I cannot disagree with this. When I was young not a day went by were I did not see some butterflies in the summer and autumn. Even in the small City where I grew up.
Now that I think of it, I have not even seen a butterfly in many years, this includes hiking it the woods.
What a shame, well with global warming and the powers that be still doubling down on fossil fuels, a big correction is probably on its way, similar to this story posted here earlier about tree roots. We had 50+ years to do something about climate change, as usual profits came first.
Echoing someone else, I live in the heart of Austin and generally rarely see bees/butterflies, but last year we planted a bunch of native wildflowers in the yard and we had a) an absolutely beautiful explosion of color, and b) TONS of bees and butterflies hanging out all day in the flowers. So, regardless of where you are, I think it's worth planting some native plants to give the little guys somewhere to hang out.
One thing I've noticed is that bugs don't hit my windshield while driving anymore.
I used to have to stop at the gas station almost daily to clean the bug splatter. That just doesn't happen anymore - and I'm still driving the same car I was 30 years ago.
plus one for this, I had wildflowers and while the number of bees was disappointing I saw a lot of butterflies. they were in the house every other day over summer.
We also planted a mint plant which went to flower, and that was like catnip to them. Anytime you looked out the window there were seven or eight butterflies on this one plant, no flowers free.
i'm building a couple of planter boxes in my backyard specifically to plant native wild flowers. it will merely be a drop in the bucket, but it's what i can do where i'm at currently. i'm hoping to see any type of insect attraction. i have a running water fountain that i see bees coming to drink, so i'm really hoping wild flowers will attract them as well as the butterflies.
Excellent move! It's amazing whet even a drop in the bucket can do!
We had just a bit of milkweed growing wild off to one side of the yard, but since we've specifically left it anywhere it can establish itself in the gardens, we've definitely seen more Monarch butterflies, even got to watch some make a chrysalis on our porch, and emerge to fly away!
Also key is to plant or let grow fully native cultivars of flowering plants. The hybridized ones are often completely unattractive and non-nutirtional to the plants, but since we've let some of them go, we've got a lot more bees and types of bees.
Clover is also better than lawn. Not only is it fantastic because it fixes it's own nitrogen and enriches instead of depleting the soil, it also attracts bees, and keeps the bunnies occupied so they don't bother the garden so much.
(This is in the Northeast US, north of Boston. Where are you?)
You single out only fossil fuels, but there are so many other ways in which we are damaging the environment that we also need to worry about - PFAS everywhere, noise and light pollution, pesticides and many other chemicals in rivers, expanses of monocultures, etc. It concerns me that there is so much fixation on one form of harm, which I fear may result in less attention to the many others that we are inflicting.
Even if I wanted to do that I couldn't because everybody else's indiscriminate use of fossil fuels is destroying the environment I would need to sustain me. Literally the point of the article you've responded to.
There are lots of speculative culprits and maybe it's a combination, but we won't get anywhere unless we find out which ones are responsible for fouling habitability by desirable insects and selectively addressing those pollutants.
If it's, for example, fertilizers... it would not be likely we pull back on farming output with resulting starvation in other countries that depend on affordable agricultural products in a global market (yes, we rich countries can afford a 2x or 3x cost of food, but not people in poor countries from which in a global economy we'd be sucking up their agricultural production and outbidding the locals.
biodiversity loss is surely a huge one. "even in undisturbed forests" is the headline, but these undisturbed forests are lesser in size every year. Ireland's forestry cover has dropped from about 80% in the 1600s to 1% in the 1900s. It's back up to 11% now and that seems great on paper, but its all monoculture forestry for logging, with zero wildlife. meanwhile, hedgerows and wild land is shrinking all the time - the place where wildlife actually lives
Here's one that I don't think people are even considering.
I've seen insects flying repeatedly into brightly colored non flower objects. They get stuck doing it.
So even something as simple as a small piece of colored fabric can throw bees off and there's no such thing as a forest so untouched that there isn't some human left object in it.
Brightly colored objects are more common than ever too.
I don't doubt numbers are declining. Yet, where I live in the suburbs outside a city in the US northeast, I see bees, butterflies, and fireflies all the time when it's warm out. There was a time period when I didn't. But I may not have been as observant then.
Anecdotally, I noticed a pronounced drop in bugs in general after a nasty heat wave we had back in like 2018. Took several years, but they seem to have bounced back a bit now.
Seems to be some degree of fluctuation in populations after these big climate events.
Not butterfly- or bee-related, but growing up in the suburbs of Toronto in the 70s (hence, an urban environment), I remember seeing several grasshoppers per day in our neighborhood during the summer. These days, I'm lucky to have seen a single grasshopper in the past several years, and I spend a lot of time in nature. Very sad and disconcerting.
I remember in the 80s that there were bees all over the grounds at my elementary school, they had dandelions, clover, and a few other weed/grass species in the mix but bees went whole hog on them. About a decade ago I went back to that school during summer and noticed not a single bee was around the grounds. It's wild how fast insects are dying off these days. Heck, I remember summers in my hometown where it was a bad idea for me to be out since mosquitos would bite me furiously but now I rarely see them.
Weirdly enough, it seems like the last few years here in SoCal I’ve seen more butterflies than normal. I’ve seen more bees than normal, but I’ve planted some native plants that they seem to love.
Saw six butterflies last night while walking in a highly developed area. I’ll probably see six more tonight. Are anecdotes really how we want to measure this?
It would be better to do a systematic study, and publish the results in a scientific journal like Current Biology. Then maybe to help get the word out, publish a summary on a website like Science.
I don't see why not? Citizen science has been pretty important to fields like ornithology. I'd actually be surprised if something like this wasn't already happening somewhere at small scale at least.
Anecdotes have a degree of unreliability and a degree of reliability. Outright dismissing an anecdote as completely baseless and invalid is highly, highly unwise and a sign that the person is not logical.
First off, anecdotes have extreme speed. You can get some sort of answer much faster and at a hugely lower cost then a "study".
Second, studies are not to be trusted either. There's huge incentive to doctor these things and with the replication crisis this "doctoring" has been shown to be common place.
