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posted by chromas on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the debug-the-planet! dept.

The first global scientific review of insect population decline was published[$] this week in the journal Biological Conservation. This is the first global study of its kind, and the term "impending catastrophe" would not be hyperbolic with respect to the findings:

Highlights

  • Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.
  • Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) are the taxa most affected.
  • Four aquatic taxa are imperiled and have already lost a large proportion of species.
  • Habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines.
  • Agro-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are additional causes.

For some time now we've been warned by scientists that pollinators are having a hard time, creating problems for humanity WRT many food sources. However, this study paints a far more dire picture with the possibility of irreparable harm to ecosystems on a global level. Without strong insect populations, it's not unreasonable to conclude that humanity may not continue either.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:42PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:42PM (#800089)

    if by "humanity" you mean a population of beings that can reproduce successfully with homo sapiens, and it's genetically diverse enough to not die out from "married my cousin" mutations, then humanity will continue.
    if only remote populations of eskimos/innuits etc, but still we can survive without insects.

    human "civilization"? I doubt it. In fact the biggest danger to humanity as defined above comes from the fact that many people will be staring starvation in the face, and they may just decide to fuck up the entire planet (i.e. nuclear weapons etc) out of spite.

    what can you do?
    accept that part of yearly crops will be eaten by insects, stop spraying everything with insecticide.
    start using a bike instead of a car.
    start eating locally grown food.
    dress approapriately for the weather and use less heating/cooling.
    eat less meat, especially beef.
    take your vacation as close to home as possible, or make it so that you can travel there by train/bus/boat instead of plane.
    lobby to have ocean transporters use sails in addition to fossil fuel based engines.

    I doubt that insects as a whole will go away, even if we do go nuclear, but I don't think it's worth going through the years when they are reduced to only a few survivors that can then evolve into new species (like mammals did when the dinosaurs went byebye).
    if we fight insecticide use and habitat loss due to climate change/agriculture, we can maybe save them.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:01PM (5 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:01PM (#800104) Homepage Journal

    Some of your points are reasonable, but not all. The biggest one is the "eat locally". While supporting local business is a good thing in principle, this does not make agriculture more efficient. Transport is the smallest part of agriculture, and all the rest benefits from mass production.

    Anyway, all of these problems have the same root cause: too many people on the planet. Countries and cultures that still produce more than two children per mother need to be reigned in. Education will help with this automatically, but in some cases more stringent means may be required. China's one-child policy was not wrong. The simplest, if cold-blooded, method would be to cut off any and all international aid, as long as countries populations are exploding.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:17PM (2 children)

      by looorg (578) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:17PM (#800113)

      China's one-child policy was not wrong. The simplest, if cold-blooded, method would be to cut off any and all international aid, as long as countries populations are exploding.

      It might have been ok in theory. Then the people fucked it all up by deciding that they all wanted boys and started to mass-abort female fetuses. Now they have a really messed up population mix. China is hardly alone in this. Mother nature needs to start some sort of self-correcting world war to get rid of a lot of the male surplus.
        Cutting aid to the developing world might work if one is just ok with large amounts of people starving to death, followed by them breeding even more offspring in the hope of at least one of them surviving -- sort of what they are already doing. So it might not really solve anything. Might be better in that case to just put some drugs in the food to prevent them from breeding. But then that would not go down well either as a solution.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:11PM (#800159)

        Exactly - thank you.

        The thing that reduces population is LESS poverty and MORE aid. The useless fucks that brought you austerity (only for the poor) are now shipping it abroad. It's really almost as if devastation and WW3 are really the goal. (Endtimes perhaps?)

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:07AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:07AM (#800466)

          Less poverty? Sure, and better education is a part of that mix, and a great predictor of reduced population fertility when the education is extended to women specifically.

          More aid? You're going to have to be one hell of a lot more specific about this. Lots of aid has been shown to be counterproductive because:

          a) Food aid in particular tends to reduce the incentive to farm, thus wrecking local economies
          b) Food and financial aid alike have an ugly way to enrich strongmen, and thereby either fail to improve or outright worsen the lot of the common populace
          c) Industrial aid ends up with massive debts, as a rule, usually cash losses on the parts of investors, and is a tool of geopolitics anyway

          Could you be a little more detailed?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:51PM (#800186)

      Tommy [wikipedia.org], is that you?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:07AM (#800465)

      Search for the research of Hans Rosling.

      The two things you can do to have the biggest impact on population growth are:
          1. Give women washing machines for their laundry.
          2. Give them western television programming.

      Seriously, look it up.
      Easy to do, low cost. A hell of a lot cheaper and quicker than that high-falutin education everyone keeps going on about.
        (Baby steps. We'll get to the education problem next.)

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:17PM (1 child)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:17PM (#800114) Homepage Journal

    You sound like my daughter. It's amazing, she buys almost all the food for her family. She's into the Organic Food, big time. And the Locally Grown. She goes to the Farmers' Market, she buys the Avocado. And the Banana. From the guys that grow them. And New York is amazing that way, it's a place where almost anything will grow beautifully.

    Bug spray, give me a little bug spray. Now they don't want us to do the spray. You know you’re not allowed to use bug spray anymore because it affects the ozone, you know that, right? I said, you mean to tell me, because you know bug spray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good. Today you put the bug spray on, it’s good for 12 minutes, right? So if I take bug spray and I spray it in my hotel, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer? "Yes," they tell us. I say no way, folks. No way. No way. That’s like a lot of the rules and regulations you people have in the mines, right? It’s the same kind of stuff.

    Let me tell you, we spray very heavily. And we're going to keep spraying heavily. Because it works. Used to work a lot better and we want to get back to that one. Because there are still folks that check in, they stay the night. And when they check out they say, "oh, bedbugs, so horrible!" And they'll show you the bites. The so-called bites. Because they don't want to pay. They want a free night. In one of the world's most luxurious hotels. Crooked! And I wish the bedbugs would all die. Why don't they die? So those bedbug scammers will have to come up with a new scam!!