends on that butterfly for existence, but it's still worth saving because of a moral obligation we have for making it endangered.
so this story is amplified, so that those predisposed to this outlook have something to carry around..
> spending 20 years of resources
this overly-simple, too simple, example of one person and "the military" is not at all representative of say, the Bison and praries, or frogs and freshwater. And who are the most prolific polluters in the Federal Government, and who is famous for "20 years of resources wasted for no result" .. ?
Its just as abrasive to hear this pre-baked conclusion, as for others to hear the actual truth of say, entire regions of coral going extinct.
Shift your view up a couple levels of abstraction and everything on the planet is ultimately meaningless. People always seem to argue about "saving the planet" as though it has some greater meaning, when in reality it is just a poor proxy for "keep the planet inhabitable for humans".
I'm sure there are some who do. There are a lot of people out there, you can find just about any belief.
But sometimes I get the sense that people say things like this as a way to derail the conversation. They'd rather talk about other people's motives and beliefs than the the actual observation about the environment.
And we know those people are out there. Some of them get paid a lot to do it.
There is strong evidence that when humans first arrived in locations they had never existed before, mass extinctions of megafaunal species occurred. And this was thousands of years ago, before we collectively had any idea about the dangers of biodiversity loss, climate change, or the sheer extent of the power we wielded as a species. The first time we ever thought about the greenhouse effect as a tangible concept was only 200 years ago.
Given that it required us thousands of years to develop a scientific mindset to even be able to comprehend the scope of our own destruction, I can't see how we could have stopped ourselves any sooner.
The recent uptick in energy consumption is now magnifying the problem at an exponential rate, but it doesn't sound agreeable or practical to prevent people from spreading around to consume all the resources we have, or to smack the newly invented, frivolous and energy-draining devices from their inventors' hands the moment they've been first actualized.
Where I live, we first noticed the insects and then the birds disappearing around 2010. That was also around the time that the local climate changed considerably, and the summers became unbearably hot. Construction has also removed many of their former habitats in my area, while decreasing rainfall has led to drier conditions. The last of the local bee population near me disappeared around 2018.
Habitat is definitely a factor with fireflies. For years we had none. Then we let some of the landscaping and trees grow out so parts of our yard became more forest-like. 2-3 years ago we started seeing fireflies for the first time.
"Wilson once stuck his arm into one of these mounds and described the pain as “immediate and unbearable.” "
That's science, that is!
We have systematically reduced the world's ecosystems into smaller and smaller islands and this bloke has demonstrated what happens on smaller islands: loss of diversity, fewer species.
Hm, I would guess that it is the neonicotinoids pesticides. If I could point to my general recollection of the decline, I'd very vaguely point to that and when "roundup" became a thing.
It does seem to be even more global than that though. So global warming is probably the main culprit.
Look out the window next time you're in a jet. In america it seems like we have industrialized everything: food production, suburban housing, etc. The scale of our civilization is terrifying, and America is peanuts in terms of population (but NOT in terms of resource consumption per population, the far more important metric).
The fact is economists can't estimate the value of an ecosystem, habitat, or wilderness. It's just untapped money to them if it's torn down. If economics, which directs 95% of our policy, can't get their heads out of the asses and figure out how to properly account for the existential value of nature, we are doomed.
The fact that a pseudo-mathematical/pseudo-scientific area of study, one filled to the gills with venal denialist ultra-right-wing orthodoxy is the driving force of our future is not encouraging.
Economics is useful in the small and medium scales, and in very limited large scales, I'm not going to sit here and tell you price theory, supply/demand, and game theory are all bunk, but the political force that is "economics" is a key contributor to our dire situation.
In my back yard when I was a kid there used to be thousands of these horrible beetles in the grass. You would step on them everywhere you walked and they smelled terrible. They are gone now but so are the dragonflies and the butterflies. I don't think whatever we did was worth it.
