Do you convert dead organic matter into fertile soil or pollinate flowers? They do. If insect populations were to vanish, so would humans. They perform too many vital functions that humans cannot.
Yes… Sorry, I didn’t mean I didn’t understand what bugs do or why they’re important. I just was trying to understand the meme. I was not aware that there’s universally less bugs. I haven’t seen this covered in news.
I don’t have a good source and I think it may be a more complex, but at least in Germany various media have frequently cited a number of 70% insect biomass decrease over the last 50 years or so. As a biologist, I wouldn’t be surprised if isn’t even more if you compare it to preindustrial times and the decrease in biodiversity is probably much higher as well.
I have noticed this in the suburbs specifically. Just over the span of my short life I’ve seen pretty much all the bugs in any area I’ve lived in disappear, along with the bats that eat them.
Not terribly? My hometown only expanded by one housing development, but most of those houses have not sold. But we had to close our windows at night because the mosquito sprayer trucks would spray so much fog that it impacted my mom’s breathing. When I was a kid we had fireflies and bats in the backyard.
As for my current town, I am not surprised at the lack of bugs since it’s all corn and nothing but corn; no real rivers, no big ponds, no forests near town, nothing that could shelter bugs outside the houses.
Not just climate change, but also accumulation of and reckless overuse of pesticides plus removal of their natural habitats. We are doing our damndest to make sure we can’t get our food pollinated. On the flip side, I have noticed a huge uptick in how many predatory pests I have had to fight off in my vegetable garden over the last few years despite seeing higher high temperatures and lower and longer low temperatures. The pests adapt. Its the ones we want that are going away.
Farming is always environmentally destructive. There is no such thing as “environmentally friendly” farming. The solution is massive investment into the farming infrastructure and rewilding of vast tracts of land.
We use around half of the arable land for agriculture. The sad fact is we only need to use 10% of it. The rest we farm because we can make a profit. Not because it makes sense.
It would take a complete upheaval of our agricultural system. Massive investment into water storage, irrigation systems and protected culture. It would also mean the forced migration of a millions people from rural areas to be rewilded to areas under intensive agriculture.
Aka it’s not an easy fix. t’s a systematic change to the way we interact with the environment.
Pollution leads to a decline in the bug population. Pollution = human byproducts (including byproducts of imprisoned animals) causing global warming and climate change affecting habitat; pollution = pesticides and chemicals which make it harder for insects to reproduce; pollution = plastics, trash, and environmental contamination; pollution = human changes that are functionally useful for humans (like roads and farms with pesticides and cities) but may be not helpful for insects.
The joke is that at first, having fewer bugs is nicer because a lot of bugs are annoying.
The joke is also that while it’s convenient at first, in another few decades it means EVERYTHING will die, so it’s not actually a good thing.
The joke is also the obliviousness of the human driver, who is relieved to be dealing with fewer bugs, not realizing that they are missing for the same reason he’s about to become extinct.
There are decreases in pretty much all types of animals that are neither human nor domesticated by humans, and for bugs there are decreases of bees, and there’s been discussion that the world is experiencing and extinction event.
Wynn Bruce set himself on fire and died trying to alert people that these trends pose a problem for humankind and no one cared. David Buckel also set himself on fire trying to warn people. It doesn’t matter at this point.
The problem is religion. People are stupid and believe in imaginary bullshit that doesn’t exist and society accepts this as normal thinking. Psychiatry says bizarre religious thinking is a symptom of schizophrenia, but normal religious thinking is acceptable if enough people believe it (in an unscientific capitulation to popular opinion in a “scientific” field that is hardly ruled by scientific rules). Religion is always illogical and it’s dooming us all.
People believe god would never create a planet that could be destroyed and don’t understand math or how to analyze scientific data. On top of that, greed caused by capitalism means that for most poor people, they are just struggling to get by and really can’t contemplate next year much less 100 years from now.
Most pollution is caused by not only poor resource management and not correctly taking into account externalities of pollution into the markplace in creating government rules (and conservative economic theory means making rules to deal with externalities) but also caused by just too many people. It’s sad, but likely some horrible virus like bird flu killing most of the population is the only way in which the planet remains habitable. The fact that only Communist China has successfully been able to reduce their population through non-economic policy declarations (as opposed to restricting resources) is a sad commentary on some of the problems of democracy when so many people just can’t understand math and instead embrace religion. (China also is a large contributor to pollution and this is not meant as exculpation of the Chinese Communist Party, but rather a brutal look at how religion has played a large role in decimating the environment.)
