http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-flu...

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutsch...

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatisch...

Der Spiegel discusses issues in the methodology of the data collection. The intervals over the years weren't uniform, data was collected by volunteers/hobbyists and they did not measure the dry mass weight. There are differing opinions whether or not those issues have relevance.

SZ gives some details on suspected causes. Neither climate change (warmer weather should yield more insects, not less) nor changes in plant diversity can explain the observed effects alone. Main suspects:

- agricultural fertilizers, especially nitrogen

- pesticides, especially neonicotinoides

    Members of the Krefeld society have been observing, 
    recording, and collecting insects from the region—and
    around the world—since 1905. Some of the roughly 50 
    members—including teachers, telecommunication 
    technicians, and a book publisher—have become world 
    experts on their favorite insects. Siegfried Cymorek, 
    for instance, who was active in the society from the 
    1950s through the 1980s, never completed high school. 
    He was drafted into the army as a teenager, and after 
    the war he worked in the wood-protection division at a 
    local chemical plant. But because of his extensive 
    knowledge of wood-boring beetles, the Swiss Federal 
    Institute of Technology in Zurich awarded him an 
    honorary doctorate in 1979. Over the years, members 
    have written more than 2000 publications on insect 
    taxonomy, ecology, and behavior.

The meadows have been turned into forests and to a lesser extent pastures.

It's not a few percent, it's 30% of the land, probably more in Germany where there are much lest forests than in Sweden.

The bio-diversity in a meadow strikes me as much higher than heavily grazed pastures or a mono-culture wheat fields or pine forest.

This is mostly clearly seen on the east coast because most of the Midwest is still used for farming.

Edit: in Europe this is visible in coppiced forests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing . Haven't seen one here in the US but I assume they're somewhat common in Europe where they were an early and effective method of sustainable forestry.

Something that bothers me is the gristly, meager attitude of a certain type of conservation ecology. I think we are really going to start having to cultivate healthy ecosystems from the ground up, regardless of who's originally "from here" or not. I'm very optimistic about permaculture and wild cultivation techniques. I think they deserve more of a shot than people often give them.

And that "ag-tech" oligopoly has gotta go, along with its foolish, ignorant, exploitative approaches to ecology and economics alike.

But the case in point was that the countryside has changed considerably because of changes in agriculture.

The comparison between relatively preserved parks and National Forests (e.g. Willamette) and the rest of the states forests is truly jarring.

For that matter, the same pattern can be seen across the country. Much of Pennsylvania is densely forested, but the entire state has only a few thousand scattered acres of old-growth woods.

Weyerhaeuser, etc. grow those fast growing pulpwood trees and harvest.

I think you mean "before Native Americans arrived". One of the side effects of the European arrival to North America was reforestation due to a disease-driven decline in the population of Native Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire

European deforestation was most extreme during the late middle ages and early modern period. When people were using wood for fuel in a growing economy, before switching to coal, major European nations were running out of trees. Coppicing was adopted out of a desperate need for basic resources.

All these wild weeping willow which had been a signature of Masovian landscape and which I still remember from childhood visits to family farm died soon thereafter. So did the frogs. It is like coming to different country now.

Now look what Nestle/other food giants, but also slaughterhouses and animal farms, do: they use groundwater with private wells, and they extract more water than can be replenished... boom.

If you DGAF about planning and resource management and just do the same thing year after year your fields will soon be useless for growing that one thing you've specialized in and it will suck to be you but none of your neighbors will feel sorry for you because they all saw it coming from years off.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0301/Mexico-s-monarch...

I've seen various flying insects more than a hundred miles out to sea but I accept that not all insects fly.

Not just dumb: as far as biological life goes those trimmed lawns are pretty close to dead useless land.