One solution is indoor farming, because you can stack in 3D and have entirely controlled input and output. We would need like 100x the number of existing mechanics and mechatronics folks to keep such an endeavor operational though.
Significantly fewer wasps this year in my little corner of coastal New England. More stink bugs in the past few years. Honeybees and bumble bees seem pretty consistent.
Anecdotally this year - almost no insects in our backyard. It was great for being outside but also really creepy. Could be a one year thing here but still noteworthy.
Maybe the author doesn't see insects as they are in a heavily populated city with exterminators everywhere. Down in Southern California I have seen more bees this past year than I have ever seen. A few things I do feel like I see alot less than I used to see is dragonflies and praying mantis. I remember as a kid I used to see so many of both, now I may see one or two a month(dragonflies), and praying mantis once or twice a year.
Do you mean honey bees because those would be more like looking to cows or sheep population as a metric of general wild animal population.
My area of SoCal is HOA/office park “landscaped” with near zero variety of plants for miles around. There are very few flying insects in my yard. I did attract some caterpillars this year, but they are very particular about plants. The caterpillar on the native gooseberry stays there, the tomatoes get hornworms and the other plant gets budworms. Bugs can be very specific and the grass and office park shrub monoculture around is not supportive of a diverse insect population.
I've had a different year, as well. Fewer bees seemed pretty obvious, but more wasps this year, including a swarm of wasps that I didn't even know swarmed--they normally have 3 or 4 wasps on a relatively small hive.
But I've got lots and lots of mantises this year. One evening, attracted by the lights of my workshop, I counted 6 mantises climbing around my windows at the same time. I've continued to see them elsewhere, though one at a time. I've never seen more than a few per season, previously.
I have a crap ton of bees visit my flowers and happened to get chatted up one day while outside garden gin by someone who keeps bees. If memory serves he’s about 10 blocks away, so I never would have solved that on my own just by walking around looking for hives.
Could be you have new neighbors.
Half of my bees are bumbles (at least one nest in my yard), maybe the odd mason, and hoverflies. But I’m on an edge of a garden district, less than a mile from a river, so I see lots of things. I’m pretty sure I’m part of a corridor between the two.
I believe that bugs (Heteroptera) might be more resistant to common pesticides than other insects.
Where I live, in Europe, several species of bugs have become quite abundant in recent years.
On the other hand, most other kinds of insects, e.g. butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, various kinds of wasps and flies etc. have become exceedingly rare compared to how abundant they were when I was young.
All these, and ticks, so many ticks. My roommate got lyme disease walking through are back yard which has next to no plant life and is mostly concrete.
You are right, I forgot ticks. This spring while hunting mushrooms I would pick 10+ off of my pants after every trip out. I have a pill bottle with dozens of them from taking the dogs for a walk. almost always itty bitty little devils.
Not applicable here, as "Trinidad and Tobago" is a single name in a list of two items. But a comma following "Tobago", while not a serial comma sensu stricto, would still aid comprehension.
I’ve been thinking about the same since I saw your comment. I think a comma after Tobago: “Trinidad and Tobago, and in Suriname” would make the sentence easier to understand but it also might add meaning that isn’t there. Does the added comma imply that primary object (most of the work) was done on Trinidad and Tobago, while the work in Suriname is smaller or less important?
I don't think a semicolon is right here. Are you proposing this?
"He spent a sabbatical conducting field work on Trinidad and Tobago; and in Suriname."
That sounds very odd indeed — I wouldn't say the sentence with a semicolon-sized gap in it and reading it with one is jarring.
There's nothing wrong with the original sentence. When I read and say it I do so with the same cadence as "He spent a sabbatical conducting field work on Bermuda and in Suriname." The "and" in Trinidad and Tobago is just coincidence — it's not part of the sentence structure. If a reader doesn't know that Trinidad and Tobago is a place then perhaps the sentence's "in x and y and on z" would provoke them into finding this out.