Third, even an "honest" study can be wildly off depending on the data gathered and most of the time these studies only find correlative associations rather then causative (most people don't even know how to conduct a causative experiment).
A good example of this is smoking Cannabis and Tobacco. Depending on the time both were deemed healthy to consume by research via multitudes of biased research and and a lack of unbiased studies.
But with a little anecdotal common sense it's easy to see that breathing burnt plants into your lungs is likely just bad overall.
The charts going down to the right and the maps showing territory shrinking are both important. That’s why they’re posted here frequently.
It’s also important to remember what those charts and maps mean, which is future generations having magic and beauty and wonder stolen from them. The destruction of the environment is heartbreaking on its own, but the destruction of the human experience is a whole additional layer of tragedy.
We have also added to the human experience. We are able to fly above the clouds at hundreds of miles an hour, an experienced that throughout human history was in the realm of legends and stories about gods. I can also talk and video conference with relatives living thousands of miles away.
I have a strong suspicion if our descendants learn that we traded butterflies for 9 hour plane flights for business meetings that are completely feasible over the Internet, they'll think very poorly of us.
My position is that every day people make tradeoffs without even considering what those tradeoffs are, because the benefits are so immediate and local while the costs are externalized both in time and space.
It's important to connect everyday decisions (and their real benefits) to their externalized costs (which are also real, and probably ~impossible to recover once incurred).
Once our cohabitants are gone, they're likely gone forever. We have no reason to believe we'll ever be able to recover a meaningful portion of them. Ecosystems are astoundingly complex and the more we learn about them, the more we learn how subtle they are.
I get it, you were saying it for effect, but this statement:
>if our descendants learn that we traded butterflies for 9 hour plane flights for business meetings
Makes it seem like that's all flights are good for. It's not any different than if you said "quinceaneras" instead of "business meetings". They are probably a non-zero percentage of why people fly but even without these things, there would still be demand for air travel and the problem would remain.
I share your doom and gloom about the situation but hope we can focus on changes that have material return. There are many optional things in life that we can cut out but then what would be the point in living?
Which is exactly why I singled out a clear example of something we can reduce and that would be meaningful without incurring a huge negative impact on whether life is worth living or not.
Environmental harm is both multicausal and overdetermined which means we do in fact need to pick (many) specific things which individually do not seem extremely substantial (because they’re not) and start reducing them.
What an experience that is! Crammed between people and hardly being able to move for hours while significantly contributing to CO2 and noise pollution just so you can sit indoors in a remote place for work or at a beach for fun which you could've just done localy for pretty much the same experience
>Crammed between people and hardly being able to move for hours
Do you know why it's so cramped? To maximize the number of people on the flight and therefore reduce the per-passenger carbon emissions and cost.
I can tell you've never traveled if you think every place is like every other. The creek in your podunk town is not the same as the beaches in French Polynesia.
It is about cost to airlines but to call out the cramped conditions in the same breath as carbon emissions when the cramped conditions reduce overall carbon emissions immediately gave away that the OP doesn’t give one shit about climate change when it comes to their personal comfort.
Dialing in on how it benefits the airlines when low prices also benefit flyers and lower per-passenger emissions benefit everyone shows you just have a bone to pick.
Of course I have a bone to pick. It is too cramped! Having my knees mashed into the seat in front of me, my back aching, for a 9 hour flight is absurd, and should be illegal.
Many, many flyer hate this. It absolutely does not benefit flyers, not when you see seat price static, or going up, and airline profits up (prior covid).
It. does. not. help. consumers. Airlines care not about emissions.
You claimed it was done to reduce emissions. This is completely false. No hand wavy logic will change this.
You don’t seem to understand how this business works so let me explain. Air travel prices have been dropped significantly over the last few decades. What used to be a luxury reserved for the wealth can now enjoyed by folks paying as little as $10 for a 2 hour flight (e.g. RyanAir). The average economy experience used to resemble that of a business class ticket with a price to match. Over the years, this experience was whittled down to what we have to today to make air travel affordable to the masses and capture more demand. Airlines are a notoriously low-margin business and most of them make nearly no money — this is why there are literally thousands of them that have gone out of business. Often their greatest asset is their loyalty program and the rest is a massive liability.
Whether lowering emissions is a direct consequence or an indirect consequence, increasing seat density does just that so suck it up.
increasing seat density does just that so suck it up.
No.
Airlines in my country (Canada), exhibit the behaviour I described. Greater profits, zero real savings for consumers, and cramped seats.
Thus, again, hand wavy stuff re:environment, is not the cause. Assertions otherwise are 100% wrong.
Airflight does not need to be cramped. If you wish to push this narrative, the narrative of "good! cramped is good cause environment", then I suggest you start with more effective places.
Such as, limiting hot water usage, temperatures in homes, the size of homes, the size of cars, bus seating, the ability to use anything but your feet, for short (1km) trip distances, and on and on and on.
All of these will do far more, immensely more for the environment. And will be far less onerous than cramped airline seating.
EG, drop all indoor temps, by law, to 60F in winter, and just wear a sweater.
Of course, you'll get little traction making people take lukewarm showers, so instead, you want me to have aching knees for a week after an airflight. And no, this problem isn't rare in my country.
Canadian airlines are not special. Air Canada has a negative operating income. They don't make shit.
Since you seem to be missing the point, let me make it simple for you. If you have 100 passengers and two plane types, one can seat 100 passengers in a economy configuration, and another can seat 50 passengers in a business configuration with more room, and all 100 passengers must fly, which is the more efficient one? Which one is going to be double the price? Which one makes the airline more money (hint: neither)?
Aching knees? You poor thing. Fly business class then, it's available to you, but don't pretend like you care about the environment.
Before the pandemic, Air Canada was highly profitable, with a 50$ CDN share price, and making deals to buy other airlines.
Don't confuse asset write down, and other chicanery, for loss. Not when they're buying up airline after airline.
I care about the environment, yet you're making my point here. You equate "caring about the environment" with "making change no matter how small, everywhere, in every thing, without focusing on big issues first".
