8 ms·

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't f

This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story, and bee colony collapse disorder. All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. Note that if we don't find a way to correct this, it can be catastrophic on a timescale that makes the most alarmist climate change predictions seem like nothing. There must be some percentage of normal insect population density below which population of frogs and birds and what not will fall even farther, with knock-on impact elsewhere. One wonders how much of a boy-who-cried-wolf effect we might be seeing. Alarmism gets tiresome, so it's important to ring the alarm about the most urgent problems first. The insect apocalypse -if it is real, which I've a feeling it very much is- is probably a problem we can ameliorate quickly once we decide to, and it will worsen quickly if we don't. But climate change gets all the attention and sucks the oxygen out of the room.

the8472 8y ago
You're assuming that's just due to insecticides. Insects are exposed to multiple stressors. One of them also happens to be global warming. Others are habitat loss, insecticides, invasive species, etc. In fact the researchers measuring the loss of insect biomass in puerto rico rainforests attributed it primarily to climate change since the other factors do not apply there.
- Flozzin 8y ago
  I was going to mention the same thing. I too up until the puerto rico article blamed insecticides. But something much larger seems to be going on. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...
  - campercoder 8y ago
    Climate change is causing this. Every ecoystem on Earth took 10s of millions of years to find it's equilibrium. Everything living in those ecosystems is a product of millions of years of adaptation and evolution. If you go and change the temperature, the amount of water & the seasons, then it is a big rug pull under the feet of evolution. Everything can and will collapse. Look at what is happening in the arctic... now that permafrost is melting, you have massive, uncontrolled methane release. People think that we can continue to pump CO2. We are very wrong about that. I just wish it were the pine beetles as the ones dying out.
    - aw3c2 8y ago
      You are posting hyperbole, millions of years is a bad measure to tell people that human influence is affecting. There is no equilibrium either, nature changes a lot. Look at temperature history, big changes happened again and again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
      - filoeleven 8y ago
        When people say “the climate has changed before,” these are the kinds of changes they are talking about. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ You’re right, there is no equilibrium. But there is a limit to how rapidly any system can handle changes while remaining recognizable as the same system.
      - campercoder 8y ago
        Yup, it's about the rate of change. Sucking 10s of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon out of the ground and injecting into the atmosphere over just 100 years is complete and utter suicide. For all living things on our planet.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  The variations in surface temperature we have seen in the modern era are nothing compared to what we've seen in the recent geological record. Moreover, insects are very sturdy throughout the geological record, so it's very difficult to believe that less than 1C change in a century could cause this (the end of the last glacial period saw a 7C swing in just a few hundred years). It's pretty clear that climate change is not the stressor causing this. EDIT: Allow me to expand. As to climate, it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), lots of models whose predictions have been atrocious, and besides, Earth's climate has a number of negative feedback loops, like the water cycle. We also know that CO2 and temperature in the geological record are linked, with CO2 changes lagging temperature changes, which rules out CO2 as a cause of past temperature changes. Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth (depending on the direction of the change). (Readers who are curious about that should read Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/. https://wattsupwiththat.com/.) But insects? We have a very plausible cause: our use and overuse of chemicals in farming, from fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides (which nowadays are used to kill the crops themselves as part of the process of ripening and picking them). We can be fairly certain that land use changes are not the cause: the brunt of land use changes in North America happened many decades ago, but the change in insect population density is very recent. Could the cause be something else? Yes, absolutely, but climate change is almost certainly not it -- recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia, let alone the past 18ky. And note that there is absolutely no way to test whether climate change is a cause -- how can we change the climate back in the kind of timescale we need to respond to the insect crisis in?? There aren't very many plausible causes that come to mind besides insecticides and herbicides, really, and those can be ruled in or out pretty trivially: just reduce the use of them in some large region (a few tens of thousands of acres, contiguous, say) and see what happens. The timescale for testing any hypothesis about these chemicals causing insect die-offs is on the order of... one year, maybe two -- maximum five. If insect populations don't rebound we don't need to keep using insecticides anyways, thus saving the industry a fair bit of money. There's also Occam's razor... No, pointing the finger at climate change strikes me as begging for a disaster. It's a hypothesis that cannot be tested fast enough. Insisting that we test it before testing any hypothesis that we can test in just a few years (and at a savings to industry!) is irresponsible and irrational. Science is testing falsifiable hypotheses. Here we have one. So try and falsify it. The insecticide hypothesis is cheap and easy to test, and doesn't require much time. You might argue that testing those hypotheses that are easy to test is like a drunk person looking for their car keys under the street lamp, and you might be right, but if the only other hypotheses you have are not falsifiable, then the only science you can do is: come up with more falsifiable hypos if you can, and test those you have now and come up with later. Cost is absolutely an issue, naturally, and again, the cost of testing the insecticide hypo is low, but the cost of testing the climate change hypo is simply not even within reach.
- ben_w 8y ago
  “Lots of insects are dying” and “insecticides kill insects” does make it very easy to reach that conclusion. I know nothing of the relevant biochemistry. Are these insecticides well targeted or highly generic in what they kill?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sverige 8y ago
    Most are based on organophosphates, which work basically by sending the nervous system into hyperdrive. They will kill a wide swath of animals (not just insects) if applied heavily enough. Some are deadlier to certain insects more than others. For example, Sevin kills bees even in very small doses. The other thing to note is that "loss of habitat" isn't always disappearing wetlands or stands of trees being cut down and converted to tillage. The widespread use of herbicides has almost eliminated milkweed in areas where it used to be very common, for example. When I was a kid, it was everywhere in the ditches of the Midwest. Now it's rare to see it. Milkweed is essential for monarch butterflies.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Also these ditches and edges of farm properties are often eliminated with consolidation of farmland into larger and larger continuous acreage ownership.
toofy 8y ago
> This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story... For those who aren’t aware what they’re referring to by insect apocalypse, a story came out a few days ago about some seemingly very important insect research: NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalyps... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541536
- tejohnso 8y ago
  There's also this paper [1] describing "biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction". Should have made front page news everywhere. [1]http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089 http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089
  - mirimir 8y ago
    And it's (for now) being replaced by relatively simple cultivated ecosystems. Food crops, trees, and livestock (which I gather includes farmed fish). Ultimately, if we can manage it without collapse, that's all that will remain. Plus us and pets, I mean. And various pathogens, parasites, and so on.
mirimir 8y ago
I have a bad feeling that the "insect apocalypse" will spare cockroaches, fire ants, Asian stink bugs, etc, etc.
- canada_dry 8y ago
  Just you wait... bed bugs will cross breed with fire ants then we're all doomed.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    I vaguely remember an SF short story from the 50s-60s with a world full of stuff like that. You couldn't go outside without protective gear.
    - spc476 8y ago