> He spent a sabbatical conducting field work on {Trinidad and Tobago} and in {Suriname}
Could be clearer, although "On Trinidad and Tobago" doesn't make sense. "In Trinidad and Tobago", or "On Trinidad", or "On Tobago", sure, but Trinidad and Tobago are two islands (and many smaller)
About the same amounts of pests every summer, so I'm not concerned. If the winter comes fast, like 15 C one day and -15 C the next day, many will die and there will be less of them the following spring, but at the end of the summer they have usually recovered. I think the lack of pest are due to use of pesticides and lack of habitats - rather then some doomsday coming.
Find it interesting for this topic to be coming up after reading an article recently that goes into some detail on the concept of the perceived insect apocalypse
Because it is misanthropic to talk about it that way. You're describing thinking conscious beings that have needs and that are born without their choosing. Construing people as an invasive species is not going to be productive or win you any points in a serious conversation on the subject.
This won't be popular, but remember just 10 years ago when people were talking about the environmental advantages of a mass die-off of humans? It was trendy for a bit to spitball about how much better off the environment would be with an x% decrease in human population as a result of a global death event. In fact, "we need a new plague" was a running joke on online environmentalist forms for a while. Funny how an actual pandemic made those same people glibly taking up the advantages pull a 180 when it was their grandmother who was in the x% who were going to die.
> remember just 10 years ago when people were talking about the environmental advantages of a mass die-off of humans
No. I recommend finding better friends, or choosing different online reading material. We live in an age of information abundance as well as opinion abundance. Your attention is valuable, and there are better communities and reading options out there.
And where in my derision and mockery of the idea of democide, and folks who support it, as glib and thoughtless do you see me praise it? Looks like you've misread, or misconstrued, my comment as the exact opposite of what I had written.
With respect to changing what I read, I like being exposed to opinions I disagree with, even ones I find abhorrent like this. It's useful to survey the opinions out there, even the nonsense ones.
The difference between a nationalised industry and a publically-offered industry is that the nationalised industry has a chance of properly dealing with externalities, treating workers properly, ensuring safe long-term functionality, and, y'know, prioritizing the service they're there to provide.
This situation is covered by the first, though I bet the things that are killing the insects are hurting us, too.
Yes, yes, the USSR was bad. If I allow you to define "nationalised industry" as "something bad the Soviets/CCP/Venezuelans did", then of course it's bad.
Contrast that to the concept of a Crown corporation in Canada, which "provide services required by the public that otherwise would not be economically viable as a private enterprise or that do not fit exactly within the scope of any ministry." [0] They can do things like "care about externalities" because they're not expected to make money, but they're still structured as corporations and therefore can have the usual trappings like middle management and competitive salaries and casual Fridays.
A famous example would be the Canadian National Railway, which was created by government fiat in 1918 as a response to a bunch of private railways in (less-developed) western Canada running out of government money to feed on and thereby going bankrupt. The diversity of the interests that it inherited allowed it to spin off all sorts of other beneficial Crown corporations recognized by every Canadian, like VIA Rail, Air Canada, and the CBC.
Of course, the privatization of Crown corporations is also a great way for right-wing governments to create minor budgetary surpluses to enthrall the plebes while handing over a captive "customer"-base to their already-wealthy friends, and since the 80s it's become a proud tradition. [1] Air Canada, Ontario Hydro, Petro-Canada...
> Contrast that to the concept of a Crown corporation in Canada
Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc.
I'm sure most agree with you that there are areas best served by government run organizations. Crown corporation just operates in such areas, so it wouldn't change peoples views on what services a government should run at all.
>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc.
An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? I also suggest you read the second link in the grandparent: Nova Chemicals, Yara Belle Plaine, PotashCorp, all the resource extraction corps in Saskatchewan...
Also, that's strictly wrong -- Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all, so long as the government chose to endow them to do so. Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada, which (before it was sold off for a song to already-rich people) extracted real physical oil in Alberta, and dealt with the real physical externalities in a much MUCH *MUCH* more accountable way.