Now, you don't even need the bags of flower seeds though it helps. Just mow your lawn + remove biomass only twice a year. At max 3, if you've been using fertilizer in the past, or down to 1 if the soil has gotten rid of most nutritients: by cutting grass and removing it you remove nutritients so the fast-growing plants (grasses, nettles, ...) get less of a chance while the slower growing ones (amongst which a lot of wild flowers are, as wel as plants which used to be common before mass-scale agricultuter but are now rare because they don't get a chance mostly due to the abdundance of nitrogen deposition) will florish. For maximum ecological results you'll also leave certain pieces untouched for a year (some butterflies/files/spiders need long grass to survive winter). Do this for a couple of years and your once neatly trimmed green piece of land will turn into an actually valuable piece of colourful nature. I realize this is not for everyone, e.g. it's not an ideal place to play football or teach your kids how to ride their bike, but if you have the chance it's worth giving it a shot.

An ideal tool for applying the above principle is the scythe. It has several advantages over machines like mowers and weedwackers: you learn how to use a nice tool which does not burn fossil fuel, makes no noise except from a satisfying 'swoosh', is relatively cheap yet will likely outlive you. Depending on how you use it it can be a tai-chi-like moment of peace to start the day, or you gan go full-on and treat it as your work-out instead of going to the gym. And in the end it is less work than keeping grass trimmed throughout the growing season (unless you have a robotic mower, or vast amounts of land): mowing/raking for a couple of hours twice a year doesn't even come close to the amount of time I see my neighbours running around with all their mowing devices bi-weekly even though I have more grass to cut than they have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukZA4Y7usQk

But in all seriousness, yes.. lawns are evil. Created in Victorian Britain to demonstrate wealth.. "look at me, I can afford to have un-productive land". I try to minimise them as much as possible on my 1.5 acre lot. Veggie gardens, mushroom logs, wetland and lots of dead wood as in the video

That all said, I keep a couple of hives, this might be the last year. For the last couple of year my otherwise very healthy hives have collapsed around this very time of year, I just noticed one wasn't doing well all of a sudden.

Roughly when everyone is putting stuff on their lawns for winter, especially the golf course a 1/4 mile away. I know correlation is not causation but it's an unusual time for hives to fail, they've been working all summer building up and it is this point that they are their strongest.

Frankly, my feeling has been for a while that we, as a species, are at the end of our golden age.

In all seriousness, if anyone tells you you can't have a thriving eco system in your yard, fight them on every level. Manicured lawns should be outlawed, not encouraged.

FTFY.

And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number.

So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions.

https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S...

http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...

A suburb of Portlad OR is far more likely to have a bylaw or HOA reg about grass height or some other nit picky thing than the suburb of Portland ME because the OR suburb is wealthier and wealthy people have the time to care about these things, care about what the standards should be and care about how to enforce them.

Yes, many Americans live somewhere one or more rules/laws that control what they do on/with their own residential property. The Americans who are most represented here likely have far many laws/HOA rules with which they much comply.

Someone said it's "somewhat common in the US" to be restricted from growing eco-friendly laws. You "fixed" that statement by adjusting it to "somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN".

The initial statement was true, there was nothing to fix. It might be "very common" among HN readers (though I'll bet they skew more urban than you're suggesting), but it really is "somewhat common" nationwide.

And the distinction isn't irrelevant, because this isn't just a parochial HN-reader concern - turf covers roughly 2% of US land. Not all of that is lawns, and not all of those lawns are legally constrained, but as I tried to demonstrate, the total amount is significant. I'm not objecting to the point that this situation has heavy demographic skew, I'm objecting to the implication that it isn't widespread.

[1] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/citycode/article/514518

Sometimes those can be even worse. I lived in a town of 300 growing up, and we often had to deal with the mayor's wife and occasionally the mayor himself coming to our door to tell us we were in violation of some lawn ordinance or another. This is particularly obnoxious considering that the only way to even look up town ordinances is to go to the other side of the county to view the documents at the county office.

Edit: Context: He's a permaculture farmer (one of the first), and has a really compelling solution to modern agriculture, in my opinion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Holzer

This isn't SV specific DC, NYC or pretty much any other large city has a slow drip exodus of upper middle class people from it's suburbs to the less stifling suburbs of some other city with similar results.

That said, since the drought, there are thousands of dead lawns, and I've never seen these laws enforced.

I'll still want some lawn to play ball and such, but I'm all for keeping some wilder areas in the corners, let whichever flowers want to grow, grow there.