      The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. It was the scariest book I ever read.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Thanks. I read that too. But I'm pretty sure that this was a short story. I remember a description of venturing outside, with suit failure, and horrible stuff happening. However, it could have been a particularly memorable part of The Sheep Look Up.
        cpeterso 8y ago
        Not the short story you're looking for, but The Hellstrom Chronicle is a 1971 pseudoscience mocumentary in the same vein: the struggle for survival between humans and insects. The conclusion is that insects will "win" due to their adaptability and ability to reproduce rapidly and humans' inability to organize due to excessive individualism. The film is an odd duck: it's satirical and knowingly pseudoscience yet it won both the 1972 Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Documentary Feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle
whyenot 8y ago
> All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. I am not aware of any scientific publication showing a causal link. Let's be a little careful about this. By increasing crop yields and reducing deaths from insect borne diseases, insecticides have greatly reduced human suffering over the past century. It's possible that insecticides are the cause, and if so, something has to be done, but such decisions need to be based on facts, on science, NOT on superstition and storytelling.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Yeah, but think about it: insect population is down? why keep using pesticides at the same level as usual?? And if you reduce pesticide use because there's fewer insects, and if the insect population recovers, then you'll have some very suggestive evidence (still not dispositive, but so what). There's a hypothesis to test, so let's test it.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    Here are some possible answers to your "why??" Insect population may be down overall, but not down with crop pests. Insecticides may require a certain density of use to be effective; that is, there may be a non-linear dose/response curve such that it's not really meaningful to reduce the current levels. The goal is to maximize income. Reduced insecticide use, even with the relatively low corresponding insect populations, might still reduce the yield and/or quality and therefore profit. Think of how the oceans are overfished, but while there's a good reason that everyone should greatly reduce their catch, there's no good reason for any one fishing crew to do that on their own.
- ip26 8y ago
  Ironclad facts, science, studies, & research are great. However, if we are facing imminent collapse of pollinator populations (which would lead to a lot of human suffering) the precautionary principal starts to look interesting. In other words, if we run the risk of population collapse within ten years, and population collapse will lead to crop failure and mass starvation & death, but rigorous studies on cause will take fifteen years to complete... do we wait for them to finish?
eksemplar 8y ago
I don’t think the insect apocalypse is getting its attention stolen by climate change. I just don’t think enough people care. I mean, look at France. They are having violent riots because the gas prices were increased to fight climate change. I know that it’s easy for me, a relatively wealthy Scandinavian, to not worry about gas prices, but even if these people are struggling to make ends meet, they are right now, actively fighting to kill the future of their children. How the hell we going to change anything when the status of the world is like this?
- sfvisser 8y ago
  I think the people in France are acting very rational here. The artifical increase in gas prices directly hits their state of being right now and that of their kids. There is no uncertainty about that. Global warning may or may not make life shitty in some future scenario. Why do they, who are already poor, need to pay the price right now? I think most people rather want to be not poor in a world with global warning than poor in one without. I think I would.
  - smhost 8y ago
    agreed. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of global emissions, and you're punishing the people? come on, that's not right.
    - gerhardi 8y ago
      Do you think that those companies would exist in their current form without the consumers (/the actual population) buying stuff made by those companies?
      - pojzon 8y ago