> An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry?
No, they aren't manufacturing anything. Managing natural resources is a reasonable thing for a government to do.
> Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all
But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
> Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada
There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
Apologies, I had updated my comment to list a few of the dozen-and-a-half industrial Crown corporations that Canadian governments have sold off to already-wealthy people. I'll continue: Victory Aircraft, Orion Bus Industries, Canadian Vickers, Canadair...
It's a historical fact that the government did operate industrial Crown corporations, and they operated them "better", as viewed from the embarrassingly non-fiduciary perspectives of the workers and the environment, which is the point.
>There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
There's several organizations between the legislature in which some regulation is made, and the actual group to be regulated, whereas a Crown corporation's mandate to report directly to the government, not to mention the absent necessity to cover bad things up until the quarterly earnings report drops, makes them more honest. The other kicker, of course, is that private corporations can just bribe I mean lobby the government for permission to do bad things. There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that.
A Crown corp is not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service. No amount of deployed regulation on a for-profit, privately-owned corporation can change its tendency to optimize for the former.
Victory aircraft was a WW2 wartime aircraft manufacturer, not sure how that is relevant for anything. Wartime economics is very different from peacetime economics.
Orion Bus Industries is and was always a private company. It was owner by a government entity for an extremely short period.
Canadian Vickers is a private company.
Canadair was a private company, then nationalized for a decade. Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
> There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that. They're not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service.
Right, they can work in service sectors where you provide a service to people. They can't do good work in an industry sector where the job is to produce goods. Government agencies are great at managing simple sectors, but they couldn't take over the entire private sector. If they could then they would already have done that in many areas of the world and those would thrive. But anyone who tried quickly reversed it as it didn't work out.
"Evidence"? You said there aren't any industrial Crown corporations. In fact, you said that
>>>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though
and
>>Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
But I listed a whole bunch of former industrial Crown corporations. Just because you don't like the idea that your baseless assertions were proven wrong by the facts doesn't detract from their facticity.
Canadian Vickers isn't a private company, they don't exist. When they did exist, they were heavily subsidized by the government and then nationalised into Canadair, which then privatized after the war and got thrown around as a subsidiary of various aerospace corps until '76 when the government bought it from General Dynamics. Then it actually did quite well until the Challenger business jet, then the Mulroney government -- one of those right-wing, fast-buck governments I mentioned earlier -- sold it in '86. And that's a great example, because that's just a straight-up loss. If a private company makes a crazily-bad investment, it's going to go under and get bought for pennies on the dollar by another private company. A Crown corporation, theoretically, can take less "sensible" business risks without that fear, because of government support. Unless the government decides it's not worth it and sells it for pennies on the dollar by another private company.
>Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
The "Crown" doesn't "lead" a Crown corporation. They don't make business decisions for them, they just provide a mandate (in this case, "design aircraft in Canada"), a financial backstop, and, yes, allow much more efficient internal meddling than normal regulatory schemes if need be.
To be honest, I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Your assertions are mostly false, and the suggestion that my argument is leading up to the idea that "government agencies" could "take over the entire private sector" is absolutely bonkers. Again, I suggest you go read up on what, exactly, a Crown corporation is and does. You're clearly under a number of incredible misapprehensions.
How about the middle ground, where the capitalists try to be good citizens and patriotically do not attempt to poison us all for profit, while building escape bunkers in New Zealand, once we are all f---ed back home.
Ok, big ask, I know. How about this - they stop gutting the government to a point where any sort of reasonable regulation and oversight is essentially absent. Let's be honest for once about what "small government" stands for.
> the solution to these types of problems are incompatible with capitalism as we practice it today.
It isn't, regulations to price in externalities is a cornerstone of modern capitalism as practiced everywhere in the west. If your government isn't doing its job then you shouldn't blame capital, you should blame your government, your voters or the system you use to count votes and elect officials.