If people weren’t religious, they could understand these problems. But instead religious idiots take pleasure in making fun of Greta Thunberg as woke because they are literally too stupid to analyze graphs and intelligently assess data. That’s okay, if humankind lacks the intelligence to deal with this problem, then war famine and plagues will perhaps succeed since human reasoning has failed. Religion allows these people the comforts and safety of their delusions as a cocoon away from the anxiety and fear caused by dealing with reality, which can be harsh. Unfortunately, people in this delusional cocoon make really stupid decisions so we’re probably all going to die.
Often when bacterial populations with limited space and infinite glucose supplies are left to their own, they pollute and pollute and population grows exponentially until suddenly the pollution is too much and nearly all of them die. Glucose = oil; petri dish = earth; colony collapse in a petri dish = 7.99 billion people suddenly dying.
If some horrible disease like bird flu suddenly killed 4 billion people, perhaps AI could swoop down from the metaphorical cloud and help humanity manage resources in time to stop us from all dying, but probably it’s too late for even that.
(When you hear Elon Musk say people need to populate the planet even more, I think he knows what is about to happen and is taking the rational position that fleeing earth is the best option for survival and it will be hard to flee earth is everyone is so scared of death they stop working. So his message of “everything is fine, let’s increase the population and also thereby pollution even more” is dishonest, but highly rational. I don’t know if this is actually what he thinks. His hostility towards trans people also seems strange so I suppose it’s possible he is that illogical, but his response to that may be a result of a lack of empathy caused by severe autism, whereas telling people to keep increasing their numbers may be a rational lie so he can increase the likelihood of fleeing earth prior to planetary collapse.)
A certain subset of people have given up on trying to convince people of anything or do anything, figuring it’s like arguing with the sun rising and setting and that planetary biosphere collapse is just an inevitable part of nature. Others set themselves on fire to warn people, some people hold cardboard signs and gather and chant and think that will change capitalist societies and wake people up from the delusions of religions, deprogramming people through signs held up by large numbers of people. A lot of people are aware on some level, but don’t like to feel existential dread and so they just sort of ignore it.
Sorry, can someone explain? If there are less bugs, that’s attributable to something I should know?
Do you convert dead organic matter into fertile soil or pollinate flowers? They do. If insect populations were to vanish, so would humans. They perform too many vital functions that humans cannot.
Yes… Sorry, I didn’t mean I didn’t understand what bugs do or why they’re important. I just was trying to understand the meme. I was not aware that there’s universally less bugs. I haven’t seen this covered in news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
TW: this entry can be hard to read.
Thank you.
I don’t have a good source and I think it may be a more complex, but at least in Germany various media have frequently cited a number of 70% insect biomass decrease over the last 50 years or so. As a biologist, I wouldn’t be surprised if isn’t even more if you compare it to preindustrial times and the decrease in biodiversity is probably much higher as well.
OP literally never leaves the city.
I have noticed this in the suburbs specifically. Just over the span of my short life I’ve seen pretty much all the bugs in any area I’ve lived in disappear, along with the bats that eat them.
Have they built it up a lot while you were living there?
Not terribly? My hometown only expanded by one housing development, but most of those houses have not sold. But we had to close our windows at night because the mosquito sprayer trucks would spray so much fog that it impacted my mom’s breathing. When I was a kid we had fireflies and bats in the backyard.
As for my current town, I am not surprised at the lack of bugs since it’s all corn and nothing but corn; no real rivers, no big ponds, no forests near town, nothing that could shelter bugs outside the houses.
I’m not in the city right now. The key word in my post was “attributable.” As in, what’s causing the phenomenon?
Climate change.
Not just climate change, but also accumulation of and reckless overuse of pesticides plus removal of their natural habitats. We are doing our damndest to make sure we can’t get our food pollinated. On the flip side, I have noticed a huge uptick in how many predatory pests I have had to fight off in my vegetable garden over the last few years despite seeing higher high temperatures and lower and longer low temperatures. The pests adapt. Its the ones we want that are going away.
Farming is always environmentally destructive. There is no such thing as “environmentally friendly” farming. The solution is massive investment into the farming infrastructure and rewilding of vast tracts of land.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
We use around half of the arable land for agriculture. The sad fact is we only need to use 10% of it. The rest we farm because we can make a profit. Not because it makes sense.
It would take a complete upheaval of our agricultural system. Massive investment into water storage, irrigation systems and protected culture. It would also mean the forced migration of a millions people from rural areas to be rewilded to areas under intensive agriculture.