        Average joe is not educated enough/has to worry about everyday living, to actually pay attention to those companies practices. Its on the goverment to regulate them in such a way that would allow our spicies to thrive in the future. Unfortunetely fast gain motion sparked by capitalism is also in the vains of people responsible for legiatlation. Humans have too many self-destruct mechanisms embedded in them to accomplish anything in the long run as a civilisation. We either have to change drastically or face extinction. Untill the people who CAN make a difference start to care - there is not a lot masses can do. Grouping in modern age to the size that can influence those people at power is very hard.
quotemstr 8y ago
I don't think it's alarmism fatigue so much as the culture war having smashed lots of people's trust in institutions and elites. It's hard to care about pressing real problems when society's energy had been spent on nasty, petty, and vicious disputes that don't matter much, but that for the participants, feels like the apocalypse. What is everyone going to do when the real apocalypse shows up?
empath75 8y ago
Forget the frogs. If we don’t have insects we don’t have food.
- azeotropic 8y ago
  Actually, most staple crops are wind pollinated.
monktastic1 8y ago
It seems to me that all of these problems -- the insect apocalypse, general biodiversity loss, climate change, all the way to the depression and anxiety epidemics, economic inequity, etc., stem from the same general principle: our alienation from ourselves, each other, and nature. In a sense, healing any one of them will contribute to healing all of them. And trying to merely engineer our way out of any of them (while preserving the underlying mindset) will just cause more of the same to rear its ugly head elsewhere. We've forgotten that this life is a magical, wondrous, precious gift, and the world is worth loving and caring for. We have to stop treating it as -- and thereby turning it into -- mere "stuff." It's alive. If you're a fan of this line of reasoning, I recommend the author Charles Eisenstein.
- tstrimple 8y ago
  > It seems to me that all of these problems -- the insect apocalypse, general biodiversity loss, climate change, all the way to the depression and anxiety epidemics, economic inequity, etc., stem from the same general principle: I thought you were going to say capitalism.
  - monktastic1 8y ago
    My sense is that capitalism is also a symptom of the same principle (which compels us to view nature as merely a "means of production").
  - wgjordan 8y ago
    According to Marx [1] our alienation from ourselves, each other, and nature is the product of (the capitalist relation to) labor: > Through estranged, alienated labor, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...
samstave 8y ago
the problem is that the gardening and weed management actions we take eliminate the sole plant that these critters put their eggs on. MilkThistle is what they eat and lay eggs on ONLY. and so with RoundUp killing the milkthistle "weed" we blindly erradicate the support system for upsteam insects like the monarchs. Funny how if you want to dploy a new building facility to a location you need to do an environmental impact analysis/report... but looking at a pesticide, we dont look at the impact it would have to the lyfecycle ecosystem to all the critters who rely on the various "weeds" we think we are killing... Look at the episode of chefs table on netflix with the buuddhist chef - she hasa . "farm to table" garden where she gets the ingredients for her amazing dishes - no pesticides, no weed killers - not insecticides.. just goes through and lets everything live naturally together. monsanto should research how all the various ecosystem cycles rely on each plant type and what role insects play in every manner other than affecting their company bottom line.
mempko 8y ago
Bird populations are also crashing. It's a complex problem, overuse of insecticide is one part, but global warming is another. We have changed the habitats of these creatures in such a short amount of time, they don't have time to adapt. Humanity should ask itself, can we adapt to a world without bugs, birds, and eventually every other vertebrate? Or is our habitat changing too fast to cope too?
wgj 8y ago
> climate change gets all the attention It's in the article. "The biggest reasons are habitat loss and pesticides across the butterflies’ breeding and migratory range. This year’s steep drop is probably due to extreme weather, at least partly resulting from climate change. Late rainstorms in March, as well as an intense, extended wildfire season across California, have battered the species. The state’s forests have yet to recover from the record-breaking drought stretching from 2011 to 2017." Climate change is claimed to be a significant factor, and deserves the attention it gets.