An example, getting the US, for example, to reduce hot water usage even mildly, would do more for the environment than decades worth of "make people's knees hurt", "adding two seats to rarely full planes" mentality.
Hell, here's an idea which would save, in one month, more than those extra few seats in a decade (which are only used on full flights.. a rare thing).
Pass a law, that airlines must share flights if not full enough. That is, if a flight is less than.. 65% full, then the flight by law is cancelled, if competitors have a closely timed route, but, also by law, a competitor must take those passegers and kick a commission to the originating airline.
That's actual change. That's actual savings. That's less convenient, but no, you'd prefer to make my knees hurt. And care to assign cost to the poor, if people don't want that.
And again, I have flown plenty, and have only once seen all seats occupied.
How many flights have you been on, fully seated? Be honest!
No. The truth is, profits (force people to pay for seats with more legroom, like as doors and such).
increasing seat density does just that so suck it up.
No.
Airlines in my country (Canada), exhibit the behaviour I described. Greater profits, zero real savings for consumers, and cramped seats.
Thus, again, hand wavy stuff re:environment, is not the cause. Assertions otherwise are 100% wrong.
Airflight does not need to be cramped. If you wish to push this narrative, the narrative of "good! cramped is good cause environment), then I suggest you start with more effective places.
Such as, limiting hot water usage, temperatures in homes, the size of homes, the size of cars, bus seating, the ability to use anything but your feet, for short (1km) trip distances, and on and on and on.
All of these will do far more, immensely more for the environment. And will be far less onerous that cramped airline seating.
EG, drip all indoor temps, by law, to 60F in winter, and just wear a sweater.
Here's my Chicago suburbs anecdote: Tons of mosquitos, more fireflies than 5 years ago (but not even close to how many there were 30 years ago), not very many butterflies. A few ladybugs but they're always orange or yellow now, never red.
>"Are anecdotes really how we want to measure this?"
Anecdotes aren't always bad, or even inappropriate. We're on an internet forum having a casual discussion so my expectations for intellectual rigor are quite low.
Lucky. I haven't been seeing anything for a long time and due to old habits from studying entomology, I habitually identify any butterfly I see. I can tell a Monarch from a Viceroy at a distance just because the latter flies differently.
I haven't seen either one since early covid, when they were suddenly more common for whatever reason.
I know its a drop in the bucket, but I hope this can inspire more drops in the bucket. I tend my yard with plenty of plants that make food and habitat for bees and butterflies. This includes native milkweed for the monarchs, carrots, fennel, and parsley for the swallowtails, and many other flowering plants for the bees. Chemical warfare is completely banned from my property. All kinds of insects are here and in balance providing food for the rest of the ecosystem.
This is the way. I'm going to do the same even though I only have a balcony. I was thinking of building a fountain for birds too to help them cool down and bath in the dreadful hot days. That's the least I can do.
Are you saying that intermittent pollinator gardens don't serve to bolster the ecological network? Because that would be wrong. Every bit helps and even small gardens have a large impact.
Plastic recycling was a propaganda campaign by the plastic industry in order to fool the world into thinking that using plastics in the first place was sustainable. This is a documented fact. Maybe it wasn’t back in 2010.
That the “the problem” being Joe Beergut throwing a bottle in the trash instead of producing metric tonnes of it every day in the first place is being (was being) portrayed as “parody” is an impressive feat that one can credit to that campaign.
> Likewise, had they not been so tired, and busy, and stressed, citizens making up the equivalent of three major metropolitan areas told reporters that they probably wouldn't have driven their minivans down to the corner store.
America is designed for ridiculous urban/suburban sprawl, hideous parking lot squarage, putting commercial shops in can-only-be-driven-to outskirts of populated areas, making anti-pedestrian “Jay Walking” laws (pushed by automanufacturers), decimating poor communities by demolishing them in order to put highways through them so that commuters can still get stuck in rush hour traffic, having an embarassing public transportation system where even the train connection in the giant metropolis Philadelphia—New Your et al hasn’t improved in decades. And so on.
Central planning creates that kind of horrible infrastructure. Not minivan-driving boogeymans.
But good effort on posting that link. It managed to elevate my blood pressure a little here in the morning. A good start to the day!
It's the pesticides. Consider the world from the POV of an insect. Even if you're a bee, your metabolism is similar to other insect pests. There are huge fields of dense crops with plenty of pollen but if you partake, you die.
You may be partially right, but IIRC one of the studies which found a significant decrease was specifically taking bug samples from number plates rather than windscreens because number plates have been the same shape and in the same orientation for years.
It's still an anecdote, but I've been driving the same truck for 15 years now. It definitely feels like I don't have to clean my windshield nearly as often as I used to in the summers.
I think it's to do with the predators that used to keep the grazers in check. They are fewer because we shot them in protection of or livestock. This lead to a swath of plant extinctions...
I would also suspect that as people get older they are less adventurous in their driving habits. Your to/from work commute and grocery trips expose the ol’ jalopy to a very different ecosystem than the road-trips you would do as a younger person looking for trouble/adventure/memories.
I remember it from my parents driving, mostly. I haven't cleaned my windshield at a gas station since something like 2006 or 2007, though it used to be needed constantly. I remember air so thick with insects that the space illuminated by the headlights was alive—and that wasn't unusual. I haven't seen that since the 90s.
For me it is actually the opposite, I drive much more cross country now since I moved to other side of Norway and both me and my wifes family lives a 400km drive away.
Couldn't evolution partially explain this? Bugs that avoid roads, cars, etc. would have an advantage. They'd be able to live longer, and be more likely to reproduce. Over time the bugs that get hit by cars would be replaced by the bugs who've adapted to not get hit by cars.
Bugs reproduce pretty quickly, so this trait could have propagated pretty quickly.
