Here in the ultra-dense Netherlands, threats to insects are magnified. As such, it's easier to point to specific causes.
Butterflies: 50% reduction in 50 years. Beetles: 75% decline since 1985. Ladybugs: 50% reduction in 20 years. Across the border in Germany: a 75% decline in flying insects since 1989.
It doesn't take much of a scientist to see the trend. I've been hiking the forests here multiple times per week for 20 years. You can clearly see how some groups are disappearing whilst others remain.
There's several root causes but the primary one is a lack of native plant diversity. Since agriculture over here is done in close proximity to forests, the soil becomes acid due to the nitrogen disposition. This benefits the growth of a handful of plants at the expense of all others. In some of our forests, the soil is now so acid that snails no longer develop a case and bird eggs collapse.
In this plant monoculture, insects depending on a specific host plant disappear. Outside (protected) forests, things aren't much better. Even the tiniest of strips of grass that would normally produce wildflowers, are aggressively mowed down. People's gardens are designed to be as hostile to insects as is possible.
Secondary reasons are invasive species and light pollution.
It's a sad state of affairs and one we should be deeply ashamed of. We're not talking about some iconic predator requiring hundreds of acres of wild forest just to survive. We're talking about insects that require little space, healthy soil, a flower, and for it to be left alone. We can't even offer that.
And what's crazy is that everyone thinks it's going to be electric cars that somehow saves us. When the fact of the matter is there is a ton of stuff we can start doing today that would positively impact the environment.
It's pretty easy:
* Restore lawn areas to native plants: small (wildflowers), medium (bushes), big (trees)
* For areas that are kept as lawn, simply mow less. Allow plants to flower. Don't treat clover as evil. Support multiple grass types. Stop using chemical fertilizers and stop trying to feed the grass. Feed the soil with organic fertilizers and compost.
That's it! It reduces maintenance costs and time, reduces the use of gasoline, reduces noise pollution, and vastly improves soil health, insect and wildlife health, and increases pollination of our own food. It's a literal win-win.
And yet, no one does it. They turn their lawns into wastelands and never even use them. I've heard that lawns should be compared to deserts but that even that is disregarding the biodiversity that deserts have over lawns.
I'm annoyed by the climate change (CO2) narrative. It is far too narrow. Rather we should be talking about an umbrella of unsustainability that includes wildlife decimation, biodiversity collapsing, pollution, overfishing, deforestation, water and air quality.
We shouldn't just live in a way that expels less CO2, we should live in a way that doesn't annihilate the biosphere.
And yes, gardens are a great personal way to make a start. Mine too has native flowers which attract lots of insects, in turn attracting birds and bats. Plus some mini ponds. It's far less work compared to a sterile garden whilst much more fun.
People do talk about all those things. There are plenty of groups dedicated to each of those things individually or which include all of those things in their mission statement.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where getting even the most basic policy changes to protect the environment is a herculean effort, so people rationally focus much of their attention on the largest or most urgent things.
If you had a friend who was playing with Uranium, smoking cigarettes and eating food with artificial colors, it'd be fair to say they should stop doing all of those things to avoid getting cancer. But it'd also be fair to focus mostly on the Uranium.
The people who talk about expelling less CO2 also talks about those other things.
It’s kind of amazing that in the broad spectrum of groups you could talk about that are having a negative effect on biodiversity, etc. anyone would mention climate change activists and groups when not only is their fight broadly related, they’re almost completely in alignment with more biodiversity.
This dynamic where such comments attack people who support the commenter’s stance but support it maybe 80% are attacked by the commenter, but the people who do not support their stance, are actually in power, and are going out of their way to destroy what the commenter claims to care about are not even mentioned is fascinating.
There is no salvation. Whatever was Earth before human civilization is in a death spiral. What comes next is anyone's guess. Elites are massing wealth to get off planet, and when the mass migrations really start and mid income countries start becoming failed states on their path, I hope you are in a place that can hold you safe for the remainder of your time here.
Well... no. They're prepping to move to compounds in New Zealand. Even a global warming (and nuclear war, let's throw that on the pile!) ravaged Earth is vastly easier to live on than, say, Mars. Trying to escape that way would be a frying-pan-into-the-fire plan.
> and when the mass migrations really start and mid income countries start becoming failed states on their path, I hope you are in a place that can hold you safe for the remainder of your time here.
But yeah, that's basically the reason why, I reckon. Somewhere sufficiently stable and liberal that's also really, really hard to reach without a ship or airplane. Avoiding the various climate refugee crises and wars we're likely to see in the coming decades probably is their motivation. New Zealand's a clear front-runner in that race.
The compounds in NZ, mountaintops, deserts, islands, they are the now. There is clearly a drive to get off planet. It will most likely fail but it's happening.
No, because there is literally no where to go. Mars is 100X harder to live in than Antarctica, which we still can't live without constant resupplies from developed areas of Earth. If those are gone, we can't live on Antarctica, let alone Mars or whatever (perhaps mythical) exoplanets we could only reach after hundreds or thousands of years on generation ships (which we also don't have the technology to make anytime soon)
If you watch high-altitude time-lapse photography, human settlements look exactly like a mold infestation. We spread as much as we can, and eventually we'll collapse as we exhaust resources.
The earth won't "care", it'll just be another of the many boom-bust cycles in the history of nature. We're part of it.
It's not going to be pleasant for the humans and animals that live through it, though!
While we have enough individual intelligence to see this is coming, and wish to avoid it, I don't think we collectively have the intelligence to do so. A crowd of humans has its own dynamics and kind of thought, and so far, these crowds are very short-sighted and prone to all sorts of irrationalities and hysterias.
These crowds are being controlled by those benefitting from the status quo and the status quo, practically by definition, has its own momentum - "this is the way we've always done it." Many people legitimately don't understand how doing what we did in the past won't work or even cause harm going forward. That's the heart of the issue.
I agree that it's a fantasy. For one, I think Mars is just a power play by the likes of people like Musk and Bezos. It doesn't even make sense to view Mars as a backup for Earth because, at least currently, Earth is still alive and Mars is already completely dead. It's like saying "we're going to kill off the only planet that can sustain us to get to a planet that cannot sustain us". It's mind boggling that we can get people excited about electric cars and Mars but cannot get those same people to realize the reality that Earth is the only planet known to mankind that can sustain us.
As far as I can tell, humans can't survive for extended periods of time in gravity as low as it is on Mars.
There's also the problem of surface radiation. Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth, I'm not sure what the plan is for dealing with that.
Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base:
You can spin the space station up to 1 G, park it behind a celestial body that acts as a radiation shield and power it with nuclear, or beamed solar power.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious about the relative difficulty of the two problems.