the8472 8y ago

You're assuming that's just due to insecticides. Insects are exposed to multiple stressors. One of them also happens to be global warming. Others are habitat loss, insecticides, invasive species, etc. In fact the researchers measuring the loss of insect biomass in puerto rico rainforests attributed it primarily to climate change since the other factors do not apply there.

Flozzin 8y ago
I was going to mention the same thing. I too up until the puerto rico article blamed insecticides. But something much larger seems to be going on. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...
- campercoder 8y ago
  Climate change is causing this. Every ecoystem on Earth took 10s of millions of years to find it's equilibrium. Everything living in those ecosystems is a product of millions of years of adaptation and evolution. If you go and change the temperature, the amount of water & the seasons, then it is a big rug pull under the feet of evolution. Everything can and will collapse. Look at what is happening in the arctic... now that permafrost is melting, you have massive, uncontrolled methane release. People think that we can continue to pump CO2. We are very wrong about that. I just wish it were the pine beetles as the ones dying out.
  - aw3c2 8y ago
    You are posting hyperbole, millions of years is a bad measure to tell people that human influence is affecting. There is no equilibrium either, nature changes a lot. Look at temperature history, big changes happened again and again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...
    - filoeleven 8y ago
      When people say “the climate has changed before,” these are the kinds of changes they are talking about. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ You’re right, there is no equilibrium. But there is a limit to how rapidly any system can handle changes while remaining recognizable as the same system.
    - campercoder 8y ago
      Yup, it's about the rate of change. Sucking 10s of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon out of the ground and injecting into the atmosphere over just 100 years is complete and utter suicide. For all living things on our planet.
cryptonector 8y ago
The variations in surface temperature we have seen in the modern era are nothing compared to what we've seen in the recent geological record. Moreover, insects are very sturdy throughout the geological record, so it's very difficult to believe that less than 1C change in a century could cause this (the end of the last glacial period saw a 7C swing in just a few hundred years). It's pretty clear that climate change is not the stressor causing this. EDIT: Allow me to expand. As to climate, it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), lots of models whose predictions have been atrocious, and besides, Earth's climate has a number of negative feedback loops, like the water cycle. We also know that CO2 and temperature in the geological record are linked, with CO2 changes lagging temperature changes, which rules out CO2 as a cause of past temperature changes. Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth (depending on the direction of the change). (Readers who are curious about that should read Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/. https://wattsupwiththat.com/.) But insects? We have a very plausible cause: our use and overuse of chemicals in farming, from fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides (which nowadays are used to kill the crops themselves as part of the process of ripening and picking them). We can be fairly certain that land use changes are not the cause: the brunt of land use changes in North America happened many decades ago, but the change in insect population density is very recent. Could the cause be something else? Yes, absolutely, but climate change is almost certainly not it -- recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia, let alone the past 18ky. And note that there is absolutely no way to test whether climate change is a cause -- how can we change the climate back in the kind of timescale we need to respond to the insect crisis in?? There aren't very many plausible causes that come to mind besides insecticides and herbicides, really, and those can be ruled in or out pretty trivially: just reduce the use of them in some large region (a few tens of thousands of acres, contiguous, say) and see what happens. The timescale for testing any hypothesis about these chemicals causing insect die-offs is on the order of... one year, maybe two -- maximum five. If insect populations don't rebound we don't need to keep using insecticides anyways, thus saving the industry a fair bit of money. There's also Occam's razor... No, pointing the finger at climate change strikes me as begging for a disaster. It's a hypothesis that cannot be tested fast enough. Insisting that we test it before testing any hypothesis that we can test in just a few years (and at a savings to industry!) is irresponsible and irrational. Science is testing falsifiable hypotheses. Here we have one. So try and falsify it. The insecticide hypothesis is cheap and easy to test, and doesn't require much time. You might argue that testing those hypotheses that are easy to test is like a drunk person looking for their car keys under the street lamp, and you might be right, but if the only other hypotheses you have are not falsifiable, then the only science you can do is: come up with more falsifiable hypos if you can, and test those you have now and come up with later. Cost is absolutely an issue, naturally, and again, the cost of testing the insecticide hypo is low, but the cost of testing the climate change hypo is simply not even within reach.
ben_w 8y ago
“Lots of insects are dying” and “insecticides kill insects” does make it very easy to reach that conclusion. I know nothing of the relevant biochemistry. Are these insecticides well targeted or highly generic in what they kill?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sverige 8y ago
  Most are based on organophosphates, which work basically by sending the nervous system into hyperdrive. They will kill a wide swath of animals (not just insects) if applied heavily enough. Some are deadlier to certain insects more than others. For example, Sevin kills bees even in very small doses. The other thing to note is that "loss of habitat" isn't always disappearing wetlands or stands of trees being cut down and converted to tillage. The widespread use of herbicides has almost eliminated milkweed in areas where it used to be very common, for example. When I was a kid, it was everywhere in the ditches of the Midwest. Now it's rare to see it. Milkweed is essential for monarch butterflies.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    Also these ditches and edges of farm properties are often eliminated with consolidation of farmland into larger and larger continuous acreage ownership.

toofy 8y ago

> This seems like part of the insect apocalypse story... For those who aren’t aware what they’re referring to by insect apocalypse, a story came out a few days ago about some seemingly very important insect research: NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalyps... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541536

tejohnso 8y ago
There's also this paper [1] describing "biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction". Should have made front page news everywhere. [1]http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089 http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089
- mirimir 8y ago
  And it's (for now) being replaced by relatively simple cultivated ecosystems. Food crops, trees, and livestock (which I gather includes farmed fish). Ultimately, if we can manage it without collapse, that's all that will remain. Plus us and pets, I mean. And various pathogens, parasites, and so on.