Of course later we drove by as they were all dying, not quite as dazzling a display lol That noted, I am all for this!

Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places.

In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being sturdier.

Eastern grey squirrels, brought to the European mainland from the UK, are also increasingly replacing local red squirrels. Red squirrels get through winter by hiding food supplies and staying lean and mean, while grey squirrels build up fat reserves.

What ends up happening is that the grey squirrels sniff out the food supplies of the red ones and clear them out to fill up their own fat reserves, that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve.

But I agree with your general sentiment, I remember nature being quite a bit "buzzier" when I was a kid, I always thought I felt that way because I might have paid more attention to things like insects as a kid, but I guess my feeling wasn't all that off.

Things with squirrels are a bit more complex. While the two species do fight over the same resource, the main reason for the decline of red squirrels is disease.

The grey squirrels carry squirrel-pox, which can be fatal to the reds. That's always the explanation I've heard cited for the decline in red squirrels in the UK at least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_parapoxvirus

I wonder if the grey squirrels adapted this behavior because of previous encounters with red squirrels, displacing them in the process, or if it's just "bad luck" for the red squirrels to run into grey squirrels who just happen to perfectly counter their survival tactics?

In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.

Someone's related blog: https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-pa...

Quote: So how did this squirrel get here just over 100 years ago? Some reports say that the squirrels were a gift from the Mayor of New York City in 1909 but Jolene from Stanley Park History found that in 1909 Vancouver Park Boar Chair, Charles Tisdall, wrote to various American cities in search of purchasing “grey squirrels” for Stanley Park.

And here I was thinking milder winters would benefit the red squirrels because they would have a better chance getting through those without food supplies/fat reserves. Guess it's actually more of an even playground in terms of food supplies, where things like the grey's parapoxvirus tip the balance in favor of more greys surviving.

Are harsher winter conditions harder on the grey squirrels? Maybe their fat-reserves give them a mobility disadvantage that becomes crippling in harsher winter conditions? Or maybe those remote places are so remote that grey squirrels merely haven't made it there, yet.

Don't blame us, they are an invasive species here too. Proper British squirrels are red.

We are doing this to us. We are changing the environment to support short-term wants/needs at the expense of its human habitability in the future.

Well, we don't really know what consciousness really is, so it's hard to say that the Earth isn't conscious. After all, who would have thought a complex network of simple neurons arranged in a particular way would be conscious?

Even a cursory definition of consciousness must include the sum total of all of our sensory perception, and without the biome to augment that perception, it is impossible that our consciousness would not shift to accommodate the inclusion and exclusion of whatever difference in our sensory input would give to our experience of being alive.

We would all _be_ conscious (presuming relative health), but if we were all on Pluto, for example, the lack of light would change our consciousness, and for each individual this change would happen at a rate determined by their experience.

Perhaps this change would happen gradually enough for some that it might be considered an artifact of evolving, but certainly the change would begin the instant we left Earth's influence, and what might be considered our 'normal' state.

I realize it's a little (though I detest this term) 'hand wavy' because it's a thought experiment based on zero examples, but we do know that our consciousness is dependent on what we perceive and don't perceive. Hence the question posed by Nagel [1] "what is it like to be a bat?", as bats are cognitively very close to humans (relative to the entire biome), but without eyesight, it is fairly clear that the consciousness of a bat would be different than that of a human.

I recognize that this point is not necessarily the one central to your comment, but I do think it's interesting to remember that if we were not here, we would not be as we are.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

You may want to revisit that assumption.

Being as the science on this subject is changing very rapidly, as we speak.

So ten years ago when I was 20, I had the chance to go with my rich old friend-boss to a relatively high-end restaurant. He called a noodle dish -- I have eaten the same dish -- that cold noodle with shrimp paste (which smells pungent but tastes good) -- for hundreds of times in my life and I didn't expect anything different. But before we started, the waitress brought up a bottle that has a small pipette and dropped a little drop to the paste. The aroma was warm and fuzzy like how you would think of the cinnamon apple juice for a cold day. When I tasted the same dish, it tasted so warm, so rich, and so aromatic. But that's about as good as words get because it was unlike anything I have had in my life. It transformed the dish and my experience to another level of existence. It was that little bug that made me appreciate the food, my life, and the little heritage in the little country, where, honestly, not a lot of things really made sense. But definitely, that little drop of oil does make a lot of sense.