My general sentiment is that it seems much, much easier to just keep Earth sustainable rather than trying to make an unsustainable planet sustainable. It's sort of a paradox. If we can't keep a sustainable planet sustainable, how can we possibly make an unsustainable planet sustainable and keep it that way?
Because keeping the Earth sustainable means reaching consensus among 200 states and 8 billion people? That is a political/legal problem, and I am not sure why it should be "much, much easier" than first settlers terraforming an otherwise empty planet.
It seems wrong even to compare those two tasks. They are so different that they don't seem to have a common metric. An analogy: is is easier to stop two spouses from quarreling or to write a SHA-256 implementation from scratch? How would that even be measured?
At least writing a SHA-256 implementation from scratch is theoretically possible. The point is, it is possible to keep Earth habitable, were just not doing that. But there is no plan B. In other words, we're fucked.
> As far as I can tell, humans can't survive for extended periods of time in gravity as low as it is on Mars.
Our only datapoints for long-term human activity are "Earth gravity" and "complete freefall". This is one of the things I hope we can answer in the near-term with manned lunar missions.
> Given that we can't figure out how to build subterranean cities at scale on earth
We know perfectly well how to build subterranean cities at scale on Earth. We don't, because it's expensive and because people tend to like having windows for natural light and fresh air. It'd be cheaper on a smaller planet like Mars (less gravity to fight against), and it ain't like there'd be a possibility of natural light or fresh air anyway given the radiation and unbreathable atmosphere.
> Honestly, a self sustaining space station seems easier to achieve than a self sustaining Mars base
You'd have the same radiation problem if not worse (and no "underground" to shield you from it; "park it behind a celestial body" doesn't really work, either, when you have cosmic rays coming from all directions - said cosmic rays being the dominant form of space radiation), but other than that, yes, space stations are more practical - and you can build 'em anywhere, not just Mars.
You could also build such a spinning structure on an airless body like the Moon or Ceres. Ceres is in fact pretty close to ideal as far as human colonization goes: low gravity (so it's easy to build there and easy to leave for other destinations), close proximity to the rest of the asteroid belt (so lots of opportunities for space mining), and it's pretty much a giant ball of water ice and hydrocarbons so we'd have everything we need (at least on a fundamental chemical level) for air, food, and water alike.
Look I get it, dismissing part of my comment on technicalities makes it seem less likely to play out. But the fact remains that we are clearly headed for disaster and rich people are clearly hoarding as much money as they can to prepare. To hyper focus on tearing apart just one outlandish way in which the elites might or might not seek safety is its on form of denial.
I wouldn't get so annoyed by it. Nerds will nerd and pick apart trivialities. I get your point that the rich are planning for this. Whether they do it by building underground bunkers, space stations, or communities are mars is moot. I'll add though that I don't think it's worth concerning ourselves what the super rich are up to.
The rich killed Rome too and they still ended up with no society.
Bezos' space corporation, Blue Origin, hasn't yet reached the orbit - after 22 years of continuous work. So it seems safe to say that Bezos does not place much value on space colonization.
Musk, on the other hand, seems to be obsessed by the Mars project.
As long as the elites believe they have a plan B, whether it be New Zealand or Mars, they will not make the sacrifices necessary to avert disaster.
The author writes on his experience with a group of elites who were seeking ways to protect their positions in the face of collapse (societal / ecological / etc.). Salvation will not come from the top.
Nobody is making it off earth. And it's not just elites, we're all shitting in the drinking water to some degree, and we're all stuck here. I don't know anybody (personally) who actually makes significant lifestyle sacrifices that curb their impact on climate change. My wife and I are vegetarian, have no kids, don't own a car, and haven't been on a plane for years. I don't know any other person in the "first world" who lives the way we do. I'm not saying this because I think I'm better than other people or because I'm some type of activists. Far from it. Our lifestyle choice is comfortable physically and is the only one that makes me comfortable psychologically. I rarely mention this stuff online, and I never bring it up with friends of family. But every person I know in my age group lives a "typical Western life". Cars. Kids. Meat-rich diet. Several flights a year. Plastic bullshit on their lawn at Halloween and Christmas. And yet they also demand to know what the elites and politicians are doing to save the planet. Because they sure as shit don't think it's their job.
I'm not saying "this is your fault". But I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
> And yet they also demand to know what the elites and politicians are doing to save the planet.
Because none of what they do as individuals has any significant bearing on the current trajectory of Earth's biosphere. None of it. These are systemic problems, and trying to pin the blame for systemic problems on individual participants in that system - as you're doing right now - is not just ineffective, but is deliberately ineffective: a narrative crafted by those very same elites (and the corporations they own) to deflect blame from the system they themselves architected and continue to enforce.
> I think that these elites you want to blame are as clueless and selfish as every other person you know.
Well yeah, obviously. But that brings into question why they're elites in the first place, and the answer is that they shouldn't be elites in the first place, not that they're somehow of equal blame (let alone less) as their subjects.
Vegan. Grow much of my own food (mill my own flour, etc.). I lived without electricity or running water for most of a decade '00s (and only added a small DC only solar system for electric lighting for the rest of that decade). I continue to maintain a small footprint, but electric lighting, refrigeration, heat in the winter and hot and cold running water are pretty great (hot and cold running water is fucking amazing!), and I don't want to give those up again. But, none of that matters as much as my being a US citizen. The US military has CO2 emissions larger than 140 countries combined. My share of those US military emissions made my carbon footprint very high throughout the 00's in spite of near zero personal emissions. Presently, the US pushing for sanctions on Russia, led to much higher carbon footprint LNG being shipped to Europe to replace Russian pipeline gas (US oligarchs are making a killing selling LNG, though). Etc.
If everyone, in the developed world, made similar personal choices, to the two of us, things would be better, but it would still be insignificant compared to US policy decisions like the massive US military perpetually deployed across the world. And, if the entire world's population was able to share in hot and cold running water, heat in the winter, electric lighting, refrigeration, etc., much of those gains from personal choices of westerners would be negated.
I don't know the answer. Yes, a lot of people need to reduce their waste, and share with the rest of humanity and non-human life. But, it will not be enough-- somehow we must change governmental and corporate policies.
As things currently stand, the average American has near zero impact on policy decisions[1]. While our rich and powerful elites are driving us off a cliff. The change we need will not be led by them, but in the current climate, a revolution, in the US, is highly unlikely, and if it were to happen would likely result in an extreme far-right authoritarian/theocratic regime even more extreme than the individual enrichment at any cost, "drill baby drill," right to far-right regime that currently rules. And, the US currently controls much of the world (see all western nations observing US illegal sanctions against 1/4-1/3 of the worlds population and also providing support for recent US illegal wars of aggression). Maybe the rise of China will save us, if the US elites do not lash out in desperation to maintain power and e.g., cause a nuclear holocaust. But, pinning hopes of halting environmental destruction on China is a slim hope.
