The fall of the tiny Empires that run the world was written by Oliver Milman.
Anyone with a car can collect data. When was the last time you had to clean bug splatter from your car? The ritual was always going to be done on a long drive. We are more likely to see those landscapes through glass mile after mile.
The trend is more than anecdotal. Many people dismissed the project of the ecologist, who began driving two roads in 1996 and counted the windshield splats, as a lark. The results showed that there had been a decline in the number of insects colliding with the first and second roads. Other scientists have reported similar collapses in nature reserves all over the world, using more conventional methods. The situation has been referred to as an "insect apocalypse" or "insectageddon" by news stories.
Oliver Milman's new book is a gripping, sobering and important new book. He is refreshingly willing to embrace the complexity of the issue. More don't appear on the graph because no one has ever studied them. There are an estimated 5 million to 30 million different kinds of insects in the world. Some will likely disappear before we name them.
Climate change, habitat loss and light pollution are some of the threats that are blamed for the crisis. Industrial agriculture has transformed once-varied rural landscapes into vast monocultures. Modern single-crop farms lack the diversity of plant life needed to support an insect community. Barbara Smith says it's like if the only food available was chips. Even if you don't eat chips, there are chips for everyone.
A good quote and a knack for explaining scientific research is what Milman has. He interviews a lot of experts, including a scientist who tracks the decline in beetles through the feathers of birds that eat them. It's hard to begrudge the book's pace, even though there are times when one longs to linger on a story. The people who know the most about the crisis are the scientists who describe their findings as alarming or frightening.
Huge crop failures, collapsing food webs, bird extinctions and more are threatened by insect declines. There are logs of wood that are pushed underwater, and they bob back up again if the pressure is removed.
Hanson is an author and a Biologist with recent books that include Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid.
The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World is a book by Oliver Milman.
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