This is incredibly obvious to be in my neighborhood. My landlord (very regretfully) has a company spray insecticide in our yard. There are no bugs, not a single bug sound.

The area I live in has many nature conscious people so about 1/10th of the yards are gardens, wildflowers, etc rather than grass. Just walking by them you hear a tremendous symphony of bugs! Then it almost entirely goes away in the next yard that is just grass.

In a local park there is about 1/4 acre that is only mown every couple of years as a "pollinator friendly" prairie-ish area, and the number of fireflies in just that section is astonishing. There are just hundreds and hundreds, it's beautiful.

Thinking about the increasing suburbanization of the US makes me sad. We subsidize this lifestyle so heavily here that it doesn't make sense to live anywhere else, but the land use is just awful.

It's not even wildlife and plants. I'm in southwest Ohio and the closest reasonably dark sky spot is almost 2 hours away. My S/O and I have been to some dark sky viewings hosted by a local observatory about 45 minutes away. I have really good night vision and can just barely see the milky way. My S/O /thought/ she could see it, but only realized the magnitude when we went to this national forest 2 hours away. It made me sad that she hadn't been able to see some of the wildness of our world.

I truly hope the "suburban dream" that has been pushed for so many decades starts dying off, so at least some of the wild areas in the US remain intact. There's already so little in the midwest.