Yes it's a fantasy at this point, but a fantasy that a lot of very smart people and a lot of resources are pursuing. They might succeed. I won't make the call. But plan B clearly is some sort of Fortress Europe and god knows what cyberpunk western is in store for the US. It's plain to me the rich are bracing for disaster and see the rest of us as fodder. At this point the best we can do is pick a place least likely to be overrun in our lifetime. I'm thinking Norway or Switzerland.
I believe that if we acted today, that there could be salvation. Institute massive taxes against plastic use. Ban it for take-out food and other single-use instances. Start heavily taxing other wasteful areas. Heavily encourage if not enforce composting and recycling.
Immediately start restoring mowed lawns with native plants. Ban the use of chemical fertilizers.
It could be done, but we won't. Salvation is at our fingertips, but we close our fists.
We can't design a solution for the problem of 'too many humans devouring Earth's resources'. Locusts can't make plans. Galaxies cannot deviate from collision. I don't understand why we harbor fantasies about being anything other than a natural process that will simply run its course.
That's an interesting perspective. In many ways, it seems to me that evolution did not or cannot account for technological development. I have been trying to read more about what makes life go, and it seems it's highly related to thermodynamics and information theory.
Are you proposing that any life will eventually discover technology (namely the ability to access and manipulate stored energy and also computation)? If so, it's possible that life is accounting for it in ways we don't understand yet.
Whatever we call technology is as natural a process as everything else systems in our Universe cobble together. I see no difference between termite mounds and the Internet. All is bound by the laws of physics. The same processes created complex monkey brains create datacenters. Physics is very clear: only things that are thermodinamically downhill can happen. Human civilization is just a natural, 4D phenomenon we get to see unfold. All in all it won't amount to more then any passing geological pattern on any planet before or since.
That's just because humans have not yet acted coherently yet as a species. There are all kinds of scenarios likely and unlikely that can unfold and none of us know what they are. Nature may be indifferent but she does seem to give us every chance.
By the way, I think you're in a tiny minority if you believe there is no distinction between things that evolve and things that are designed.
I wouldn't me making this argument if I thought everyone thought like me. We have a great capacity for understanding and changing nature, yes. And also the need to believe we are apart and special. But we're not. High rise buildings and fiber optic cables are as natural as anything else that grows on the planet. Drawing a line and calling "artificial" or "designed" on this side is completely arbitrary.
I think your take is very interesting and I agree with the sentiment in general. But humans are different sociobiologically from other animals. As far as I know, we are the only ones that cook our food, which caused drastic changes in the guts of hominids, because the energy required to process food was farmed out to the cooking process and literally to the grass-eating animals we ate. Every since fire and further technological developments, humans have gone against nature and evolution.
I get what you're saying and agree in spirit, but I think it is zooming out a little too far to say that technological development is just another natural process. Yes, it is in a way, but things like computation are truly different beasts. No, humans are not special in terms of our importance, language, meaning, or even intelligence, but my thoughts are that technology is a separate process from natural processes. It is distinct from evolutionary processes.
If you have some interesting reading, I'd love to know it. I haven't necessarily considered the question of technological processes being an extension of natural processes.
As a practical matter I just don't think it's useful to lose the distinction between artificial and natural, even if I cannot define precisely when something is one or the other. In the same way it's not useful to lose the distinction between "selfish" and "selfless" which is a good enough reason to reject psychological egoism.
I think it's okay to accept something is true in an "ultimate sense", but not in a practical sense. e.g. that all technology is a natural process since the causal chain that led to it happened or rather was allowed by physics. To wit, plastics really are natural because humans evolved to be able to make plastics. If you argue against plastics being natural, then you might argue that anything "made" by an individual organism is artificial, which is clearly absurd.
No super interested in finding a resolution here, since I don't think the common meanings are problematic.
I get what you're saying, and I actually like it. I myself have called Life a singular phenomena that describes a (very) complex 4D shape of which we humans are all just a part (and as a group are currently only about as impactful as a large asteroid!). But if you follow this to far you get some nasty results, mostly around a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness, which I honestly don't think has a rational basis. The world is strange and even one good idea, one chance, could turn things around for Life in general, and humans in particular. It certainly needs to be a big change, something like a "phase shift" in human affairs. We certainly cannot bring our traditional values into the future, which were predicated on living in a world that would push back against our ambitions. Nowadays, the ONLY thing restraining humans is humans, and yet self-restraint has never been so out-of-fashion.
These suggestions sound like a classic "central planners know better" attitude.
Would taxing/banning plastic actually reduce waste/pollution? or would the shift to more expensive replacements (paper/wood/etc) actually increase pollution and waste?
Banning chemical fertilisers would almost immediately cause a massive famine, enormous drops in agricultural productivity, etc. People consuming "organic" foods that don't use fertiliser can only do so from the position of privilege wherin chemically-fertilised crops are feeding 95%+ of the population. We even have a real example of the consequences! See Sri Lanka recently :(.
It's times like this I can't help but see why some people are so keen to keep the government away from things.
I should have clarified in my original comment, although I already mentioned this elsewhere prior to your comment. Chemical fertilizers, to my knowledge, serve no actual purpose other than vanity for residential applications. Thus, they should be banned for those purposes. For commercial agriculture, a more long-term approach is clearly needed, but an actual approach should be realized instead of doomsdaying.
Plastics are a nightmare and there is no going back from them. We have inundated ourselves and our environments with micro plastics, and they will not just go away. Paper and wood do not have this problem on the disposal side unless they've been treated with chemicals. I'm not sure where paper and wood come into a discussion with plastics and fertilizers, but I would also support using less wood.
Thank you for the polite response - I realise I was a bit harsh.
I don’t see an issue with chemical fertilisers, personally - I don’t think non commercial users of them are significant enough to be worth any consideration compared ro conventional agriculture.
I can’t say how consequential microplastics are - however banning them for use as packaging etc can have huge negative consequences because they are a very cheap (both in price and energy) packaging compared to most alternatives. I think that if microplastics are a concern, car tires and clothing are much more significant than “single use” instances as good packaging (which I would guess is actually usually disposed of properly most of the time).
I brought up paper because it’s a common substitute packaging (eg cardboard and the like), but is significantly pricier than plastics and more energy intensive to produce.
It’s not an easy Robles to solve, the more so because we use these things because they work so well. I just took exception to singling these things out because they are either critical to modern civilisation (fertiliser) or extremely useful (plastic packaging)
The existence of prior extinction events does not negate the fact that humans are extremely destructive to the planet.