mirimir 8y ago

I have a bad feeling that the "insect apocalypse" will spare cockroaches, fire ants, Asian stink bugs, etc, etc.

canada_dry 8y ago
Just you wait... bed bugs will cross breed with fire ants then we're all doomed.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I vaguely remember an SF short story from the 50s-60s with a world full of stuff like that. You couldn't go outside without protective gear.
  - spc476 8y ago
    The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. It was the scariest book I ever read.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Thanks. I read that too. But I'm pretty sure that this was a short story. I remember a description of venturing outside, with suit failure, and horrible stuff happening. However, it could have been a particularly memorable part of The Sheep Look Up.
      - cpeterso 8y ago
        Not the short story you're looking for, but The Hellstrom Chronicle is a 1971 pseudoscience mocumentary in the same vein: the struggle for survival between humans and insects. The conclusion is that insects will "win" due to their adaptability and ability to reproduce rapidly and humans' inability to organize due to excessive individualism. The film is an odd duck: it's satirical and knowingly pseudoscience yet it won both the 1972 Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Documentary Feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle

whyenot 8y ago

> All probably caused by overuse of insecticides. I am not aware of any scientific publication showing a causal link. Let's be a little careful about this. By increasing crop yields and reducing deaths from insect borne diseases, insecticides have greatly reduced human suffering over the past century. It's possible that insecticides are the cause, and if so, something has to be done, but such decisions need to be based on facts, on science, NOT on superstition and storytelling.

cryptonector 8y ago
Yeah, but think about it: insect population is down? why keep using pesticides at the same level as usual?? And if you reduce pesticide use because there's fewer insects, and if the insect population recovers, then you'll have some very suggestive evidence (still not dispositive, but so what). There's a hypothesis to test, so let's test it.
- eesmith 8y ago
  Here are some possible answers to your "why??" Insect population may be down overall, but not down with crop pests. Insecticides may require a certain density of use to be effective; that is, there may be a non-linear dose/response curve such that it's not really meaningful to reduce the current levels. The goal is to maximize income. Reduced insecticide use, even with the relatively low corresponding insect populations, might still reduce the yield and/or quality and therefore profit. Think of how the oceans are overfished, but while there's a good reason that everyone should greatly reduce their catch, there's no good reason for any one fishing crew to do that on their own.
ip26 8y ago
Ironclad facts, science, studies, & research are great. However, if we are facing imminent collapse of pollinator populations (which would lead to a lot of human suffering) the precautionary principal starts to look interesting. In other words, if we run the risk of population collapse within ten years, and population collapse will lead to crop failure and mass starvation & death, but rigorous studies on cause will take fifteen years to complete... do we wait for them to finish?

eksemplar 8y ago

I don’t think the insect apocalypse is getting its attention stolen by climate change. I just don’t think enough people care. I mean, look at France. They are having violent riots because the gas prices were increased to fight climate change. I know that it’s easy for me, a relatively wealthy Scandinavian, to not worry about gas prices, but even if these people are struggling to make ends meet, they are right now, actively fighting to kill the future of their children. How the hell we going to change anything when the status of the world is like this?

sfvisser 8y ago
I think the people in France are acting very rational here. The artifical increase in gas prices directly hits their state of being right now and that of their kids. There is no uncertainty about that. Global warning may or may not make life shitty in some future scenario. Why do they, who are already poor, need to pay the price right now? I think most people rather want to be not poor in a world with global warning than poor in one without. I think I would.
- smhost 8y ago
  agreed. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of global emissions, and you're punishing the people? come on, that's not right.
  - gerhardi 8y ago
    Do you think that those companies would exist in their current form without the consumers (/the actual population) buying stuff made by those companies?
    - pojzon 8y ago
      Average joe is not educated enough/has to worry about everyday living, to actually pay attention to those companies practices. Its on the goverment to regulate them in such a way that would allow our spicies to thrive in the future. Unfortunetely fast gain motion sparked by capitalism is also in the vains of people responsible for legiatlation. Humans have too many self-destruct mechanisms embedded in them to accomplish anything in the long run as a civilisation. We either have to change drastically or face extinction. Untill the people who CAN make a difference start to care - there is not a lot masses can do. Grouping in modern age to the size that can influence those people at power is very hard.

