Silent Spring: The Sequel

A few years back I was finally able to purchase a small piece of property in New Hampshire with the intention of devoting it to my favorite group of wild animals: the arthropods. I don’t mow or rake, removed most of the outdoor lighting, built a pond habitat and planted native flowers. It took a few years to get it going, but this summer it is in full bloom, and it is a beautiful mess: my very own nature sanctuary, alive with buzzing, flying, ticking and stridulating, an organic orgy of offensiveness to the human desire to control and contain.  But hold on. Wait a minute. Where the heck is everybody? I stare at the bewildered blossoms in anguish. There is simply nobody there.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m exaggerating.  A few bugs, bumblebees, or thread-waisted wasps stumble by occasionally and a handful of frantic moths flitter up my kitchen window at night. However, the overall reaction to my humble effort to support the most maligned and misunderstood group of animals in the world? It can only be described as pathetic, and I’ve been on the planet long enough to know that it isn’t normal.

You see, I was a born arthropod enthusiast. As a child I would spend most of my swimming time, in the face of great ridicule, heroically rescuing drowning insects.  On road trips, when my father pulled over cursing to cleanse the windshield of sticky green hemolymph, I would wander off to the streetlights in search of Luna moths and Dobsonflies. They were everywhere. At night, in the suburbs, our lighted windows were just teeming with segmented critters of all shapes and sizes. They were prolific, incredibly diverse and seemingly invincible.

Later, I went to school for entomology. Even then, in the 1990s, insects were so easy to find that I was able to assemble a passable collection a week before it was due. Now? I would probably earn a D-.

But don’t take my word for it. This is not just local, temporary or anecdotal. Insects are in dire straits all over the world and the consensus is in: the main culprit is not climate change. It is habitat destruction and pesticides. As our population inevitably expands, we take more land for ourselves and leave less of it for the rest of the species that share our planet.

This is not something that is going to happen, it is happening now. It is happening everywhere. People, this is the sixth major extinction event, and it is human caused: Silent Spring, the sequel.

Climate change is a crisis and biodiversity loss is a connected, but essentially separate one. We cannot, in our important efforts to transition to a green economy, ignore our impact on biodiversity. We cannot continue to rip apart forests and pave everything over while erecting solar and wind farms or destroy habitat mining metals for electric cars.

There are many selfish and practical reasons to be concerned about this problem, but I’m only going to present one: as go the arthropods, so goes the rest of nature. I imagine there are people out there who would say: “So what? Humans will survive. Who needs nature? We’ll live in a barren, desolate landscape and eat cockroaches for lunch. They’ll still be around.”

However, if you’ve ever been struck by a bird, dragonfly, frog or snake; If you’ve ever watched the itsy-bitsy spider climb up the waterspout; if you’ve ever caught a glimpse of a tiger beetle and just been dumbfounded by its beauty. Even if you’ve ever gotten a butterfly tattoo: you have some connection to nature, and you have some reason to care.  

The good news is that nature is resilient. Together, we may be able to pull it back from the brink, but it is going to first require an immediate and massive adjustment in the way most of us think. A shift from a mindset of destruction and control to one of creation and relinquishment needs to occur. We need to take radical action, but, more importantly, radical inaction.  At every level:  industry, government, and in our everyday lives, we need to find value in biodiversity, embrace it,  and then, after that, we need to leave it alone.