Sorry, just exasperated. It's like a plains settler throwing more buffalo skulls on the pile, then thoughtfully pontificating about why the piles have been getting smaller over the years.
rain and winds brings contamination into the most remote corners of the world
for example the Aral Sea has not dust but salt storm, to top it of they are highly toxic due to extrem over use of pesticides upstream and toxines from there have been fund as far away as in snow in Sweden (probably further away too, I just don't remember).
another example dust from the Sahara somewhat frequently get carried as far as Germany
> An early version of the technology – which detoxified a widely-used group of insecticides called organophosphates – is described in a new study, “Pollen-Inspired Enzymatic Microparticles to Reduce Organophosphate Toxicity in Managed Pollinators,” published on May 20, 2021, in Nature Food. The antidote delivery method has now been adapted to effectively protect bees from all insecticides, and has inspired a new company, Beemmunity, based in New York state.
The company (I think it's the same company) currently makes flower pots to attract and feed native bees, and they make food bricks that help boost bee immunity and robustness. Still a small company, and frequently out of stock.
You can click through the "health action" drop downs on their lickbrick page to see what each of the ingredients do. https://www.beemmunity.co/lickbrick
Why has massive biodiversity losses at multiple previous points in earth's history always resulted in an even larger subsequent explosion of biodiversity?
I lament we've been given this amazing Eden filled with boundless flora and fauna -the complexity and beauty of which we can barely comprehend- and we're trading it in for parking lots and shiny baubles.
"You know what I love most about Mars? They still dream. We gave up. They're an entire culture dedicated to a common goal, working together as one to turn a lifeless rock into a garden. We had a garden and we paved it."
However, the Martian dream dies the moment they find out there are other worlds with biospheres not named Earth that they can migrate to. Particularly one named Laconia. The problem with Mars in the Expanse is they never got around to terraforming the surface. That and the military culture.
In the books, Holden says that not a single blade of grass grows outdoors on the surface. But Earth, despite its pollution and massive population, still grows tons of things that don't grow anywhere else. It's hard to understand just how fertile our planet remains. Bobby is dazzled sitting by the polluted harbor, hearing a sea gall flying overhead. Mars only has underground zoos and farms.
Economic growth, increase population, and technological advancement such that we can get off this planet are the only ways the Eden survives. Otherwise you have maximally until the sun goes red dwarf, and likely Earth will lose its magnetic field allowing its atmosphere to be lost to space, or a sufficiently large asteroid will hit well before that.
We're on the clock, humans have to get life off this planet before it is destroyed or everything dies forever.
If we focus our efforts on colonizing space instead of trying to save this planet first, humanity will never get to colonize another planet.
Terraforming or even just permanently living self-sufficiently on Mars is many orders of magnitude harder than stopping global warming, and you see how well we are doing there.
Mars is more hostile than earth even after a long time of humans fucking it up.
Global warming has been blown way out of proportion. The steep decline in cost of solar panels and wind turbines over the last 10 years is already enough to solve the problem.
Oil will simply be more expensive and that's what will trigger change. People vote with their wallets, only a tiny proportion of the population has the luxury of doing anything but. Foolish to try to appeal to morality when most of the world lives paycheck to paycheck or worse.
On Mars we actually do want to create global warming and a greenhouse effect, so it's good that we know how :D
While there‘s no doubt that earth’s clock is ticking there’s no doubt that the universe‘s clock is also ticking - although a few orders of magnitude slower.
> Early Triassic faunas lacked biodiversity and were relatively homogeneous due to the effects of the extinction. The ecological recovery on land took 30 million years.
I guess it eventually works out if you are willing to wait very, very long.
I don't know the answer to that, but I can say that you and I are likely to be long gone before any explosion in biodiversity will occur. It won't happen for many tens of thousands of years (probably many millions).
People often seem to think the whole climate change is worrying about the earth and all the animal life. The earth will be fine, individual animals will hardly notice (they have much more immediate concerns most of the time, like being eaten).
It's humanity that is going to suffer, with the risk of many of our highly optimised systems becoming unsuited to task (think many cities and food production needing to shift, leading to starvation/conflict).
IMO, because the "tournament" of evolution between competing species comes to place where "winners" are declared, they live. Losers die off. While lamentable, this opens the field for the next round of competitors to fill the voids left by the losers which drives more diversity and the process repeats itself.
It opens the space for less well adapted creatures to evolve into and adapt. For a short time (on an evolutionary timescale) you get a much larger variety of adaptation strategies until the best ones win out.
Unless humanity completely erases life on earth I'm sure it'll bounce back. There's still time ahead, although not as much as there was behind. However, I'd rather we destroyed less and restored more, at least in my lifetime, so we could enjoy its existence.
Its hard to have a rational response to the steady trickle of warnings.
We know that things are not going well on many fronts.
We also know that we are locked-in along an unsustainable path that is extremely difficult to change given that people are not equipped mentally, socially, politically, economically to do the right things.
We also know that the negative effects will not be the kind of in-your-face "wake up" call that will panic people into some sort of action.
Species don't make a lot of noise when they disappear. Its just silence.
Not that panic reactions could change anything. Changing course into a sustainable economy would require massive, coordinated and persistent changes over decades.
So we must resign to a steady degradation of the environment across the planet, the loss of many beautiful things, the creation of fragile human monocultures, recurrent epidemics and ecosystem disasters and just hope that some deus-ex-machina will grant us at some point a way out - despite us not deserving it.
Doesn't the article suggest the opposite. If populations are declining in untouched forests far from human activity, wouldn't that be evidence that human activity is not the cause of population decline
It only suggests that local effects are not responsible. That leaves as some of the possibilities: climate change, air pollution, other chemicals that still make it in to 'untouched' forests.
Microplastics have been found everywhere, from high mountains, to antarctica and deep ocean sediments. I am not claiming thats the vector responsible in this case but the human footprint is now everywhere.
The term anthropocene is not an exaggeration. We are changing everything on a planetary scale: light pollution, sound levels, chemical and gas abundances etc.
People think that if something is not immediately fatal its somehow ok. That the tragedy of our reptile brain wiring.
In reality all sorts of impacts will accumulate only imperceptibly slowly. We might be able to do something about some of them if they have clear cut causes and some easy remedy. Like the ozon hole. But its an uncertain arms race.