If companies can just buy politicians then the problem lies with your democracy and not with those companies.
That's too bad. "Corporations are people", my friend, but they can also pump unlimited amounts of money into politics, creating their own laws. Let's not just call out "the government". They are the government. And, no, it's not tinfoil stuff, we know what's going on.
Politicians taking bribes from companies for creating laws is an example of politicians using their power to enrich themselves. Such politicians will use their power to enrich themselves regardless of what system you use, making such people run the entire economy would guarantee a disaster.
What you need is a stronger separation of capital and state.
There is no separation of capital and state in the United States anymore. It's just more "gentle". What we have is "broken capitalism".
We have a system where government figures trade as if they were teenagers on Robinhood, then disappearing through revolving doors to work for the companies they were supposed to "regulate", we have CEOs running companies into the ground while walking away with riches. This ain't capitalism. It's something.
Historically, the capitalist countries have been much less-polluted ('cleaner') and more environmentally friendly in general than the communist countries. With respect to 'socialist' countries, the correlations depend on exactly how you define socialism, and which countries you include/exclude.
The alternative to 'capitalism as we see it today' is not socialism. It's capitalism without regulatory capture and functional regulatory bodies that have teeth and use them.
Totally and completely false. The UK in 1930 was much more polluted than the USSR and China at that time. Making that argument today is possible if you ignore moving practically all manufacturing to a country that happens to be communist. There would be far less pollution in China if they weren't making all of our stuff. It's actually a good example of how unchecked capitalism is always looking for new ways to externalize costs, regardless of the consequences for whoever is left holding the bag.
Also, any country that builds infrastructure with taxes and regulates industry is socialist, including the US. The difference is usually that "capitalist" countries have safety net for corporations and the wealthy, while "socialist" countries have safety nets for everyone.
>The UK in 1930 was much more polluted than the USSR and China at that time.
And how industrialized were the USSR and China in 1930?
When a larger part of your economy is agrarian you're going to be incapable of polluting the shit out of everything to the same extent as more industrialized nations.
Well, China wasn't communist in 1930; that aside, I think it's tough to get an accurate idea of one specific time in the past, as such I think we're better off trying to understand the general situation over the situation over a longer-term in the USSR. Here is a quote from a self-professed socialist on a socialist website about the environmental situation there:
>"On this basis, let me agree with Adam that the damage done to the environment by the Soviet regime and its successor doesn’t remotely bear comparison with that in the West. It was, and remains, catastrophically worse. Particular countries elsewhere, especially in the developing world, have suffered one or another ecological disaster, sometimes of mind-bending dimensions. The USSR managed something in just about every sector of heavy industry to match the worst of them."
I think there’s enough contradictory information here to make clear ideological statements like that indefensible. The late USSR was far dirtier than America of the same period, yes, but neither can hold a candle to pre-EPA America or late industrial revolution England. Heck, London had a coal smoke smog in 1952 that killed 10-12K people in a week.
Regardless, I find this discussion to be an unwelcome diversion. The USSR is dead, and even most communists don’t want that specific state back. The reality is that today in America we regularly let companies privatize their profits and shift their costs onto all of society. We don’t need to nationalize industry to fix that, and as you correctly point out that might not be sufficient, but we do need to regulate this.
North Korea and Cuba have been disasters, and I think you're wrong about the USSR being cleaner than pre-EPA USA. China has been a mess throughout its self-professed communist history as well; you may dispute its degree of communism, but it certainly has more nationalized industries (of the sort proposed in parent comments) than the USA or any other 'capitalist' country.
I see you’re more interested in hashing out the communism vs. capitalism thing. I am not. Frankly it’s the internet’s most overwrought and under productive argument.
All I want to see is industries pay according to the impact that they have on society. This isn’t an inherently socialistic idea, but it would require a change in the way that we currently conceive of capitalism[0].