Fast forward one year ago, life has been so much easier to me. Food is abundant, but I sometimes miss that little dish. I asked my parents if they could get some of the ca cuong oil to me, even if it's expensive (as it always has been believed). They tried then replied that they couldn't source the oil, no one sells it. Further researching revealed to me that the little insect has gone practically extinct and it is now illegal to catch them. I want to believe that it wasn't me that contributed to it, but maybe I did. It was more widely believed, however, that the widespread use of pesticide and insect-resistant rice has pushed the little insect to extinction in just a matter of 10-15 years.

The day I figured that out, I feel died a little bit inside. I feel something was lost when I, and many people around me, was busy pursuing. I am now doing work that has a lot to do with biology, and I go to talks of people having that little spiel with how our challenge for the 8-billion people world is food security. I heard PhD students and faculty talking about how great is insect-resistant plants. The scientists in large agree with the assertion that GMOs aren't harmful. My friends would go great lengths to defend GMOs on their blogs and facebook statuses. They are all hardcore, hardworking, real scientists with good intents. I tend to believe smart people meant goodwill.

Still, the world marches forward for whatever it marches forward for, little insects that eat human's food be damned.

Various little butterflies would be abundant seem much less now. I wish I knew their names.

My seven-year-old daughter has never been stung. My ten-year-old son claims he was stung once, but I'm not sure I believe him. By the time I was ten years old, I had been stung at least a dozen times. (I can still remember some of the particular stings, just due to the severity of the swelling.)

This strikes me as odd, and in the context of this paper, frightening.

Good luck talking to them about it; you'll be labelled a green wacko one step removed from eco-fanatics who firebomb SUV dealerships. If you don't want or like proper suburban manicured lawns, maybe you shouldn't live around everyone else who does want them, would be their attitude.

Even if you dodge that hurdle by finding stuff that doesn't need mowing or edging, your neighbors are going to think you're crazy if your yard is all monkey grass or vines or cacti.

Yes, and? That's them projecting the weakness they actually do have inside them on you. To the degree you are free from weakness, their weakness will destroy them, so be the wall they splatter themselves against, be the water they drown in.

> your neighbors are going to think you're crazy if your yard is all monkey grass or vines or cacti.

If someone genuinely thinks a person who is otherwise acting perfectly normal is genuinely, clinically crazy because of some vines or weeds... there's a reason for that, too. If you end up with such neighbors, laugh your ass off and go about your day. Walk softly, carry a big stick, and let honesty be your biggest ruse. If you want to please everybody, you're going to be a hostage of the worst and then still die like all of us. So "cut the crap, fuck the rest."

Secondly, http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/hort/wildgrdn.htm

> Where 'attracts insects' is mentioned you can assume that birds will also be consequently be attracted

https://www.kingsseeds.co.nz/Kings+Seeds+Blog/x_post/Plants-...

> But what if we are trying to DISCOURAGE insects from coming into our garden. After all, there are some we just get completely sick of. What can we sow to help us to repel the insects we don’t like? Here are some ideas for that:

Thirdly, if all fails, enjoy it with binoculars. You'll live. Heck, most people will even survive insect stings.

Well if you read the link, I believe the point was that some plants attract stinging insects and others repel them. Also, stings. You'll live.

As long as you're not allergic like I am. Sometimes nothing, other times... it no good.

Thanks climate change!

"EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...

If you're in the US, we have a great conservation organization for invertebrates that is doing great work on both habitat revival and pesticide reduction, and receives not nearly enough donations: https://xerces.org/

How can we determine how much of the change we even have control over?

I'd put monoculture and pesticides higher on my list of suspects.