quotemstr 8y ago

I don't think it's alarmism fatigue so much as the culture war having smashed lots of people's trust in institutions and elites. It's hard to care about pressing real problems when society's energy had been spent on nasty, petty, and vicious disputes that don't matter much, but that for the participants, feels like the apocalypse. What is everyone going to do when the real apocalypse shows up?

empath75 8y ago

Forget the frogs. If we don’t have insects we don’t have food.

azeotropic 8y ago
Actually, most staple crops are wind pollinated.

monktastic1 8y ago

It seems to me that all of these problems -- the insect apocalypse, general biodiversity loss, climate change, all the way to the depression and anxiety epidemics, economic inequity, etc., stem from the same general principle: our alienation from ourselves, each other, and nature. In a sense, healing any one of them will contribute to healing all of them. And trying to merely engineer our way out of any of them (while preserving the underlying mindset) will just cause more of the same to rear its ugly head elsewhere. We've forgotten that this life is a magical, wondrous, precious gift, and the world is worth loving and caring for. We have to stop treating it as -- and thereby turning it into -- mere "stuff." It's alive. If you're a fan of this line of reasoning, I recommend the author Charles Eisenstein.

tstrimple 8y ago
> It seems to me that all of these problems -- the insect apocalypse, general biodiversity loss, climate change, all the way to the depression and anxiety epidemics, economic inequity, etc., stem from the same general principle: I thought you were going to say capitalism.
- monktastic1 8y ago
  My sense is that capitalism is also a symptom of the same principle (which compels us to view nature as merely a "means of production").
- wgjordan 8y ago
  According to Marx [1] our alienation from ourselves, each other, and nature is the product of (the capitalist relation to) labor: > Through estranged, alienated labor, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself. [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...

samstave 8y ago

the problem is that the gardening and weed management actions we take eliminate the sole plant that these critters put their eggs on. MilkThistle is what they eat and lay eggs on ONLY. and so with RoundUp killing the milkthistle "weed" we blindly erradicate the support system for upsteam insects like the monarchs. Funny how if you want to dploy a new building facility to a location you need to do an environmental impact analysis/report... but looking at a pesticide, we dont look at the impact it would have to the lyfecycle ecosystem to all the critters who rely on the various "weeds" we think we are killing... Look at the episode of chefs table on netflix with the buuddhist chef - she hasa . "farm to table" garden where she gets the ingredients for her amazing dishes - no pesticides, no weed killers - not insecticides.. just goes through and lets everything live naturally together. monsanto should research how all the various ecosystem cycles rely on each plant type and what role insects play in every manner other than affecting their company bottom line.

mempko 8y ago

Bird populations are also crashing. It's a complex problem, overuse of insecticide is one part, but global warming is another. We have changed the habitats of these creatures in such a short amount of time, they don't have time to adapt. Humanity should ask itself, can we adapt to a world without bugs, birds, and eventually every other vertebrate? Or is our habitat changing too fast to cope too?

wgj 8y ago

> climate change gets all the attention It's in the article. "The biggest reasons are habitat loss and pesticides across the butterflies’ breeding and migratory range. This year’s steep drop is probably due to extreme weather, at least partly resulting from climate change. Late rainstorms in March, as well as an intense, extended wildfire season across California, have battered the species. The state’s forests have yet to recover from the record-breaking drought stretching from 2011 to 2017." Climate change is claimed to be a significant factor, and deserves the attention it gets.