0 - Economists generally think that removing these externalities are good for the market. But this runs contrary to the anti-regulation attitude currently in vogue.
>"I see you’re more interested in hashing out the communism vs. capitalism thing."
No, I just think that most of your previous post was wrong.
edit: I see that you added to your post:
>"0 - Economists generally think that removing these externalities are good for the market. But this runs contrary to the anti-regulation attitude currently in vogue. "
Where have regulations decreased over the medium to long-term (5+ years)? I can't think of any (stable) country which has acted in an anti-regulatory way; do you have any specific examples?
> Where have regulations decreased over the medium to long-term (5+ years)? I can't think of any (stable) country which has acted in an anti-regulatory way; do you have any specific examples?
This is genuinely quite baffling to me. Ignoring the fact that de-regulation has been an explicit plank of the GOP for my entire life, the US deregulated a ton of stuff since the Reagan era. Airlines, trucking, labor, and the financial industry all saw significant cuts to their regulatory rules. Anti-trust laws have been re-interpreted to be less aggressive[0] leading to more mergers, and regulation of various services have been weakened[1]. Environmental regulations have been a bit of a back-and-forth with executive orders changing things often, but at the state level de-regulation and willful non-enforcement is the norm in some areas. Texas is generally the go-to here, with willful non-enforcement of EPA rules around fracking and the (disastrous) deregulation of the energy market. Trump in particular made industrial de-regulation a goal, and tried to de-regulate a ton of stuff and lock out his successors from changing the rules back.
The UK is now finally starting up their deregulatory processes again, now that they're no longer restrained by the EU. They've been greenlighting new pesticides for use, eliminating EU rules around used plastic exports, and allowing private water companies to dump their untreated sewage into the ocean. Personally I'd keep my eye on them the most for de-regulation, because their anti-regulation party has effectively no electable opposition, leaving them entirely without political restraint. Although given the current status of their import woes, I think they might end up not being sufficiently stable for your requirements.
0 - Anti-trust used to be about whether or not a company was "anti-competitive". The new rules determine whether or not a monopoly reduces consumer prices. Whether or not this is good or not, this is effectively a deregulation.
1 - I'm specifically thinking of the end of the fairness doctrine and the deregulation of ISPs.
I would agree that many specific regulations in the USA have been reduced/eliminated, but overall regulations have steadily increased throughout the last 90+ years. You may be able to pick out one year that they decreased overall (though I can't), but I doubt you can find a 5-year period over which they've decreased (by any measure).
I gave tons of examples and an entire decade with bipartisan deregulation as the norm. It seems that you're ignoring what I actually wrote, all while demanding more evidence I already gave and offering none of your own. I'm forced to conclude that you're not really acting in good faith, and that there's no point in continuing.
You're citing what Congress said, and I'm talking about what regulators actually did; take a look at GWU's graph's relating to regulatory agency rules and sizes, as well as the data on the Federal Register: https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats
I mean, probably? If we had elected good officials at least. I'm not defending socialism at all, but if you accept the fact that this kind of thing happens because there's no monetary incentive for the industry to avoid it, then the logical conclusion is that under a system not motivated by profit this would be less likely to happen.
But what I'm sure you are aware of this line of thinking. What is the argument against it?
That is the argument against it. If you had elected good officials they would have created regulations against this already. Fact is that we can't elect good officials in the current system. Either it is because people would rather have more goods instead of caring about nature, or the system is corrupt and politicians use their power to enrich themselves rather than doing what people wants. Either case those politicians wont be fixing the problems you care about.
The problem with US politicians is that they are sold out to the private sector. This is a problem that would obviously not exist if there was no private sector, or if it was weaker, which is the "what if" of the discussion.
Sure, then we could elect politicians that are bad in different ways, but then this becomes a discussion against socialism, which is not what I'm intending here. I'm only talking about socialism hypothetically. My point is that we can't ignore capitalism's shortcomings. We have to understand what having profit as a main motivator leads to, so we can deal with it.