Even in your link to the Permian–Triassic extinction event, one of the most probable causes of loss of marine life was hypercapnia. Several of our modern-day coastal waters are highly hypoxic, enough to cause drastic changes in macro behavior of fish and even whales, and the hypoxic waters are directly caused by human actions.
Humans, in the last century alone, caused half of the total forest loss in the past 10,000 years, and we were directly responsible for a large portion of the other half.
If we go by co2, the guess is that something between 1,000 - 1,500 ppm is required to tip us into a greenhouse phase.
Our current levels are well under 500 ppm.
Humanity will have to work very hard to force the planet out of its current icehouse.
We are definitely having an impact, and could well drive ourselves extinct, but I still see us as unable to implement drastic change, especially as some extinction events have required thousands of years to come to pass.
If we ban chemical fertilizers (what does this include, btw?), will we be able to grow enough food to feed everyone? What else would have to change to make that possible?
Permaculture is soil- and insect-friendly and can be productive and resilient, but it requires more manual labor and setting up a permaculture system takes a lot of knowledge and I think it takes years before it is producing competitively, depending on the soil conditions.
If we ban synthetic fertilizers (and more importantly herbicides/pesticides) abruptly before having established organic methods at scale, that will most likely cause food insecurity like it did in Sri Lanka.
Slowly phasing them out to a level that is not killing us in the long run seems more sensible to me.
I was thinking of banning them for residential use and then re-evaluating their use in commercial agriculture industries. There's no reason that I can think of that they should be used in residential applications. All they do is keep grass artificially green and destroy soil health.
If elites think they can move off planet and somehow survive a total collapse of earth's ecosystems, they are in for a rude awakening. An independent colony able to maintain its inhabitants in any kind of comfort will be dependent on the earth for the foreseeable future.
Its actually difficult for me to believe that any elite would be stupid enough to think they could survive an earth environmental catastrophe in space.
I'm pretty sure at least some of them are dumb enough to think they can survive it on earth, though. And they might be right!
"Its actually difficult for me to believe that any elite would be stupid enough to think they could survive an earth environmental catastrophe in space." You underestimate the raw power of untethered hubris, fueled by venality.
Excuse me but humans have already made immense technological progress through science, creativity, effort, and not listening to doubters like you. What on earth are you talking about and how could you speak so carelessly about such a crucial issue? And where the hell is this bs narrative that it's just a bunch of elites who want to get off earth ? The issue is ensuring the survival of humanity in the current braindead situation that all our eggs are in one basket. Any basic strategy course will tell you this is a good way to lose all your progress after a few iterations. I'm starting to wonder if there's a campaign to discourage the mission to ensure humanity's safety. Hit me back in 3 years when this hits the news and thank me then but it will probably be too late.
You're making claims discouraging people to seek a solution to a VERY important issue. Kindly show some substantial info demonstrating evidence humans would be reliant on Earth. The entire point of such a mission is not to be. And lots of materials exist elsewhere. Again kindly show us proof of your extremely dangerous claims.
It's a catch all metaphor. Most likely we will see some version of fortress Europe and the US devolving to frontier economy. Frontex is already getting bigger budgets, more boots on the ground and better kit with each passing year.
I hate to break it to you, but Earth before humans has largely been dead for hundreds or thousands of years, depending upon the exact region you're talking about.
I'm a bit confused on what you're getting at and your timelines. Earth was around for billions of years before humans and had life on it the entire time except possibly the first few hundred million years.
"Earth before humans is in a death spiral" says to me they're talking about earth as it existed before humans, not life on earth at all.
Earth before humans died with the rise of civilization, and especially global trade. We transformed large swathes of land into farmland and urban areas. We enabled the transfer of invasive species throughout the world. We redirected and sucked rivers dry for our own purposes. We dumped our garbage and literal shit in waterways. We destroyed the majority of natural habitats.
And this all happened hundreds or thousands of years ago.
I was surprised when I moved into a German apartment that my landlord apologized about their being moss between the tiles on our patio. My honest response was, "oh no, moss looks better than an empty crack." I was really surprised when I for the first time saw people outside literally using blow-torches to kill moss in their driveway cracks.
The dislike of clover is a really strange one for me, too. When I was growing up I loved the clover patches in the yard; they're like green clouds floating across the lawn, and the honeysuckle brings happy honey bees. Dandylions are pretty, too, admittedly more so in the yellow phase than the gray phase. But then they make nice toys!
Generally speaking I find the natural aesthetic more beautiful and more serene than the golf course look.
> And yet, no one does it. They turn their lawns into wastelands and never even use them. I've heard that lawns should be compared to deserts but that even that is disregarding the biodiversity that deserts have over lawns.
This was true for me for a long time. We had a lawn, and we had kids, and I believed that kids w/out a lawn was a travesty. Special lady friend was like, "dude we're surrounded by lawns," and it's true. There are 2 parks within walking distance of here and a big plot of grass at the local church. We killed the lawn, the kids didn't care, and I just haul them to the park. Still working on better habitat but it's coming along. And yeah as you say the exciting stuff going on in the soil and above ground is just amazing. Wild beans (not edible but pretty), edibles like dock, orach, dandelions & mallow ... just all kinds of stuff.
It's good to see a comment that recognises that this "bug splatter on the windshield" data is mostly just an easily observed hook to connect the measured declines to people's everyday life experiences.
The topic seems to come up here ever few months, and there's always a significant percentage of the discussion devoted to aerodynamic effects, or changes in insect distribution specific to roadside habitats. Those converstations often feel like "middlebrow dismissal": people who think the fact they can come up with a plausible alternate explaination for the data given a few seconds thought means it's likely that the studies are totally flawed and can be ignored.
Meanwhile if you dig in to the actual evidence, the studies based on vehicle data show a small negative correlation between vehicle age and number of impacted flying insects (i.e. older cars have slightly fewer splats, not more). More importantly, the general trends of declining biomass of (especially, but not only) flying insects reproduce over a wide range of methodologies and habitats. For skeptical readers, there are some links to studies in a previous comment I made on a previous thread on this same general topic [1].
Having said that, I think you've missed one of the big factors that's likely to contribute to the decline: the widespread use of insecticides (especially) and herbicides in industrial agriculture. Studies on bees show that even insects exposed to something much lower than the LD50 of certain insecticides experience behavioural changes that dramatically decrease their survival rates. And because "pest" insects typicaly have short lifecycles and rapid reproduction rates, they're often best placed to evolve tolerances for the insecticides, so there's pressure on farmers to use more and more to get the same effect.
For anyone who's interested in an introduction to this topic aimed at the general public (like me!), but written by a Professor of Entomology, I can recommend Slient Earth [2].
I happen to study/photograph insects as an amateur and can casually confirm the collateral damage pesticides have on insect life.