We also should archive everything we can, like we do with books. Assuming civilization will survive there's a small chance to rebuild the ecosystem on this planet or some another in distant future. It's not a given, but definitely possible.
When we moved to the mountains my son really wanted to see a porcupine. I talked to an oldtimer forrester friend and he said that in the 60s/70s they sprayed to kill all the underbrush to make logging easier and that that changed the fauna quite a bit and that was when porcupine's became uncommon. I thought it sad we thought we were hiking through natural forests but they had been heavily changed by an expedited business practice from a few decades in the last century.
We saw everything from otters and beavers to lynx, grizzlies and cougars in our journeys, but never a porcupine.
Interesting. I live in the city and I see porcupines just walking the dog. Usually they're up in oak trees. They seem well adapted to city life since they just need to live in and eat tree tops.
In Texas you can have three beehives in your backyard. And if you have a few acres you can have pretty much as many as you can sustain. I've beehives. It's super fun to care for my bees!
There was no criticism, it was just a statement of what the researchers did, but with a sneer. Criticism is when you come up with reasons why those surveys wouldn't be representative, not instead choosing to deal in the fud of a sarcastic tone posing as argument.
Were they suggesting that nothing short of a multibillion dollar survey of every forest in the entire world is a minimum requirement for writing a paper where you make educated guesses about what the data you have means? Were they suggesting that the forest surveyed was not representative in some way, and that adding surveys of forests that have those characteristics would give us a better idea?
Trick questions. They weren't suggesting anything other than suspicion.
it was just a statement of what the researchers did, but with a sneer.
Are you talking about me? There was no sneer. Stop projecting nonsense onto me.
The very broad claim made in the title is not really supported by the limited research cited. The thing is, it wouldn't even be that hard to cite other studies that establish a pattern supporting the claim, like what another commenter here did. But neither the author of this article nor you did that.
Yeah, but if that's used to draw a more general conclusion about populations in other forested areas, that's not good science, or journalism (more likely).
There have been other studies like this done in other parts of the world, they all have come to similar conclusions. Here was one conducted in Germany from 1990-2017:
All i can say is im glad im not having kids. They have no future, just look at the state of the world now, in another 20 years when kids today grow up their will be even less opportunities and and even worse environment.
Drop in insect and butterfly numbers has nothing to do with climate change. It is due to pesticides being pumped in unprecedented quantities into nature and monoculture agriculture.
It doesn't have "nothing" to do with climate change. Climate change probably contributes to habitat loss as weather becomes less favourable for some species in areas where they could probably survive before.
Pesticide use the is cost you pay for cheap food, meat heavy diets, and other benefits of living in "western" society. Sure we could grow food without pesticides, but it would cost more. It might also require more land - which would probably also impact insect populations.
Before 50 years ago, it was at least debatable whether everyone knew. Now everyone knows. And has for at least a generation.
You fuck things up without realizing, then you get to be surprised they're fucked up. You spend 50 years doing it knowingly, you don't get to act shocked when insects numbers are plummeting and once per century forest fires are happening every year and France gets zero rain for all of Feb...
Welcome to the new normal. The one we all knowingly ordered.
This is far more pressing than the climate crisis, but people don’t seem to prioritize it:
One third of all arable farmland has become desertified in the last couple decades as people are in a race to the bottom (just as USA was in the Great Depression leading to the dust bowl)
Biodiversity has plummeted as species go extinct, only to be replaced by farms and monocultures
Insect populations are plummeting
Forests are being decimated
The boomer through millenial generations think they’re smarter than previous ones but they are in fact like an irresponsible kid living on an ecological credit card, that their children will have to pay.
Child mortality was solved but humanity was slow to adjust their birth rates to compensate for it.
Falling birth rates have little to do with child mortality and everything to do with child labor becoming less valuable due to legality as well as industrialization. Children became liabilities instead of assets to parents, parents had less kids. And the current problem is actually not enough people are going to be around to maintain the current economy of scale both in terms of production and consumption. The demographic cliff looming in Italy and China for instance will probably alleviate some of these environmental issues we are discussing, but at the cost of political instability.
If climate change would be causing this then insects and butterfly would move into colder zones like many other animals and plants in fact do. Instead, they are disappearing everywhere. It is due to pesticides and monoculture agriculture.
Which is worse in your opinion: smoke, or CO2? (Defining smoke broadly.)
It's a real question: Diesel motors make less CO2, but more smoke (of lots of types).
Would you rather spray some pesticide on crops? Or would it be better to use an energy intensive tractor (lots of CO2) to handle the situation mechanically?
The world currently is obsessed with CO2, and I think that's a huge mistake - the other types of pollution are worse.
It may not have anything to do with the greenhouse gas effect and emission of fossil fuels.
The desertification has to do with farmers planting too much and extracting all nutrients from the soil - same as happened in the 1930s which didnt have to do with cars and cows and methane in the atmosphere.
The overfishing - same thing
The collapse of insect populations is highly unlikely due to the slight aberage temperature changes or carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. It may be due to wireless radio signals, or light pollution, or pesticides and GMO plants.
The collapse of kelp forests or bleaching of coral reefs also has less to do with acidification of the oceans, and more with local pollution and ecosystem collapse.
The extinction of some species is due to hunting.
And so on. You could say the anthopocene is behind all these things — but that is not the same as saying that climate change is CAUSING these things.
If A (human activity) is causing B and C, and nearly all we talk about is C, then it is valid to say that B is more pressing, and that we should focus on A causing B. The response that “C is linked to B” is not enough because C doesn’t cause B and talking about C doesn’t do anything to stop B.
"suspecting" is not exactly the standard that I am looking for when making statements of such importance.
And their "suspecting" is certainly nowhere near good enough reason to not draw attention to other things such as pesticides, light pollution and other radio electromagnetic pollution
I'm a millennial, this is the first time I've personally noticed my own generation sharing the blame and it makes me defensive. I suppose it's true enough though.
