When was the last time you had to clean bug splatter from your windshield? This ritual was once an inevitable coda to any long drive. Now, we’re far more likely to watch those same landscapes pass by through unblemished glass, mile after empty mile.
Blame for the crisis falls on broad biodiversity threats like habitat loss and climate change, as well as insect-specific challenges from light pollution and the rampant use of pesticides.
But [author of “The Insect Crisis” Oliver] Milman draws particular attention to the way industrial agriculture has transformed once-varied rural landscapes into vast monocultures.
Devoid of hedgerows or even many weeds, modern single-crop farms simply lack the diverse plant life necessary to support an insect community.
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Unchecked insect declines threaten massive crop failures, collapsing food webs, bird extinctions and more.
But as the ecologist Roel van Klink observes, “Insect populations are like logs of wood that are pushed underwater.”
Remove the pressure and they bob back up again, something Milman glimpses at the Knepp estate in Sussex, where restored, pesticide-free pastures and woodlands hum with so much life they’ve become a tourist attraction. “If you squint a little,” Milman writes, “addressing the insect crisis can be viewed as surprisingly straightforward.”