A common manifestation of it is to find lethargic insects. Bodily fully intact and seeming healthy, yet barely able to move. Insects normally skittish that you can simply pick up. I'm not talking about insects at the end of their life cycle or them being very cold. There's something very wrong with these individuals, I believe studies suggest their brains are messed up from the pesticides.
I think it might be the same disinformation scheme as the climate science "The individual must/can fix it" - No policy must force industries to find other ways to make a profit with agriculture. There are natural ways to deal with insects and unwanted plants.
> The point of an insecticide is to kill the specific insect being a pest to the crop.
Even this can cause a collapse by removing a food source from other predators.
> I can save you the time. There will be no world.
This is true. Insects are food for a huge number of predators, and insect larvae are a really important component of having soil capable of growing plants.
Insecticides are designed to wipe out global populations of insects rather than just controlling pest insects inside a limited area? If you have actual evidence for this, it seem like it would form the basis of significant lawsuits against pesticide companies because we would have evidence of intent to cause significant ecological damage.
Yup. Visited the US Midwest (Minnesota) recently and driving from the airport city to another smaller city, started going out into farmland.
At first, it seemed like a nice bucolic change. But soon, it took on a far darker aspect - this was a barren monoculture, as far as the eye could see, for dozens of miles. Where to the birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and insects live? The land is not only covered with chemicals to kill or repel any now-unwelcome residents, but there is simply no usable habitat (and a thin row of trees every mile or so doesn't count).
It was a truly dystopian experience, and more so by knowing that this goes on for thousands of square miles. This is not our grandparent's farmland anymore. This is not nature. This is one species becoming a literal plague on the planet. It is not sustainable.
At one point during the development of California agriculture, there was an idea that farms should only be 160 acres in size, since that was what was manageable and profitable for a smallholder family. I wonder what the land would be like if we had managed to enforce that. There would probably be more crop diversity at least, and habitats in between the farms.
Kind of like anti-trust enforcement for the land itself
It could have just as easily driven innovation towards efficiently working those kinds of plots, reduced topsoil loss and degradation (reducing fertilizer costs), reduced requirements for pesticides (lower costs again), and improved yields driving down prices.
Especially now with accelerating agri-robotics developments, mid-sized farms like that can take best advantage.
That kind of comment shows that you are using zero knowledge of growing, farming, or that complexities of soil chemistry and soil biology even exist. Not helpful. If you have some such actual knowledge, show some. Sheesh.
There is certainly more I could learn about soil chemistry and biology. Jaut like there seems to be plenty more you could learn about basic economics and market psychology.
Wow, it's refreshing to see a Dutch person write down the impact of nitrogen as facts. Around me, its seems like slowly everyone is starting to doubt/deny the impact of nitrogen and whether it's something we need to care about. I'm starting to feel less at home in this country by the day because of it (and all the upside down flags consequently).
It's a worldwide thing. An urbanized population does not care about nature. At all. Modern life is almost fully abstracted away from it, and it seems fine to destroy it for as long as our delicate lifestyle remains intact.
Every once in a while, we watch a documentary like Planet Earth. It inspires even the most cynical stoic. And we feel terrible about our negative role.
But the next day we go on as usual. And as soon as a tiny thing is asked of us to better the course, we resist like a maniac.
> An urbanized population does not care about nature. At all.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Growing up in rural areas, most people seemed to treat nature as an endless resource to be exploited for personal enrichment. Any discussion of ecological regulation was met with harsh rebuke about "jobs" and "freedom" (i.e. the freedom to extract value by exploiting nature).
As I moved to more urban areas, people were more and more ecologically focused on the long-term impacts of natural exploitation. Today I live in a dense metro area (Seattle) where I've never been around a greater concentration of nature-focused people.
You're quite right. And it's even worse than that. I had this part in my earlier comment but deleted it as I did not want to distract from my main message by causing a political stir.
The controversial statement being that the issue extends into (many) indigenous communities. We have this pristine idea of them, as original peoples living in harmony with nature.
That's not the reality on the ground. I've traveled to a lot of remote areas where we frequently encountered illegal activity by locals and even park rangers. Poaching...anything and everything, including rare flowers. Logging. Gold mining. Hunting critically extinct species even when alternatives (for food) are widely available.
You can't explain it by poverty alone, there's a general sense of total carelessness. A very clear example of that is people dumping their trash in the river, in forests, everywhere. Many good faith reforestation attempts soon are gamed and corrupted.
> as soon as a tiny thing is asked of us to better the course
Well, I also see a lot of people who do the tiny thing but not the big thing. Plenty of people around me are reducing their meat intake (and are vocal about it), because climate change, but still fly on airplanes, some multiple times a year. It's so incredibly frustrating that many people are just green washing their lives, but are oblivious to the fact they're not really doing much at all.
I do have massive respect for the people I do know that have quit eating meat and are now doing all their travels by train.
Respectfully, I think your take on this does not work.
If before you have a frequent flyer that regularly eats meat, and next they stop eating meat, that is to be celebrated. It's still massive progress. Further, their footprint from flying may improve over time as airlines are investing in sustainability.
From flying 3 times a year to 2 times a year is big progress. From eating lots of meat to somewhat less, is progress.
By implying footprint perfection, it all becomes very reductive and people will reject it. With that mindset, you'll be able to find "dirt" on anyone. I mean, how very polluting must David Attenborough be?
As for bettering the course regarding insects, I wasn't even suggesting CO2 reduction. Just introducing some small spaces where wildflowers can grow, and they will come. It takes almost nothing.
> From flying 3 times a year to 2 times a year is big progress.
These people are going from 0-1 time a year to 2-3 times a year, because they're starting to earn more and can therefore take more trips. They are ignorant to the fact that's more wasteful than eating meat. This is typical personal green-washing, which is the part that annoys me.
I understand that perfect is the enemy of good and I'm not implying that everyone should be perfect.
> Around me, its seems like slowly everyone is starting to doubt/deny the impact of nitrogen and whether it's something we need to care about.
I'm not sure why that's surprising. Our food supply depends on using nitrogen at the moment. You can't just ban it cold-turkey without transitioning to an alternative that doesn't threaten the food supply. Particularly with inflation issues, further destabilizing the food supply is insane at this time. The whole climate change agenda will be in jeopardy if this isn't handled well.
They could define and enforce environmental laws that would make the current way of farming that is destroying nature impossible. The farmers would need to adapt or go bankrupt.
Instead they get offered millions. And in response they terrorize our society.
It’s also sad to see what people are doing to their gardens over here. Fake grass, no plants/just bricks. Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive.
It's crazy! On one side, I have a neighbour with all slate and concrete backyard, and a barrier at the top of the fence (to keep the fancy cats in 'o_O ) covered with plastic vines. I think they have one actual living tree and maybe a flowerpot.
