Hurtling down the path to extinction
Oops.
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
That’s not good. Lots of mammals, birds and reptiles eat insects, so you do the math.
The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.
The human species turns out to have been just intelligent enough to destroy planetary life but not intelligent enough to stop doing that.
The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.
More efficient (intensive) agriculture–>more people–>need for even more efficient agriculture–>repeat repeat repeat–>goodbye insects–>goodbye everything.
One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.
The way to stop the decline would be to stop intensive agriculture. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that would go well.
Yet one more reason to despise farmers… Time to nationalize agriculture.
In War of the Worlds, the Martians meet their demise through lack of foresight, because they have no resistance to Earth germs; they are killed “after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” Now, with our devices and technology working all too well, and plenty of warning (but still, no foresight, beyond the quarterly statement), we may bring about our own end by killing off the insects. Who knows, this might have a bigger, faster impact on human thought (and numbers) than the comparatively slow motion disaster that is climate change.
I’m not sure that would really help at this point. We would probably have to internationalize agriculture. For the time being, because of our numbers, I think we are trapped in industrialized, mechanized, chemical and energy intensive agriculture. Shifting over to methods that are less destructive would likely require more people working in the agricultural workforce. It would take time, and a lot more state intervention in the economny than many are going to welcome, but whatever we do, whatever happens, there is going to be massive societal and economic disruption as knock on effects of the ongoing ecological and climate disruption we have loaded the system with. The longer we wait to act, the less we will be able to control or mitigate that disruption, and the worse it is going to be. We are racing headlong into crisis and the earth is going to slough off a few billion humans (and countless other species) before it reaches some new equilibrium.
Too few people (and certainly too few people in power) are aware of the fundamental connections between the human sphere and the biological foundations from which it arises and upon which it depends. We’re still learning about those connections in our slow, halting way. Traditional societies that are/were more immediately tied to the cycles of the living world around them might have had some awareness of this, but perhaps in too much of a mythological or metaphorical sense (where propitiation of spirits might be seen as more important than not actually overhunting an animal or exhausting the land), rather than the nuts and bolts causality that the scientific method offers. Whatever traditional awareness of the intimate bond humans have to all other life, that awareness was lost, set aside or ignored as we adopted agriculture and adapted our ways to it.
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I’ve been trying to tell people this for a long, long time. I don’t know how many discussions I’ve had with people that claim the only problem we should be focusing on is climate change, and I tell them there are other things, big things…no, if we solve climate change, that’s all, for most people. Climate change is only a symptom of a bigger problem – it is the fever of the earth that tells us something else is wrong. We want to treat the fever without doing anything about the other symptoms.
And it’s hard as hell to get anyone interested in insects. All they want to say is, Well, Noah should have swatted those two flies while he had the chance. Stupid comment…
But then, what do I know? I’m an Ecologist – I should stick to Trans issues.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that would go well.
That’s because the idea that only intensive agriculture is working is deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. It would be good to assess what good it does to us all, actually, and start questioning it and look at what the data is actually telling us. It may have been necessary to step into this narrative post-war in order to increase food safety, but we are now in need for a new narrative and a new agriculture.
It’s only partially true, thus. There are workable scenarios within reach with only partial intensive agriculture and remaining environment friendlier agriculture can work out both a green sustainable future and a socially integrated society.
We should first realise more food is produced from small scale agriculture, which is also friendlier to both environment and social. We should note that there’s an ever going debate as to try to understand why small farms are actually more productive than the bigger ones. (The debate is known as the “inverse farm size-productivity relationship”, it is not trivial, and it is a very counter-intuitive fact, but fact nonetheless). There are several competing explanation for this, but clearly the work surface ratio is an interesting factor in the equation.
We should then realise the unleveled effect of very basic agroecology and agroforestery management at the many scales involved (not just primary productivity). It is certainly not a huge loss to accept small scale decreases in productivity if that means huge gains in coexisting biodiversity. (Amazingly, this debate is framed in reverse too in North America: we should intensify more to save space for full wilderness).
Last, it is important to realise that relying on a handfull of crops, even with a very heavy knowledge and technology around them, is not a safe bet at all. Conversely, increasing agrodiversity and food diversity is known to lead to a much greater resilience in the face of both coming climate challenges and diversity challenges. We should not do it by the dime, rather, we should focus on decuplating our efforts toward increased agrodiversity stewardship, both in our science and in our daily citizen life.