If you look around suburbia, there really isn't much ecological space for anything to grow unless it can survive on grass. Even in a lot of rural areas, with the advent of heavy-chemical farming and bigger and bigger monocultures, we're taking a lot of living space away from mother nature.

A close relative is a city planner, a job he went into as an idealist. He saw the economic, social, and ecological suffering created by terrible urban design, and he wanted to make a better world. After 30+ years, though, he's jaded and cynical.

He's seen historically active flood and landslide and earthquake areas quietly and repeatedly re-zoned for residential development. He's seethed at 40 years of opposition to even modest expansions of mass transit. Suburban sprawl, ghettoization of the poor, retail-only developments... At this point, although he still does his best to advance healthy policy, he's resigned to the fact that the developers always win in the end.

So please don't direct your ire at city planners. In many places, they're the only resistance to the boundless greed of property developers. As in all things, it's important to follow the money. The only people getting rich off the status quo are banks and developers.

It must be frustrating..

People work hard but it's difficult to make things genuinely better.

Thanks for enlightening me.

Maybe all the fireflies moved from Michigan to New York. I think I'd read somewhere that firefly populations tend to be very cyclical anyway though.

We are dumping all kinds of chemicals into the environment - pesticides, plasticizers, and a host of bio-active compounds which we already know may be directly responsible for the decline of certain individual species[1].

Climate change is a serious threat. But your post is an example of how climate change has become a highly politicized meme.

Next thing you know, it becomes a cultural taboo to be skeptical about climate change, and suddenly we're only asking the questions we are allowed to ask, looking for the data we are allowed to look for, sweeping inconsistencies under the rug, and just generally practicing sloppy science.

The scientific method necessitates skepticism. I welcome sources to the contrary, but modern western climate science is void of any published criticism, or at least it was when I had access to journals some 5 years ago. Hell, I couldnt find ONE paper discussing ANY benefit on any place on earth from a warmer climate-which is absurd, because northern permafrost could thaw and create arable land, for example.

Climate science has been sickened by politics and political correctness. You should be very wary.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

Bullshit.

Here's what I found within two minutes, from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, i. e. the currently valid "bible" of climate change:

Studies since the AR4 have confirmed that high-latitude locations will, in general, become more suitable for crops (Iqbal et al., 2009). Trnka et al. (2011), for example, examined projections of eleven agro-climatic indices across Europe, and found that declines in frost occurrence will lead to longer growing seasons[..]

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/WGIIAR5-Ch...

Start of Section 7.3.4. on page 504.

Sure, there'd be benefits: fewer lines at amusement parks, all the food you can eat, etc. But that's so far from a net "good" that only a psychopath or moron would publish a paper with that argument.

I legitimately want to ask you how you can be so sure that our doomsday scenarios are accurate, when we still have a fledgling understanding of a massive chaotic system like climate, and when almost all research has been purposefully negative?

If you look hard enough, you'll find anything. That's why skepticism is necessary. You'll at least agree that anything remotely pro climate change is taboo, I hope, and there is no room for taboo in science, in my opinion.

Edit: hell, how long have we known about deep ocean currents? Stratification of the subsea into various isoclines and thermoclines? Calthrates? People seem to underestimate how complex climate is, and how much we've yet to discover.

Like a plague, the millions or billions of human deaths is all the research we need. No benefit is going to counterbalance that.

Just to take one example (of many) of deadly things that are already happening that you yourself mentioned: permafrost melting.

"More arable land" also means "the release of incredibly dangerous, dormant pathogens like anthrax". Kinda makes the "arable land" moot.

https://www.vox.com/2017/9/6/16062174/permafrost-melting

But here's the thing - the weather systems on the planet are rather complex systems that are in a somewhat stable equilibrium. Changing temperature will affect that equilibrium, which will mean rather impressive upheaval. Both a warming and a cooling will have catastrophic effects for humanity. What we should pursue are strategies that prevent shifting too far from that fragile balance. No matter which direction.

Read the text. Somewhat stable. I'm well aware it moves, but it's moving much more rapidly than anything we've experienced, and at least a large part of that is without any doubt anthropogenic.

So how about you stop trying to parse words, and engage with the issue?

edit: words.