Aka it’s not an easy fix. t’s a systematic change to the way we interact with the environment.
So, it’s not going to happen.
Pollution leads to a decline in the bug population. Pollution = human byproducts (including byproducts of imprisoned animals) causing global warming and climate change affecting habitat; pollution = pesticides and chemicals which make it harder for insects to reproduce; pollution = plastics, trash, and environmental contamination; pollution = human changes that are functionally useful for humans (like roads and farms with pesticides and cities) but may be not helpful for insects.
The joke is that at first, having fewer bugs is nicer because a lot of bugs are annoying.
The joke is also that while it’s convenient at first, in another few decades it means EVERYTHING will die, so it’s not actually a good thing.
The joke is also the obliviousness of the human driver, who is relieved to be dealing with fewer bugs, not realizing that they are missing for the same reason he’s about to become extinct.
There are decreases in pretty much all types of animals that are neither human nor domesticated by humans, and for bugs there are decreases of bees, and there’s been discussion that the world is experiencing and extinction event.
Wynn Bruce set himself on fire and died trying to alert people that these trends pose a problem for humankind and no one cared. David Buckel also set himself on fire trying to warn people. It doesn’t matter at this point.
The problem is religion. People are stupid and believe in imaginary bullshit that doesn’t exist and society accepts this as normal thinking. Psychiatry says bizarre religious thinking is a symptom of schizophrenia, but normal religious thinking is acceptable if enough people believe it (in an unscientific capitulation to popular opinion in a “scientific” field that is hardly ruled by scientific rules). Religion is always illogical and it’s dooming us all.
People believe god would never create a planet that could be destroyed and don’t understand math or how to analyze scientific data. On top of that, greed caused by capitalism means that for most poor people, they are just struggling to get by and really can’t contemplate next year much less 100 years from now.
Most pollution is caused by not only poor resource management and not correctly taking into account externalities of pollution into the markplace in creating government rules (and conservative economic theory means making rules to deal with externalities) but also caused by just too many people. It’s sad, but likely some horrible virus like bird flu killing most of the population is the only way in which the planet remains habitable. The fact that only Communist China has successfully been able to reduce their population through non-economic policy declarations (as opposed to restricting resources) is a sad commentary on some of the problems of democracy when so many people just can’t understand math and instead embrace religion. (China also is a large contributor to pollution and this is not meant as exculpation of the Chinese Communist Party, but rather a brutal look at how religion has played a large role in decimating the environment.)
If people weren’t religious, they could understand these problems. But instead religious idiots take pleasure in making fun of Greta Thunberg as woke because they are literally too stupid to analyze graphs and intelligently assess data. That’s okay, if humankind lacks the intelligence to deal with this problem, then war famine and plagues will perhaps succeed since human reasoning has failed. Religion allows these people the comforts and safety of their delusions as a cocoon away from the anxiety and fear caused by dealing with reality, which can be harsh. Unfortunately, people in this delusional cocoon make really stupid decisions so we’re probably all going to die.
Often when bacterial populations with limited space and infinite glucose supplies are left to their own, they pollute and pollute and population grows exponentially until suddenly the pollution is too much and nearly all of them die. Glucose = oil; petri dish = earth; colony collapse in a petri dish = 7.99 billion people suddenly dying.
If some horrible disease like bird flu suddenly killed 4 billion people, perhaps AI could swoop down from the metaphorical cloud and help humanity manage resources in time to stop us from all dying, but probably it’s too late for even that.
(When you hear Elon Musk say people need to populate the planet even more, I think he knows what is about to happen and is taking the rational position that fleeing earth is the best option for survival and it will be hard to flee earth is everyone is so scared of death they stop working. So his message of “everything is fine, let’s increase the population and also thereby pollution even more” is dishonest, but highly rational. I don’t know if this is actually what he thinks. His hostility towards trans people also seems strange so I suppose it’s possible he is that illogical, but his response to that may be a result of a lack of empathy caused by severe autism, whereas telling people to keep increasing their numbers may be a rational lie so he can increase the likelihood of fleeing earth prior to planetary collapse.)
A certain subset of people have given up on trying to convince people of anything or do anything, figuring it’s like arguing with the sun rising and setting and that planetary biosphere collapse is just an inevitable part of nature. Others set themselves on fire to warn people, some people hold cardboard signs and gather and chant and think that will change capitalist societies and wake people up from the delusions of religions, deprogramming people through signs held up by large numbers of people. A lot of people are aware on some level, but don’t like to feel existential dread and so they just sort of ignore it.