> The problem with US politicians is that they are sold out to the private sector. This is a problem that would obviously not exist if there was no private sector
You are diagnosing the symptom and not the cause. Politicians selling their power to the highest bidder is a symptom of politicians being corrupt and using their power to enrich themselves. Removing the private sector would give these corrupt cronies a lot more power to enrich themselves, that woudln't solve anything at all. Instead of having people with money and people with military power, you now have the same people having both power over industry and power over military, do you really think these people would now start caring about the environment over how much those factories are producing? No, these politicians still enrich themselves, they run these factories to make themselves as wealthy as possible and now there isn't even a government to stop them since they are the government.
Modern capitalism is based on the separation between capital and state. We call it corruption when capital is used to buy political power, or when political power is used to buy capital power. Communism is the merging of capital power and political power and giving this to the same ruling class, it is the ultimate form of what we in the west calls corruption.
Modern capitalism is an exhibition of capital's dependency on the state. Without the state, who would enforce a corporation's claims to property? (the products of worker labor, intellectual property, and so on)
And empirically, the bottom 70% of the US population on the wealth scale has absolutely zero influence on public policy. The policies of the US overwhelmingly align with the interests of US corporations. I'd contend they'd be much less dominating otherwise.
> The problem with US politicians is that they are sold out to the private sector.
No. The corruption is one of many symptoms of the problem, which is the fact that the electoral system is poorly designed for responsiveness and accountability, since it is structured so as to reinforce duopoly which incentivizes lesser-of-two-weasels voting.
You should read about the Great Leap Forward and The Four Pests campaign that lead to the greatest famine in human history with up to 55 million people dead from starvation and bodies piling up on sides of roads.
Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting "surpluses" that in fact did not exist and leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with estimates ranging between 15 and 55 million deaths, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest famine in human history.
The Four Pests campaign (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài), was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as smash sparrows campaign (Chinese: 打麻雀运动; pinyin: Dǎ Máquè Yùndòng) or eliminate sparrows campaign (Chinese: 消灭麻雀运动; pinyin: Xiāomiè Máquè Yùndòng), which resulted in severe ecological imbalance, being one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs.
"Better red than expert" is not a prerequisite for socialist thought. For what it's worth, putting totally unqualified ideologues in positions of real temporal power over the economy and health of the nation and watching them fuck everything up is something we do in modern capitalism, too. Our tools are different; political power grows not out of the barrel of a gun but a barrel full of money with a dollar sign on it.
I find it bafflingly common to encounter the conflation of authoritarianism with collectivism.
You can reach collectivism only trough authoritarianism.
Do you know any collectivist society above 1 million people that was not authoritarian?
Even China learned from the mistakes of collectivist ideas and moved towards socialist market economy which lead to the greatest uplifting of people from the extreme poverty in the whole history of human species.
Lots of downvoting, as you're about to find out. For some reason, HN really really hates the idea that there's enormous monetary incentive to ignore existential problems caused by modern capitalism.
Probably because, as Jeff Hammerbacher said, "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
I think HN really hates the histrionics that started this thread, "They heroically died for our capitalist masters". When people talk about HN becoming Reddit, this is one of the things they are talking about.
> I think HN really hates the histrionics that started this thread, "They heroically died for our capitalist masters". When people talk about HN becoming Reddit, this is one of the things they are talking about.
Oh absolutely, it's very clear HN hates that. Redditification is an ever-present threat, as I learned when I turned on showdead and finally saw, in almost every comment section, the root-level graveyards of "Very cool!" etc.
But that's an entirely different memeplex. HN hates that, but it also hates the idea that there's enormous monetary incentive to ignore existential problems caused by modern capitalism. One of the ways that displeasure might be shown is whataboutism regarding genuine if unhelpful "histrionics".