Fortunately, on the other side ... I have the head of the groene commissie (neighbourhood gardening enthusiastc) and a beautiful tended garden. Mine is the most natural: a barely-tended jungle which gets trimmed and brushed once a year. We have hedgehogs!
We installed ~200m^2 of green roofs in the neighbourhood and there are bug hotels all over the place so we are doing relatively well. Quite a few different varieties of bees.
All this green absorbs a lot of heat, and manages rainwater which is important at 0 above sea level and 2m below the nearby canal.
In far too many parts of the US, what you're doing with your yard would be considered "neglect" and might result in harassment from your neighbors or even fines.
It would be nice if people realized that they can have a low-maintenance, inexpensive, and insect-friendly garden full of pretty wild flowers, by planting a perennial meadow. This needs to be cut once a year.
While this works, an alternative if you have a lawn already is to just stop cutting it every x weeks but mow once or twice a year. Mow paths where needed. More often than not there are already seeds/plants in the soil which just never got the chance to grow. And if not, depending on where you live, fauna and wind will transport seeds to your garden. The end result (mind you, takes years) will usually be similar: of the seed mixes bought, a bunch won't grow, others might but won't thrive. Whereas starting from 'scratch' this also happens. And what's left are those which happen to thrive best on the local soil type and circumstances, which usually is what works best for the local ecosystem.
If I didn’t cut my yard for a year I wouldn’t need a mower, I’d need a large brush-clearing tractor. It’s already almost impossible to cut with a mower after four to five weeks.
I can stroll through acres of local meadows and not find any ticks. Once I dare come close to bushes or go off tracks in the woods though, it's a disaster. I.e. I don't know why, but in any case the 'grass is riddled with ticks' seems highly location-dependent.
One thing I've noticed after moving back to the Netherlands is how absolutely obsessed people are with keeping things "tidy". In a way, it's nice I guess, at least sometimes, but it comes with some serious costs too. This is not unique to the Netherlands, but we're probably the best (or worst?) at it, except maybe Singapore.
From near the end of the article:
"Sometimes people find it a bit gross when we put the mulch back in plant pots, because it smells a bit woody"
Are people really so detached from nature these days that the smell of wet wood puts them off? I do despair for humankind some days when I read this sort of thing.
It just so happens I live in Eindoven, so I guess some more explaining is needed. They're working with the leafeblower now. I hate those contraptions so much.
I blow them off my wood deck, so they don't rot and damage the wood.
I let them lie on the rest of my 1.6 acres. And the 1 acre that's forested, we're working on trying to de-invasive-ize the forest and try to help rehabilitate it. Its just 2 of us, but we're trying.
Are there any guides on "deinvasiveizing"? It seems like a complicated topic. Some non native life is considered to be non invasive, having found a homeostasis its new nich (common carp as an example). And some native life is considered invasive by some because it is so well adapted it crowds out all other native life (some bindweeds)
Given the dramatic impacts we have made on a global scale, is trying to preserve de-humanified areas realistic anymore? Or are we supposed to simply try to maximize the diversity of life without regard to what life was in a place before humans arrived?
We're looking at the super-low-bar of doing things like removing known invasive plants as published in the state's DNR. They maintain a yearly list of nasties to remove.
We also don't use any chemicals to do the killing, as so many of those have terrible side effects. Killing larger invasives involves something as simple as "black contractor bag enveloping and tied at base". It captures all the seeds, kills the plant, and provides easy removal.
We also see that a lot of "lawn grasses" are also pretty invasive especially to forests. So, we also try to keep the lawn encroachment from happening..... as much. Ive done the high tech solution of "lay a slab of plywood on the grasses at the edge of the forest"!
We're also designing our garden with local plants in mind, including rarer plants for our area. If/when those flower and seed, we're seeing natives with natives. And the non-natives we bring in are checked for invasiveness.
Basically, it's being low-key stewards to the land.
Thanks! One well intentioned mistake we made at a previous residence was to plant some flowers for pollinators that were not native. They weren't invasive, but they were prolific. The issue was that they bloomed late enough that the butterflies didn't move on and froze.
wow, that article mentions controversy over the smell of leaf mulch... kinda reflective of how sterile those cities must be for someone who has never visited, so much less surprising they have fewer bugs. Heaven help them if someone ever puts in manure or fish compost :)
Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive.
That lacks an important nuance: in most circumstances (regarding soil type/nitrogen deposition), not mowing at all would lead to those patches being overgrown by fast growers leading to less plant diversity. Can happen in as little as a year or 2. So the mowing itself is not the problem, it's the amount, how and when.
Mowing itself is the problem. Fast growers are just the first step in a recovery process that takes place when a previously stunted ecosystem is allowed to heal. Other types of plants follow in subsequent years, leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
You really cannot talk about this in statements like they apply everywhere. Here's an example: around where I live, the number 1 activity by nature preservation groups when it comes to restoring grasslands of all kinds, is mowing. For a couple of reasons, but the main one being that nitrogen deposition fertilizes the soil too much, so it gets countered by removing biomass via mowing. Not doing that results is fast growers. Not because the'yre indicating a recovery process, just because they outgrow what was there originally. Which is the opposite of recovery.
leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
When I say "it's the amount, how and when" that implicates 'not mowing it all down to hell' is not the right way :)
As the other reply said, each area is unique and so there is no general rule that applies to every location on earth.
Where I live the native prairie was naturally mowed by the bison roaming around, and so not mowing leads to a number of problems as the plants around here depend on that regular mowing. Various lightening strikes and the like ("Indians") caused regular fires as well, which took care of overgrowth. Mowing simulates that without the fire. (this is both good and bad - it makes for cleaner air, but those fires also put charcoal into the ground and so made the prairie net carbon negative over the long term which is something we desperately need)
While I don’t disagree with those two points I don’t know if they’re the primary cause.
I also think it’s important to put it into context.
1. These insects weren’t really robust to begin with. Take the monarch butterfly in the North America. They actually needed primarily milkweed to survive. A single point of failure (milkweed) can cause the population to collapse. When we put up houses and converted land to farms, you’re correct we killed many of the native species, but those species were HIGHLY tuned to a particular niche. In 100-200 years it’s likely the insects that survived will re-occupy new niches.
2. Insects typically need a much smaller range to survive, so hikes in the same woods as when you were a kid doesn’t add up. Unless there was another massive environmental issue - such as pesticides or chemicals like DDT which have a secondary impact. Personally, that bird egg analogy sounds exactly like what the US saw with DDT and the collapse of the eagle population.
3. In the 1950s in the Midwest there had already been farmland all over for 50+ years. Same with Ireland (for hundreds). The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough historical data to confirm what it is exactly. Even in the 1970s you’d have solid layers of bugs on windshields driving between cornfields. Now, nothing.