Laurent, all I can say is Amen! I’ve seen a lot of those studies, and the things that can work are impressive.
Iknklast @6
Yep, same here. The more you dig into studies, the more you find things completely overlooked, dismissed or put aside because it is contrary to the current wisdom, especially when it is connecting to gross “system ecology”.
Sure, we face challenges. But there isn’t such a convenient thing as an inescapable melodrama if you’re selling miraculous solutions. That’s really an upsetting part of the ideological foundation of our narrative around the challenges. The second upsetting thing is how part of the solutions are silently discarded compared to scientistic snake oil stocks. As a result, the narrative is about producing more rather than wasting less, focusing more on a few crops rather than beginning to breed diversity or even redomesticate, new fancy shiny techs (e.g., CrispR is really cool, but before it is used efficiently we need to know way more about sequence and allelic and gene diversity, it’s all like someone who just learned to read is pretending instant access to the knowledge in the complete library of humankind: naively optimist at best, disingenuously deceitful at worst) rather than simple solutions that we know already works well enough (when do we start multilines to control epidemics? When do we diversify diet rather then biofortify a handful crop? When do we afforest field edges and start decrease field size? etc.)
Meanwhile, there are things that will probably stay beyond control forever, or at least until we face our impact straight up front and need to work with it every bit. Every year is a perfect and prodigious year for a certain species. We can’t know every tiny bit of the process, especially the right amount of rain at the right stage of growth while the right amount of variation in temps and perfect dew point at flowering time or tuber provisioning etc. etc. Therefore, when we focus on the one handful, we miss all the opportunities for the niche and orphan crops. If we diversify enough, this also means that we benefit from this unraveled uncontrolled opportunities, even if we can’t predict them. It is a safety net where we win every time, compared to betting while forcefully growing the handful and hoping it is a good year for them.
[…] a comment by Laurent on Hurtling down the path to […]
I think the trickiest part will be the political and economic changes required as vested interests will likely sooner keep reaping the rewards of the current way of doing things rather than give up their billions to save future generations. I suspect Big Ag will be as capable of fighting rearguard actions as has Big Oil. It only takes a little delay to keep the profits rolling in a little longer Long enough for current shareholders and management to make their killings), but still ensure greater disruption and damage. Can smaller, more diverse, ecologically more sensitive farming compete on the same field as the heavily subsidized and politically powerful forces of the status quo? Can the mechanisms available to the state be used to help make this shift, or are they held hostage to the beneficiaries of the current model?
Just because an idea makes somebody shitloads of money doesn’t make it a good idea for everyone and everything else that has to live with the aftermath. That’s certainly a narrative that needs to change.
BKiSA: @#1:
Sorry. That was tried in the USSR and Red China, with disastrous results. Individual private farmers are more conservative of both soil and wildlife than are agribusiness executives or Stalinist bureaucrats.
However as I recall the Club of Rome studied the world’s agricultural systems and practices in the late 1960s and found that of all the countries’ agricultural systems, only in China was the productivity of the land increasing rather than in decline. Vietnam pre-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Kissinger was probably the same. God only knows what it is like today.
Disclosure, I am involved in Australian agriculture and animal husbandry, growing grass for other people’s cattle to eat. I read some years back an interesting description of modern farming: “using land to turn petroleum into food.”
We humans now fix more nitrogen through the Haber Process than is done by all the leguminous plants and their nodule bacteria in the world. (In the Haber Process, nitrogen from the air is combined with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure: to form ammonia: as in N2 + 3H2 ——-> 2NH3. Once fixed as ammonia, other nitrogenous fertilisers such as synthetic urea can be produced from it.)
And where does the Haber hydrogen come from? Not from water by electrolysis, but from gas and oil wells; combined as hydrocarbons. So we are largely feeding ourselves on oil and coal: definitely terminal, and sooner rather than later. But the markets will sort this one out long before they solve climate change. The price of food will go up, inducing more investment in small-scale agriculture and gardens etc. Cereal crops will probably continue to be produced by heavily mechanised broadacre farmers, but permaculture, backyard gardens and hydroponics are likely to play an increasing role.