Insects are tiny but have a big role to play in our planet's future
Plants To ' Much Provide Food On Flowering Depend Pollinate Insects That 'we Our Of The
Climate-change sceptics and anti-vaccine ideologues reject scientific findings.
Theirs is an old tradition. When her ground-breaking book, , appeared in 1962, Rachel Carson was reviled. Chemical companies accused her of spreading heresy, but, at least, she wasn't burned at the stake, as Giordano Bruno was, or shown the instruments of torture, like Galileo.
In 1981, the US postal service issued a stamp in Carson's honour. Her ideas on the adverse effects of pesticides had been accepted, but only partially. Insect populations are still being destroyed throughout the world. A third of species are endangered. The extinction rate may be eight times higher for insects than for reptiles, mammals, and birds.
We depend on insects to pollinate the flowering plants that provide much of our food. "If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man will have no more than four years left to live", Albert Einstein is supposed to have said. It's unlikely that he did, but it's not fake news. What goes around comes around: In killing insects, we dig our own graves.
It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, so is there anything citizens can do to help our tiny friends? In an opinion piece just published, Akito Kawahara, of the Florida Museum of Natural History, and colleagues think there is. "The combined impact of millions of people is necessary to confront the global issues," they say.
Kawahara asks us to convert our lawns into nature reserves. Delay mowing and allow so-called weeds, such as dandelions, to grow. If you can't resist the social pressure to maintain a short-back-and-sides, potty-trained sward, at least allow an area of your demesne to remain wild. Even a window-box is better than nothing. Every little helps.
"Insects have tight ecological relationships with these species" (weeds) going back millions of years. So, go native and grow native. "Increasing evidence shows that growing native plants provides more benefits to native insects than growing non-native ones."
Take Rachel Carson's advice. Reducing or eliminating pesticide and herbicide use "could greatly benefit both terrestrial and aquatic insect communities", Kawahara says.
Nor are gardeners the only villains. Car washing is a suburban addiction. Lethal chemicals in soaps harm invertebrates. If you must scrub your car, use biodegradable soap.
Light pollution is altering ecosystems. Put out lights, or, at least, turn them down. Night-flying insects, disorientated by lights, circle drunkenly around them, until, exhausted, they fall to their deaths. Street lamps provide bats with abundant, easy-to-catch prey, but bats must make sacrifices, too.
Insects are all too often associated with squalor and disease. Cockroaches, mosquitoes, rat-fleas, and Scottish midges give their kind a bad name, but the vast majority of these little creatures are entirely harmless. Carson wrote that "the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction". She died in 1964. Were she alive today, she would surely have endorsed Kawahara's recommendations.
- Akito Kawahara, et al, 'Eight simple actions that individuals can take to save insects from global declines'; Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2021.