I strongly object to the framing where a species is considered logical to go extinct for it was not "robust" enough.
The words "specialist" and "niche" are incredibly misplaced as it comes to insects. Consider butterflies, many depending on specific host plants. The host plant is in decline hence the butterfly disappears.
Weak species. Not "robust". The point that is being missed here is that the host plant is supposed to be widely available in any half-decent ecosystem. It isn't rare, would normally be widespread, and it has very low needs. Just a tiny bit of space and healthy soil.
We're not wiping out specialists, we're wiping out the underlying habitat and ecosystem altogether.
That is a very human-centric viewpoint and a very strange one at that. It's almost egocentric.
Were big cats such as mountain lions and bobcats not robust enough in America? Because they've been eradicated due to habitat loss.
Is it really a surprise that animals that have evolved over millions of years to fit within the balance of nature are having difficulty adapting in just decades to humanity's technology destruction of that balance? The fact that some are able to make it through that imbalance is not a justification.
It's weird that you basically seem to blame evolution. And it's not just about specific populations. It's all about their interactions and relationships. We do not fully understand how all these things tie together as a system. So much of it is disappearing, we really have no idea what could happen to our ecosystems. For the most part, it cannot be good.
I am in general seriously concerned about soil and insect health. We take leaves and grass and native plants off of land and then instead needlessly dump water and fertilizer in their place because what's left is not self-sustaining. It's literally the most wasteful process you can think of for managing land, and yet we do it in full force.
I planted native plants and let things grow up in my yard this year, and it's amazing how popular the areas get with insects. This is just one year. Next year, I am hoping for much more, especially now that I know what I'm doing for the most part.
> In the 1950s in the Midwest there had already been farmland all over for 50+ years. Same with Ireland (for hundreds). The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough historical data to confirm what it is exactly. Even in the 1970s you’d have solid layers of bugs on windshields driving between cornfields. Now, nothing.
This assumes that farming methods have remained identical since the 1950s or 70s, but they haven't. I don't know if the parent poster is correct, but I don't think is a good argument unless you also account for changes in agricultural practices in the last 50+ years.
> In 100-200 years it’s likely the insects that survived will re-occupy new niches.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also, the problem is that not many insects ARE going to survive.
> The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades.
This is probably outright misleading, since you don't have the data prior to those decades. The common mistake is that people use their own lifespan as a measure for things.
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Everybody talks about the gender pay gap and ethnic diversity these days, but biodiversity is not on the radar :(
Regarding the niche comment. Look at any invasive species. Once it arrives within 10-20 years it can dominate the region it’s in. Evolution occurs the same way; once something mutates in a way with competitive advantage it expands. With insects this can happen rapidly (because they lay so many eggs). I don’t have it handy now, but we have examples of this in grasshoppers.
Pesticide resistant insects are another example. Now, this assumes we don’t keep altering pesticides, but we do. If we keep trying to reduce insect populations we can, so I don’t think it’ll happen unless we allow it to happen.
As for the other comment, my point is really we have records showing massive amount of insects all throughout history until the introduction of pesticides. Even during the Great Depression in the US we had massive swarms of insects. Once pesticides were introduced at scale we noticed a decline in recorded swarms until now we don’t even see them on windshields.
An additional problem for monarch butterflies is a pair of introduced species, both swallow-worts. These are in the milkweed family, and they induce the butterflies to lay eggs on them, but the caterpillars die after only a few days.
I wonder how common this sort of thing is. Insects evolve to feed on certain plants, and not feed on others, but invasives could screw that up.
> These insects weren’t really robust to begin with. Take the monarch butterfly in the North America.
This a horrifying sentiment.
The modern monarch butterfly as a species is two million years old. In less than 200 years, we have mostly wiped it off the map, and the excuse is, "They weren't really robust to begin with"?
> some groups are disappearing whilst others remain
Speaking of those that remain, I can say beyond reasonable doubt that there is an insane percentage increase in stinkbug populations in recent years. Fuckers get absolutely everywhere.
How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is. And we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Making agriculture unproductive will just push the demand outwards like a beaker of toxic reactants boiling over. We can't impose more trade restrictions on foreign agricultural goods either, for fear of a trade war.
This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided. The only solution I see is huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
Small farms are more productive per acre [1] even before considering the increased fossil footprint of 'efficient' farms.
>we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Additional unskilled jobs might well be worth the tradeoff, particularly for the most vulnerable members of society.
>This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided.
Russia's Dacha model produces something like 60% of the country's food through hobby 'farms' that regular people mostly go to on the weekends. It's not a hard model to replicate, I'm planting a food shrubland in my suburban home. It won't produce a large part of my food budget but it'll certainly be resource-positive as opposed to a lawn. My labour inputs I'd spend at a gym otherwise. As work-from-home becomes more normalized, the average garden size will probably increase. The problem isn't economic but cultural.
>huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
There seems to be a correlation between belief in factory farming and veganism. Those stances align on pathos but diverge on logos and ethos.
The linked study uses data from peasant farms in developing economies (Madagascar, India, etc.) from half a century ago or earlier. From the point of view of the west, that it would be measuring the productivity of very very small farms vs very small farms where the vast majority of labor is done by hand. Skimming over the article it seems that it concludes that under pre-mechanized conditions, larger farms have less available labor per unit land area. And that labor per unit land area is an important factor in agricultural productivity. This is hardly a surprise.
This is very much not like how farming is done in developed nations or even most developing nations today. And unless you want to force people to live like dirt poor peasants of the past, hopefully won't ever be done again.
Well, the hard part to replicate is destroying economy to force people to use those collective gardens. Shops were next to empty. Commercial variety was non existent. The rigid command economy didn't allow enterprise to address needs. Thus you had 2 ways to have good food - relatives in countryside or your own collective garden lot.
It's both economy in culture. Here in Lithuania those gardens survived well into 90s. During the transition, many people went on to do substance farming in addition to day job. Or, if they were unemployed, in exchange of it. But now people work cushy jobs and less and less people do that. It's down to gardening enthusiasts in the young generation. And even then the pattern is completely different. More about trying out exotic stuff for shit and giggles. Rather than aiming for good amount of food and then conserving it for the winter. Energy costs probably make it cheaper to buy jam rather than cook it too...
Only discussing the land statement here, but we have loads and loads and loads of unused farmland.
At least, that is true in Canada, and I suspect the US, and I know in the EU some are paid not to farm.
In Canada, we have quotas on some things, to prevent over production.
There are two real issues:
* drought, or summers with few sunny days, reducing yields
* random new diseases
So we need that fallow land, just in case, which is why people are given inventives to have farm land, but not use it.
