Insect Apocalypse

“a.pok.a.lips  noun, singular: the destruction of the world, the end of the world as told in the Bible, a situation causing very serious damage and destruction.”

Studies done in Germany and Puerto Rico show that insects collective weight world-wide has declined by 75 percent in the lasts thirty years.  Butterflies and dung beetles are declining two percent per year.  1 in 6 bee species are now regionally extinct.  Probably you have noticed that your car’s windshield does not need cleaning anywhere near as often as it used to, even if you haven’t noted the paucity of insects in your garden.

This should be ringing alarm bells in Congress, at the UN, in every science faculty at our universities.  It should be headline news in the papers and on TV.  But when I bring it up with otherwise knowledgeable people, even ‘environmentalists,” they are shocked.  The word is not out.

What makes this so dangerous?  Insects play a crucial role in keeping the planet’s ecosystems healthy.  They pollinate up to 70 percent of the food we eat, nearly all the flowers, and they provide food for birds, fish, reptiles and other animals.  The lowly dung beetle is just one of 1000s of decomposers that recycle nutrients that keep the soil healthy.

We know why this is happening.  It’s the spread of chemically dependent agriculture, eating up habitat and poisoning their bodies.  Some pesticides are bred right into plants using genetic engineering and the poison distributes itself throughout the stems, flowers and leaves making a deadly meal for the unsuspecting and unprepared creatures.  Much of it persists in the soil for years.  Climate change is also adding a powerful stressor.

Our agricultural system is a suicidal mistake.  Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto and the like are not so much feeding the world as are killing it.  Fortunately we know how to grow food organically using many techniques developed by organic farmers, permaculture farmers, agro-forestry farmers and traditional peoples all over the world.  We need to wrest the land out of the hands of the big corporations and return it to smaller scale and more diverse farming.  We need to cease government subsidies of Big Ag and block their lobbyists in the Congresses and Parliaments of the world.   If not, we will continue to pull the rug out from under the food system, and the rest of the biosphere, as we kill off the insects. 

Treating Our Soil Like Dirt

Treating Our Soil Like Dirt While Missing Out On Carbon Capture and Biodiversity

We’re treating our soil like dirt.  Dirt is dead, soil is alive with a vast community of organisms that make it fertile.  Leah Penniman writes in Yes! Magazine (Spring, 2019) that after the European settlers drove the indigenous people off of the land and began to plow, “It took only a few decades of intense tillage to drive around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into sky as carbon dioxide.”  Modern industrial agriculture is a major culprit, and not only from its fossil fuel mega-machines that churn and poison the land.   Because they leave cropland bare after the harvest, we will lose about 24 million acres to soil erosion and soil degradation which will result in a decrease food production by 30 percent over the next 50 years.” Creating good soil and growing plants captures carbon in the soil, so we need to radically change agricultural and gardening practices to begin rebuilding healthy soils.

What is healthy soil?   Anne Bikle and David Montgomery in “A DIY Soil Story” in Yes! magazine explain that soil is a vast organic community made up of microbes, insects, worms and myriad other creatures who “circulate the basic compounds and molecules of life “and keep the “creaking wheal of life beneath our feet” turning.  Modern agriculture compacts and damages this highly complex symbiosis between these creatures and plants.   Millions of microbes are also an important part of the mix, bringing mineral elements the plants need for health while others make growth hormones.  McNaughton reports that “One table spoon of soil is filled with more microbes than there are humans on the planet.”  Soil is the most biodiverse place on Earth, but, as Bikle and Montgomery report: “North American agricultural soils have lost about half their original complement of organic matter—so far.”   Bikle and Montgomery don’t even want to spade up their garden, so instead they make healthy soil.

How is healthy soil made?  It’s made by not tilling, and instead adding compost.  They harvest leaves from neighbors, save coffee grounds and other kitchen “waste,” get wood chips and even pooh from their nearby zoo!  This is all added in a deep layer of mulch.  “Restoring life to our soil gave us a ringside seat to the march of life in the rough order in which it evolved on Earth—from microbes and fungi to worm, spiders, beetles, birds and eventually mammals.

At the level of farms, restorative agriculture (sometimes called “conservation agriculture) can use no til methods including cover crops mulches and manures.  Take the animals off the CAFOs and return them to the farms so their manure can be used and they can aerate the soil with their hoofs as they graze. 

Almost everyone can garden, if only in window boxes.  And every garden, however small, counts, especially if planted with native varieties to encourage pollinators.  Just rethink the suburban lawn—how many millions of tons of food could be produced by pulling out the grass, restoring the soil as the Bikle and Montgomery have done, and how many millions of bees and butterflies can also be fed and so pollinate our food.  Let’s change.  You don’t have to make a 1000 square foot garden, but make a small start—maybe just 5’ X 5’. When? Tomorrow?  Next Spring for sure?

Fusion Power. Not Yet. (Not At All?)

Scientists have long had the dream of producing electricity in the same manner as the sun does, by fusing hydrogen atoms.  Various programs are (and have been for a long time), trying to make it work.  If successful, it’s claimed, it would bring unlimited amounts of cheap power for the world because the fuel, hydrogen, is abundant in the world, unlike uranium which fuels traditional nuclear reactors.  Now, scientists working on the problem say they have figured out (maybe) how to build a small fusion reactor the size of a tennis court and are ready to start the experiment.  What could be wrong with this picture?

First, in order to produce a hydrogen fusion reaction the atoms must be heated to a temperature of millions of degrees.  Since no man-made material on earth can contain such heat without just vaporizing, they plan to enclose the reaction in a magnetic field.  I ask you, would you stand outside a building that was claiming to be doing that?  How stable is such a field?  My second objective is that, while they say it will produce no greenhouse gases, it will still produce radioactive wastes.  Third, this is a ridiculously hard way to boil water, which is what every power plant does regardless of its fuel.  It makes steam to drive a turbine which spins a generator.  Fourth, hydrogen fusion will continue the current path of highly centralized, large scale power generation, leaving such plants open to sabotage or destruction in a war, when we could create the power we need with decentralized and far less dangerous, rooftop solar and wind and solar fields, technologies that are already off the shelf and being employed to limit global warming.  But my biggest concern is, do we want unlimited power?  Can we handle it?  Look how we have wrecked the Earth with the increase in power delivered by the fossil fuel revolution.  Even if it replaced fossil fuels, would it simply be used to ramp up the industrial, extractive economy and its flood of unneeded consumer junk, its destruction of remaining wild lands, and its huge waste stream?  If we are going to beat climate change and the extinction crisis which threatens our very civilization, we don’t need to power up.  We need to power down, especially in the global North, while providing clean solar and wind to the Global South so they can meet basic needs.  Fusion power ought to be a non-starter.  Just because we can, or might be able to do something, doesn’t mean we ought to.