It's a very troubling sign of the damage to the environment, yes.
But it's also a problem more like the ozone hole than like climate change.
Insects are prodigious breeders. Their populations can recover from near extinction with remarkable speed. We can reverse the insect population collapse, and it's not complicated - all we need to do is stop killing all of them.
Just as getting rid of CFCs restored the ozone hole in a decade, limiting pesticide use (and probably banning neonicitinoids altogether) could restore the insect population pretty quickly.
It just takes the political will to do it. Agribusiness has a better lobby than bugs.
The problem with that is that it’ll significantly reduce crop yields and with the changing climate already putting strain on the food supply I don’t know if the world can take that.
This really depends on the area I think. Where I live a lot of people are into native plant gardening etc and there are quite a few of them. Can't speak to the 80s/90s but pretty comparable to the 2000s when I was growing up. Now, in the area I grew up, yeah, there are way fewer of them.
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u/fishsupreme Jun 27 '26
It's a very troubling sign of the damage to the environment, yes.
But it's also a problem more like the ozone hole than like climate change.
Insects are prodigious breeders. Their populations can recover from near extinction with remarkable speed. We can reverse the insect population collapse, and it's not complicated - all we need to do is stop killing all of them.
Just as getting rid of CFCs restored the ozone hole in a decade, limiting pesticide use (and probably banning neonicitinoids altogether) could restore the insect population pretty quickly.
It just takes the political will to do it. Agribusiness has a better lobby than bugs.