This sneaky little article in the New York Times seem to come out of nowhere– as the authors observed. No one’s paying attention. We better start.
It begins with observable detail. If you are old enough, you will remember the annoying task of cleaning bugs off the windshield of your car after a drive in the country. I remember it. I remember how hard it was to get those messy little splatters off the glass, even if you used Windex or windshield washer. You’d always had to take a second run at it to get the most persistent little blotches.
If you rode motorcycles, like I did for a time, you knew the experience of getting bugs into your eyes and mouth while racing along in the countryside. Constantly. There was no escape.
It turns out that we might be headed for a big, big problem. Where are the bugs?
I look forward to the pesticide industry– which is surely studing the brilliant success of the oil (carbon) industry in sewing doubt about climate change — starting a campaign to try to convince people that 1) there are really more bugs than ever before, 2) pesticides do not harm bugs (except when they do, as advertised, and 3) suburban home-owners use more pesticides than farmers. After a few years, and after these theories have been debunked, the arguments will become: 1) yes, there are fewer bugs, but the bats are to blame and 2) what’s the problem? Do you like bugs? 3) pesticides actually eliminate predators of bugs.
A few years later and the strategy becomes, 1) all right, so we are causing the bugs to die, but you can’t sacrifice good farm jobs just to save a mosquito or two. 2) it’s too late to do anything anyway. 3) don’t worry– by the time we die because the food chain is disrupted by the annihilation of insects, we’ll already have been killed by global warming.
At not point will anyone in the pesticide or farming industries admit that they were wrong.
Re. Noah’s Ark:
There 400,000 species of beetles
12,000 types of ants
20,000 of bees