I've discussed this with libertarians and the best argument I've heard is that the incentive to manage negative externalities comes from private ownership. If the factory down the road is polluting the river that runs by your house, you sue them.
Well, sure, this is trying to fix capitalism, which is something I'm all for. But one way or another, I think it's vital to have the shortcomings of a capitalist system understood. It's one thing to believe capitalism is the way to go, it's another to go defend that we should always act in self interest and this will only lead to good things.
@babycake I take it that you are making a dig at Western society as a whole or just the U.S.? I think if you took some time and traveled to some of the non-capitalist (Marxist) countries you might see the utter horrifical ecological damage that they are doing and have done to the world. I think if all told you might find that capitalist countries have done a better job with the environment - I am not saying they have done a good job - just a better one than the Marxist countries.
The anti-capitlists have this utopian alternative world where all problems cease to exist and the power is distributed equally. I get the indulgence in the fantasy worlds but best to stick with reality and work with the system we have both the flaws and the strengths.
Perhaps consider a steel man instead of a straw one. Socialist institutions that cover natural monopolies save the state money simply by economies of scale. I'll grant not all industry could or should be nationalised but certainly healthcare in the US is a prime example of market failure.
I don't disagree with healthcare - its a complete debacle. That said the US models actually pays for a lot of the leading edge R&D in healthcare while a lot of foreign countries get to ride along the cost curve by buying that same healthcare after the bleeding edge making their healthcare costs more manageable.
That would be more tolerable if the US had better healthcare outcomes compared to those other nations. We don't -- they're doing it cheaper and better than we can. Probably the most important factor in getting good outcomes is catching diseases early. It doesn't matter how good your state-of-the-art new stage IV cancer treatment is, it's always going to be better to catch it early. Catching diseases early in their progression requires regular visits to the doctor, which in America cost an arm and a leg if you're not insured, leading to postponement of treatment and the poor outcomes we experience.
There are no "Marxist" countries on the planet. I'm not sure there ever were. I think I understand what you're trying to say, but someone could very easily take what you wrote as the suggestion that there are two types of countries: "capitalist" and "non-capitalist (Marxist)". That's... you should actually read Marx, or decide on a less fraught descriptor.
For that matter, how much of the ecological devastation in these poorer countries is being caused by a Western mining company or Western oil company or a Western baby-formula company?
I don't disagree; just like there are no true capitalist countries. However there is a degree in which you lean one way or the other and it may vary depending on industry. For instance the Health care in the United States mentioned earlier in this thread is thought to be capitalist - but it is so heavily regulated in certain ways that it is probably leaning more towards a Marxist creation.
>but it is so heavily regulated in certain ways that it is probably leaning more towards a Marxist creation
I find it interesting that you don't mention those ways, or why they might make the US healthcare system "Marxist". Marxism is a form of socioeconomic analysis, not an economic system, nor a scheme of healthcare regulation. I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to convey.
"Marxism"? "Communism"? What are we talking about again? Eh, who cares what words mean when you can bludgeon people with them! It's all "non-capitalist", which is a word that means "bad".
So like.. lawsuit? I'd definitely be calling up a lawyer (in addition to the city/police)... that's _seriously_ effed up. What if you had a home business selling honey/beeswax? That's just the most obvious example... not to mention the human-hazardous aspect of spraying this stuff!
my hometown in Texas has done this regularly since i was a child, when mosquito-borne viruses hit there. they aired notices about spraying nights on local TV news, on the radio, and published schedules in the papers.
i remember my parents discussing it with me and reading editorial debates in the paper.
not providing notice seems like a serious failure and i'd encourage you to give them legal/financial incentives to do so in the future.
It's fictional, but similar things have happened, like the aerial malathion bombardments of the 80s in California to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly. I lived through that perfectly fine, but do remember it being pretty controversial (but I was a kid, so not sure how reliable my memories are).
https://archive.md/t9nf6