I do vote on these issues, and I do what little I can for the environment; I don't use pesticides on my 100 square foot farm (more commonly called a "garden"). So long as we're on the topic of blaming entire generations though -- will more than 30% of Gen Z join us in voting any time soon? We could use the votes.
Where I am, we don’t have these poppy names for The Generations: people are just younger and older. As a consequence (perhaps), there’s less boxing of people into clearly delineated (like Millenial: roughly born 1980–1998 or something) groups for other groups to piss and moan about.
Millennials are every bit as good as the boomers for having a blizzard of excuses about why they can't possibly be inconvenienced, it just sounds a bit more nuanced. This website is full of it.
And the idea that voting does anything real is kind of cute, that's literally the least you can do and should take all of 5 minutes every couple of months these days.
I've made an effort to switch about half my food purchases to sustainable meat & veg... it's frankly a bit too costly as it stands to go 100%, but I suspect that's mostly because it is more niche and trendy than purely higher operational costs.
Switching back to (wax)paper wrapping and bulk supplies in general with paper baggies would probably help a bit. The demonization of paper/wood always bugged me as it's generally a renewable resource, and at least in N. America mostly used as such. It also inherently pulls carbon from the atmosphere. As opposed to refined plastics.
I've also avoided refined foods much more over the past decade. As much for health related issues as for any ecological factor. But the changes in hormonal balance in people in general, in particular in men, is pretty startling. While I can understand the desire to let it all happen and reduce populations, I think the methods are worse than the problem at this point. I don't think it's generally a conspiracy, only that refined foods are simply not as good for you, and hormonal issues abound in the past half century to century in particular.
> Millennials are every bit as good as the boomers for having a blizzard of excuses about why they can't possibly be inconvenienced, it just sounds a bit more nuanced. This website is full of it.
The idea that this problem is solvable by individuals changing their behavior when there is a vast ocean of money being deployed to keep everything (roughly) the same is pretty laughable. Changing the behaviour of a large population first requires them to agree on what the problem is in the first place. "Energy" interests have done a good job of clouding the issue and providing enough plausible deniability for continuing the status quo.
Here's a relevant example: a generation of people have been convinced to recycle - but those efforts were largely wasted because the collected material was shipped to China (!) and sometimes dumped in the ocean (!!). So individuals did their part, but "the system" is still going to optimize for cost-efficiency and not for environmental impact.
No way, man! You just have to do things like recycle plastic… not wait, that was a propaganda campaign by the plastic industry in order to market plastic as being more long-term viable for the environment and “sustainability”.
Well, you can reduce your carbon footprint!… wait, British Petroleum invented that slogan, didn’t they…
> The idea that this problem is solvable by individuals changing their behavior
I don't think that individuals can solve climate change without having government and corporations change.
But governments and corporations won't ever change without action by individuals to pressure them to change.
Activism on the part of individuals turning into collective action is the kind of thing that would produce actual change, not actions like plastic recycling.
But again there's a failure of the Millennial generation for you. You've figured out the individual actions which don't work and which you've been led down an alley by moneyed interests into thinking they're effective, but you have no answers to effecting change past pointing blame.
I would suggest starting with individual study and observation. Too much activism is pushed from emotion, and it all reaches a point where it just comes across as noise. I think what's needed is a balance of the passion combined with knowledge and understanding.
Getting involved in local politics and making small changes in a progressive direction as opposed to trying to save the world. A good example are communities that are supporting local growers/producers and freeing them from some of the national/state level red tape. Improving the chain of supply more locally and increasing awareness. This is much harder in larger cities though... as local foods are less diverse and less universally available year-round.
Working with local restaurants that aren't chains and trying to build local sustainable menus. Moving away from refined products to more local.
As it stands, it's very niche and trendy, which can come across as off-putting or out of touch. But working locally can be very impactful. If you can convince one restaurant to move at least part of their menu to local supply, that can help. Being closer to the source will lead you to connecting with the source and having a better understanding.
There are a lot of people out there, working on actually making their small parts work... connecting these people is really hard. I've been pushing for years talking to local restaurants to try to get them to move away from refined seed oils for cooking alone, and it often falls on deaf ears.
Shop and advocate for local coop markets that have sustainable practices.
Unfortunately, it's hard to fight the convenience/abundance of Wal-Mart, Amazon and Costco. I have enough trouble convincing my SO to hit a couple different grocery stores in a day, as opposed to trying to get everything needed in one convenient stop.
I can say at least with food... sustainable food is much more expensive than factory production. And it's likely as much to do with the trendiness than pure costs, which are also quite a bit higher/harder. Meat alone is generally 2-3x as expensive. This doesn't account for higher waste from not vacuum/nitrogen packing everything in plastic either.
6 upvotes and no comments for the single most important story on HN for the year so far.
To quote a poster:
A smiling bee says, "When we go, we're taking you with us!"
The ongoing human-caused insect apocalypse signals that the same is coming for humanity. Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects.
There goes many human crops. There go the forests that catch and slowly release rainwater to irrigate those crops. There goes much of on-land CO₂ absorbtion and capture. Here comes the big dustbowl, there goes the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, goodbye to every coastal town and city in the world.
This is at least unfair. Our parents were people just like us, trying to survive in this world, sometimes against all odds, having very limited information, and sacrifice a lot for their children.
On the other hand, there were some very specific people who, through their greediness, and often in spite of the information they had, proceeded with their plans destroying Earth natural resources and so on. But these people can be found in every generation, not just in the one of our parents.
"You can pollinate crops using bees kept in captivity. Many crops are pollinated this way." ... as much as I may appreciate the sentiment, it seems to me that we - the global we - have become adept at finding band-aid solutions (especially when it involves technology) to symptoms but rarely address and attempt to fix the actual causal factors, i.e. the problem. I would hazard to guess this is for primarily two reasons. First and foremost, it requires grass roots and pervasive change - change in values, behaviours, beliefs - and change is often difficult. Second, there appears to exist a pervasive view that sees us humans as outside of nature rather than an integral and dependent part of the whole.
Most crops are not. Many plants rely on specific insects for pollination. And domesticated honey bees can never hope to match the rest of the insect world in numbers.
