Is the Loss of Insects a Desperate Cry for Help From a Planet Under Assault?

It’s already too late for millions of insect, plant, and animal species that have gone extinct; it may soon be too late for us if we don’t wake the hell up and take decisive action...

Not a single insect anywhere in sight…

It’s early summer here in the Pacific Northwest and the flowers are blooming; above is a photo Louise took with her iPhone yesterday morning as we were walking along the Columbia River. The hillside is ablaze with wildflowers.

But it was also eerily silent. Look carefully: No matter how much you enlarge the photo you’ll not see a single insect. Thirty years ago this hillside was swarmed with bees, flies, and dozens of other winged bugs. Today, although pretty, walking by it felt like I was passing a graveyard.

I’ll never forget the day the trucker called into my radio show from southern Illinois. It was about seventeen years ago, and he was a long-haul driver who regularly ran a coast-to-coast route from the southeast to the Pacific Northwest a few dozen times a year.

“Used to be when I was driving through the southern part of the Midwest like I am right now,” he said, “I’d have to stop every few hours to clean the bugs off my windshield. It’s been three days since I’ve had to clean bugs off my windshield on this trip. There’s something spooky going on out here.”

The phone lines lit up. People from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington state shared their stories of the vanishing insects where they lived. Multiple long-haul truckers listening on SiriusXM had similar stories.

We had just moved to Portland at that time, living in a floating home on the Willamette River, and the air was often filled with bugs and swallows, small insect-eating birds that fly as fast and sometimes as erratically as bats. A neighbor had a “swallow house,” a box on a pole by the side of her home with a dozen small holes in it where the swallows made their nests.

A bit less than two decades later, now living on the Columbia River, I only rarely see swallows. The swarms of gnats, mosquitoes, butterflies, beetles, and moths that marked spring and summer for most of my 73 years, living from Michigan to Vermont to Georgia to Oregon, all seem to have largely vanished. Only the birds that don’t eat insects — seed-eaters like sparrows, and carnivores like crows, seagulls, bald eagles, and ospreys — still populate this area.

We humans have exceeded the capacity of this planet that we rose up and conquered, and it’s beginning to bite us back.

When Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence, there were only a billion people on Earth. We hit our second billion the year Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated president. John Kennedy’s inauguration was the same year we hit three billion. But our fourth billion came the year Jimmy Carter was elected. And Earth’s fifth billion humans could be counted the year Reagan left office.

Since then, the explosion of human biomass has continued unabated: Today we stand at 8 billion people, all of us competing with every other life-form on Earth for the planet’s resources.

As I point out in my book The Last Hours Of Ancient Sunlight, in the process of all this population growth we have consumed virtually all of the world’s wild spaces. We’ve harvested the oceans, razed the forests, and are burning thousands of acres of the planet’s jungles every hour.

In my lifetime, more than 80% of all the wild animals on Earth have vanished; today over a million species are on the verge of extinction. Just since 1970, North America has lost about a third of all our birds. Scientists have declared an insect apocalypse: As that “bottom of our food chain” vanishes, and its pollinators with it, it threatens the entire web of life on this planet.

Humans, and animals raised by humans for food, are now the dominant species on Earth; fully 96% of all mammalian biomass left on this planet are now us and our livestock, and our bloated population’s need for food has driven us to search places that historically weren’t subject to human predation. This set us up for Covid and other “rare” animal (zoonotic) diseases.

As we drive deeper and deeper into the wild spaces of Earth and simplify formerly complex ecosystems, we’re encountering diseases that were only small annoyances to the animals that co-evolved with them over millions of years. Now they plague us.

AIDS, SARS, Zika, Dengue, West Nile, Ebola, Marburg, Lyme disease: All have jumped from the wild into large portions of humanity in my lifetime. And now we have Covid.

— Our single species is wiping out other species at a rate not seen since the last great extinction when the dinosaurs vanished. This is absolutely unsustainable.

— Our climate, which supports human civilization as well as the diversity of life on this planet, is also collapsing as the result of humans burning fossil fuels to drive and sustain this population growth.

— Our democracies are under assault from petrostates and petrobillionaires across the world, most recently and visibly in Ukraine and Yemen.

At the same time, the industrial activity we use to support this population explosion is, itself, threatening to wipe out humanity. Human sperm counts are collapsing around the world, apparently because of human-made chemicals in our processed foods and microplastics.

There are things we can do.

There are five times more livestock animals in America than people. Eating dramatically less meat and dairy will significantly lessen our burden on the Earth — in terms of energy, water, and arable land — as well as improving our own health. 

Shifting from fossil-fuel energy sources to renewables will slow down both the way we’re altering the atmosphere and cut the trillions of tons of poison we’re pouring into our biosphere every year.

It will also reduce the wealth and power of the petro-billionaires distorting American politics, and weaken the oligarchic petro-states driving conflict and crushing democracy movements around the world. 

Our religions and culture must adapt and discover a new respect for all life, as many indigenous societies did thousands of years ago when they encountered their own biological and environmental limits.

We must protect what is left of the natural world and mobilize the planet’s nations to stop the trade in wild animals, the fourth-most-trafficked product on Earth behind drugs, weapons, and people.

And we must empower women; gender equality is another dimension of advanced democracies like we see in Europe and, particularly, Scandinavia, that petrobillionaires funding anti-woman laws in America and repressive petro-oligarchies like Saudi Arabia and Putin’s Russia currently abhor.

In societies where women have equal political and economic power with men, populations stabilize and, over time, tend to slowly reduce to levels in balance with their immediate ecosystems. 

But in societies where women are treated as men’s property, populations explode. Widely available birth control technology is essential, but must accompany egalitarian cultural and religious realignments.

Most important, we must reform our politics to incorporate notions of sustainability and compatibility with the ecosystems from which we evolved. Policy can become our most potent tool.

Holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for decades of lies is a good start; right now there are dozens of lawsuits pending against the industry and its executives, and more to come. Our government should join the effort.

Covid is just the last in a long line of diseases that are warning signals to humanity that we’ve pushed our environment beyond its natural limits, just like the war against Ukraine is the most recent outrage provoked by a petro-oligarch, showing us the insanity of a world dependent on burning fossil fuels.

We now have the technology to imitate plants and take energy directly from the sun, eliminating most of the need for hydrocarbon fuels. Sustainable energy sources are now less expensive than fossil fuels in almost every part of the world. 

The loss of insects is a desperate cry for help from a planet under assault. We tell ourselves that we’re separate from nature, but the reality is we can’t escape our own destruction without significant cultural and political change, no matter how often our most bizarre billionaires tell us we’ll all just move to Mars.

It’s already too late for the millions of insect, plant, and animal species that have gone extinct; it may soon be too late for us if we don’t wake the hell up and take decisive action.

As President Kennedy once said of world peace, a similarly massive and seemingly unattainable effort, “We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success.”