Yet we still have so much farm land, that we sell the best of it to developers, who then create housing.
We have loads of unused farmland.
One last thing. China's population is going to almost halve, over the next 15 years, Russia will have a major population decline, and the most industrialized nations are the same.
Canada has solved this top heavy, old age die off, with immigration. More than 30% of Canadian citizens, for example, we not born in Canada.
But for those with lower immigration numbers, and low birth rates (basically the entire industrialized world), populations will plummet by 30% to 50% in the next 25 years.
China had the one child program, and the birth rate in Canada is less than 1 for every 2 adults, for Canadians boen here. The rest of the West is the same.
So worldwide, our population will plummet very soon.
Yes, especially on the east coast, vast swaths of what was once farmland and pasture is now forest again. For example, most of Connecticut's forests were cut down for not very productive farms before good transportation infrastructure allowed that activity to be moved to more suitable areas. It's now forest again and atlantic salmon are back for the first time in a century.
The current agricultural land in US alone can easily feed by various estimates at least 2 billions people. The trouble is that most of it is used to grow corn etc. to feed animals in the industrial meat production.
There is plenty of land under cultivation. We already produce enough calories to feed every person on earth, they just aren't distributed sufficiently.
Currently you have most of the California central valley planted in high margin crops like almonds and pistachios because they maximize farmer profits (despite their unsustainable demands on the water supply). If the goal was to maximize human nutrition the land use would look very different.
> How would that work? We don't have enough land as it is.
With capitalism there can never be enough of any natural resource. When there is enough, it will be put to more extravagant and wastefull purposes.
The original purpose of a lawn was to show that you are so rich and have so much land that you can dedicate some of it to just grass.
The purpose of a tough guy wearing a massive golden chain in a bad neighbourhood is to show that noone dares touch him
And the purpose of a yaht is to show off - the yahts dont even cross the ocean, billionaires hire special ships to lift the whole yaht and move it across atlantic.
So whether its yahts or aingle use plastic cups, or bitcoin mining, there is never enough.
Probably better to stop propping up the small farms and let the unproductive land be reclaimed by nature. Extensively use pest resistant GMO crops to increase yields on less land and overall lessen the land needed for farming. At the same time, lessening sprawl would be quite helpful. I see plenty of people 'move out to the country' and then spray pesticides over their entire 5 acre lawn.
They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings.
What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too.
Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000.
I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd. They should have started with severe controls on importing goods from countries with high levels of pollution
They were blamed not for climate change, instead for nitrogen disposition.
This is a uniquely Dutch problem, largely unrelated to CO2. In larger countries, there's clear zoning and distance between protected nature and intensive agriculture. Not in the Netherlands, where these two things are directly bordering each other. Hence, the agriculture very directly destroys its surrounding nature. Not by CO2, by nitrogen.
Do you have a source of the government "placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers"? The Dutch government wanted[0] to curb emissions, and since (high intensity) farms are huge polluters, some of the measurements affected farmers.But I can't remember them placing the blame on the farmers.
> placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd
Nobody is doing that, this is blatant misinformation that is being spread by interest groups that profit off Dutch farmers.
Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen. As the OP mentioned, it is causing acidification of nature areas, which is negatively impacting all sorts of wildlife. It's a mostly local problem, often caused by intensive farming and is mostly unrelated to climate change.
> Most of the discussion around farmers over here has to do with nitrogen.
Yes, and nitrogen fertilizer yields nitrous oxide which is a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change [1]. This is not just "misinformation", this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer.
> this is part of the reason behind the push to ban nitrogen fertilizer
Sure, that might be true, but it is definitely blatant misinformation that Dutch farmers are being blamed for climate change. It is not part of the discussion that's currently ongoing in The Netherlands and that is purposefully being misrepresented in (mostly American) right-wing media. This needs to be clear, because the violent protests by framers in The Netherlands are being abused by foreign interest groups who frame them as protests against those farmers being blamed for climate change.
This is a real issue, because this is starting to become an actual discussion point for those who are supporting the farmers. They are, for example, asking why farmers are now targeted and airports are not, while farmers cause 88x more nitrogen emissions than flights in the Netherlands. Also, those emissions are less focused on the problem areas.
Misinformation is incredibly harmful in this discussion and therefore it's incredibly important to keep the facts straight. Otherwise all discussions and arguments will mix and there will never actually be anything done.
Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer, it's implicit that the farmers are contributing to climate change. Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change? That would obviously be incorrect, but the former claim is absolutely correct.
Maybe it's not part of the conversation in the Netherlands, but I'm not seeing what's factually wrong about it. Are they actually claiming that climate change is part of the discussion in the Netherlands? If this isn't part of the conversation in the Netherlands, what exactly are they talking about?
Given that climate change is the primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer
That's simply not true. The primary reason for restricting nitrogen fertilizer in NL is habitat change (i.e. it has profound effects on the habitats of native species), not climate change.
> Are the people claiming that the farmers are being blamed for climate change saying that the farmers are the only or primary driver for climate change?
All the comments in this thread are replies to someone who seems to do exactly that by defending farmers "visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings." by saying "I mean placing the blame for climate change on the backs of Dutch farmers was absurd."
This video is full of blatant misinformation and misrepresentation. Our current discussion is not about climate change, it's about acidification and that's it. No matter how true your comments may be, it has nothing to do with the situation in the Netherlands and it continues the spread of this misinformation. Please stop, it's harmful.
Good to know, but I don't see why it's harmful. Here in Canada they're also contemplating nitrogen fertilizer bans for reasons of climate change, so it's not like this argument isn't being made.
Butterflies: 50% reduction in 50 years. Beetles: 75% decline since 1985. Ladybugs: 50% reduction in 20 years. Across the border in Germany: a 75% decline in flying insects since 1989.
It doesn't take much of a scientist to see the trend. I've been hiking the forests here multiple times per week for 20 years. You can clearly see how some groups are disappearing whilst others remain.
There's several root causes but the primary one is a lack of native plant diversity. Since agriculture over here is done in close proximity to forests, the soil becomes acid due to the nitrogen disposition. This benefits the growth of a handful of plants at the expense of all others. In some of our forests, the soil is now so acid that snails no longer develop a case and bird eggs collapse.
In this plant monoculture, insects depending on a specific host plant disappear. Outside (protected) forests, things aren't much better. Even the tiniest of strips of grass that would normally produce wildflowers, are aggressively mowed down. People's gardens are designed to be as hostile to insects as is possible.
Secondary reasons are invasive species and light pollution.
It's a sad state of affairs and one we should be deeply ashamed of. We're not talking about some iconic predator requiring hundreds of acres of wild forest just to survive. We're talking about insects that require little space, healthy soil, a flower, and for it to be left alone. We can't even offer that.