My only purpose here is to call your attention to an article that you should read even though it will spoil your day. It is a long article and I will not attempt to summarize it since I already wrote an elegy to insects over a year ago. It is not that I was particularly prescient, I was just paying attention. If you read this essay and my elegy your work will be done.
The essay is a very good one; do read the whole thing: “The Insect Apocalypse is Here: What Does it Mean For the Rest of Life on Earth?”, Brooke Jarvis, Nov. 27, 2018, The New York Times Magazine. Here is a sample paragraph:
"Entomologists also knew that climate change and the overall degradation of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general, and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces. There were studies of other, better-understood species that suggested that the insects associated with them might be declining, too. People who studied fish found that the fish had fewer mayflies to eat. Ornithologists kept finding that birds that rely on insects for food were in trouble: eight in 10 partridges gone from French farmlands; 50 and 80 percent drops, respectively, for nightingales and turtledoves. Half of all farmland birds in Europe disappeared in just three decades. At first, many scientists assumed the familiar culprit of habitat destruction was at work, but then they began to wonder if the birds might simply be starving. In Denmark, an ornithologist named Anders Tottrup was the one who came up with the idea of turning cars into insect trackers for the windshield-effect study after he noticed that rollers, little owls, Eurasian hobbies and bee-eaters — all birds that subsist on large insects such as beetles and dragonflies — had abruptly disappeared from the landscape."
Also discussed in the essay is the "shifting baseline syndrome" which basically indicates that what is "normal" changes over time. If you are a child that has rarely seen a bug or a blue sky you won't miss them (and you will be diagnosed with "nature deficit disorder".) That reminded me of the recent furor over the decision to remove some words from the new Oxford Junior English Dictionary since children wouldn't be familiar with them - words like "heron", "nectar", "acorn" and "buttercup". If you are interested see:"How the Loss of Vivid, Exacting Language Diminishes Our World," Meara Sharma, The Washington Post, Dec. 8, 2017 and "What's a Dictionary's Job? To Tell Us How to Use Words or To Show Us How We're Using Them," Scott Huler, The Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2018. And if you are really serious: "Badger or Bulbasaur - Have Children Lost Touch With Nature?', The Guardian, Sept. 30, 2017.
Among the new words we adults will need: "Anthropocene" and "Eremocine" which means the "age of loneliness."
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