You wouldn't need domesticated bees to match the rest of the insect world's numbers. You'd just need to enough to pollinate crops. And bees can pollinate many, many different types crops. Also, you can always pollinate by hand if need be, which is how vanilla in Madagascar is pollinated. I'm not saying declining insect numbers are good, I'm just saying worrying about a crop-apocalypse is probably unfounded.
> I feel powerless and robbed of my own future by my parents' generation.
And what are you actually doing differently? Are you shopping local coop markets for sustainable, local foods? Are you supporting restaurants that do likewise? And no, vegan really isn't the option, as organic farming really needs a combination of animal and veg in practice to support the soil.
Your parents and grandparents are/were people, just like you are, and laying the blame at their feet does absolutely nothing to make anything better, and at worst will drive a political wedge that will result in even trying to make anything better that much harder.
> I have nothing to say. I feel powerless and robbed of my own future by my parents' generation.
Beware, O Sinner, for Who Promises You a Tomorrow?
--St. Alphonsus of Ligouri
Just as we pretend the heat death of the universe shall never arrive and that time (billions upon billions of years is inconceivable to the human mind) we pretended it an infinity, never truly paying heed that there would be a last generation or that we might be among them.
We mechanically pollinate plants all the time, it’s not the end of our ability to feed ourselves. I think people are ignorant to and are overestimating how difficult it is to make pollen blow in the air or transfer using mechanical means.
Please spend a few minutes researching pollination before just assuming that "technology" can solve a process that is handled by nature after billions of years of specialization by thousands of types of insects on thousands of different types of plants, trillions of times every year. Just hand waving some "mechanical means" is stuff that gets civilizations killed.
It’s definitely a problem and we need to develop technical solutions as workarounds since there is an inability to get political traction to do the most optimal thing.
How about we apply the effort and resources that a "technical solution" would require (which in this case would be massive because again, you are trying to replicate a highly complex natural phenomenon of which many components are barely or not at all understood) to get "political traction on the most optimal thing"?
There have been stories documenting how the decline of bee populations has necessitated the introduction of hand-pollination. [0] Hand-pollination seems both tedious and difficult to scale. Mechanical pollination might be viable in some environments but basically it amounts to extensively paying for something that historically has been free.
Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects
Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)?
In any case: I'm very well aware of how dramatic the decline is, but imo there are more than enough 'if all the bees die we die as well' memes out there and perhaps it's a pet peeve of mine but that's a correlation at best and it ignores so many nuances it's not funny anymore (not that it ever was, but you get the point). It's HN so let's not ignore all other pollinators (wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, spiders, birds, ... in no particular order - and of which I know many people actually go like 'erm, what, bats?'), nor that there's also wind pollation, and also not the fact that there's a bunch of crops whos yield doesn't depend on pollinators at all and another bunch who'd see dercreased yield without pollinators but not quite zero.
It is a sweeping generalisation, and so are dicots vs monocots.
But the familiar monocots are grasses, which are wind-pollinated. Many dicots are wind-pollinated, including a lot of temperate zone trees, but the familiar useful ones are, generalising wildly, insect-pollinated.
Non-angiosperms (gymnosperms, ferns etc.) are either wind pollinated, or don't make pollen and reproduce via spores, often via an intermediate sexual generation.
As has often been noted, after WW3, the mosses will be fine.
>> Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects
> Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)?
Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants and flowers use insects (or lucky burst of wind) as the only way to make a new organism, I mean a new DNA.
> Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants
It's the other way round. Dicots are a sub-domain of angiosperms (flowering plants).
There are lots and lots of flowering plants. All (bar a rounding error) make seeds. Some of the seeds have 1 seed leaf (cotyledon), so are called monocotyledonous plants: monocots. The others have 2 cotyledons: dicotyledonous plants, or dicots.
Some monocots use insect pollination and some make edible fruit. Bananas and coconuts are monocots. All cereals (except some false cereals like buckwheat) are monocots, but all are wind-pollinated. Hand-wavey generalisation: most monocots are wind-pollinated, and don't need insects.
Many dicots use wind pollination, but most of the ones that make fruit we can eat are insect-pollinated. Some plants are self-fertile and don't need to be pollinated at all (e.g. dandelions). Some can be bred to be that way. If insects disappear it doesn't mean all fruit will.
But OTOH it's not just about pollination. Insects do much more than that. They are also vital in decay, in the soil, in turning dead plants back into soil. No insects means much slower decay, means soil that's much less fertile, means plants grow much more poorly, means more crop failures.
To be fair, I do not think many people here (or anywhere) is qualified enough to have an informed opinion in the matter.
In fact, the lack of entomologists (a boring, unexciting field of study for most of us) may be the cause of how seemly late the complete wipe-out of all insect life is being reported. Last time this happened, it was killing the birds and people noticed it much much earlier.
There are a few scary solutions if it ever came to the point where insect population would start to seriously harm pollination for forests and human crops. We can always start engineering and breeding insects that are more resistant to global warming.
What we will never know for certain is what the long term effect will be if we start to do this.
Human crops are generally pollinated by livestock bees, not feral pollinators.
If we depended principally on natural produce, most of us would have starved to death long ago. Forget about the bees; just think about the Haber-Bosch process.
It's a question of which causes are the more important ones. For example, the rise in Varroa mites is probably a secondary effect caused by insecticides, but which insecticides? Colony collapse disorder is a thing, but nobody is 100% sure what is causing it yet.
So the scientists say "we don't know". Which is true... but it is very clear who is causing it. It's us. Humans. It doesn't really matter if it's the chemicals that we make in the millions of tonnes specifically to kill insects, or the ones we make in the billions of tonnes to do other things which happen to kill insects, or the ones we accidentally create as byproducts which happen to kill insects, or whether it's because we're destroying the wilderness that they need to survive, or it's something we don't know yet.
E.g. vultures in India are doing very badly. It's humans, but it's by accident.
Some Indian religions practice "air burial". They let vultures eat the bodies.
Dying people often feel unwell. They take painkillers. Paracetamol is cheap. India is poor. People take a lot of paracetamol and then some of them die.
Paracetamol is toxic to vultures.
It's still humans, but it's indirect and accidental, but it's 100% our fault.
It is a fallacy to say scientists don't know what is causing it but they/we know its humans for sure! Huh? What?! That don't make no damn sense. You got to know something before you know it, you know?
In your vulture example we know why the vultures died so we can tie it to a human behavior. We don't know why the bees die or what the deal is with the mites so we can't tie it to human behavior. You are still making a leap of faith, no matter how logical or likely it seems or in fact is.
While I agree that it's probably likely that humans are the cause I disagree with you outright stating humans are. I can still see some non-human probable causes like an undiscovered disease in or multiple species.
"OK, so, we have killed off 96% of all wild mammals, destroyed most of the wilderness on land and in the sea, caused runaway eutrophication in freshwater and massive dead zones in the sea, doubled the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, along with vast quantities of other damage, destruction, and pollution...
"But there is a small change that a new disease that is killing off lots of bees is just a coincidence, so we must not rule it out."
That's not at all what I'm saying and I'm not sure how you could interpret it like that. To be able to handle this crisis the start point is to determine what is the cause. If you don't know the cause there is no hope fixing it. Just throwing your hands up and saying Humans are the cause is useless, well unless you want to "solve" that by genocide.
> I'm not sure how you could interpret it like that.
Honestly this is how it reads to me.
Real science is complicated. It is very often -- maybe even most times -- the case that researchers can observe something happening, identify it, but not know what is the proximate cause.
Then, if they can identify the direct cause, that leads to the next problem: what caused that, building a chain of links, until they can say "we think it is this that is the root issue".
It is normal natural scientific caution to say "we don't know what causes this."
But it's an over-simplification. We do know what the ultimate cause is: human induced changes to the environment.
It is possible to both say "we don't know the reason" and to also know the root reason and for both statements to be correct.
Around the world, wildlife is dying off in large numbers. Even when it is not directly humans intentionally killing the organisms, it is caused by environmental damage caused by humans.
Saying it's not is like standing over a bleeding body, gloating, with blood-covered hands, and saying "I didn't kill him! The knife did!"
Yes, honey bee colonies are collapsing and the direct proximal cause is unidentified. However, that is a small facet of general large-scale collapse in insects in general: 85-90% in the last century.
That in turn is a big important faced of a general collapse in wild animals over that time, and indeed, over the last 2-2½ centuries.
The death of most wild animals is only a part of the death of countless plants, fungi, invertebrates, and microbes of various kinds.
You can't pin that down to a single cause, such as, say, DDT. There are lots of causes. But one thing caused all of them: human technological civilisation.
Before the Industrial Revolution, humans had already driven lots of species into extinction. Steller's Sea Cow, the Great Auk, the Dodo, all in documented history. Before historically recorded times, giant land sloths in South America, elephant birds and moas in New Zealand, and lots more.
But it's been exponentially increasing for about ¼ of a millennium, and the thing about exponenntial curves is that close to the end, where the rise is nearly vertical, all hell breaks loose and it becomes hard to trace the connections between phenomena and changes that are occurring very rapidly.
> But what about the poor SUV drivers? And all this green stuff is gonna make us poor!
That's basically been the reaction of the boomer generation I heard when talking about the looming eco disaster. When getting decent bicycle infrastructure in cities is impossible because half the population does not only doesn't care but actively opposes any change we can forget about changing any of this. It's going to happen.
The question then becomes: What can we do to deal with that? How can we replace the polinators?
I am colossally pessimistic but at the rate we are going, I think we are heading for between 4-7⁰ C of warming this century, 5-10m of sea level rise, the extinction of 95%+ of species, and a small remnant of humanity, maybe a few million people, living at the poles, after the collapse of our technological civilisation.
We're not going to have time to invent magic mini flying robots to do pollination when the bees are all dead.
Thats unrealistic. Sure, some countries are going to become unlivable for humans, afghanistan, pakistan etc. but large parts of now permafrost will become habitable in exchange. And there are also many plants that dont rely on polinators.
I really don't consider myself an environmentalist in the most typical sense. I think that people should probably get a little bit closer to natural processes and away from industrial franken-foods.
The push against repairability is pretty bad. The levels of pollution are disheartening to say the least. Two instances in travel stick out to me. Going into/through LA in the mid 00's and finding the smog unbearable and driving on the I-10 through west TX and into Louisianna there was this thick layer of gas fumes that was simply hard to even keep my eyes open.
These are two visible, pungent cases and you don't need to be an environmentalist to feel that this is a problem.
I'm also not inherently against GMO plants/food... I will say that some of these have been problematic, like 20x the histamine response in modern wheat vs. older strains. The increased use of soy and legume proteins that are not complete/good, and the lack of understanding of how problematic they along with the vegan/vegetarian cult-like culture have been. Not to mention the massive negative impact of refined seed oils on human physiology and hormone production.
There are a lot of choices made in the past century or so that have been done out of convenience and at the time ignorance of longer-term impacts. We should largely know better at this point.
I don't like the tendency to lay global climate change to blame for it all, or that humans are even the leading cause of those changes... climate changes and has throughout time. But I can absolutely find that covering a significant portion of the planet in chemical pesticides that kill off insects to the point that it's of serious concern, and making no efforts to move towards something that is sustainable is irresponsible at best.
I can also feel that continuing to come up with more chemical processes to make a better non-stick pan, vs. just learning to clean/maintain steel and cast-iron pans is problematic. Yeah I like amazon... I like that I can get apples year round... I like that I can do a lot of things. But I'm at least trying to make better choices at least part of the time... and advocating for others to do the same.
Now that I think of it, I have not even seen a butterfly in many years, this includes hiking it the woods.
What a shame, well with global warming and the powers that be still doubling down on fossil fuels, a big correction is probably on its way, similar to this story posted here earlier about tree roots. We had 50+ years to do something about climate change, as usual profits came first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35054175
(edit, fixed the link, paste issue)