Oliver Milman The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World (Atlantic Books, London, 2022, 260 pp)
This is a beautifully written book that ought to be widely read. It ought to set off alarm bells all over the place. As much as any single book since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), it makes starkly clear how reckless and destructive we are being as a species in our impact on the ecosphere. It does so with an easy to read, but cumulatively disturbing weave of interviews, anecdotes and telling data. Read it and you are unlikely to think of insects, including those you regard as pets, in quite the same way again.
Insects are of extreme antiquity in the biosphere. The earliest fossil insects date back some 400 million years, which makes them among the earliest terrestrial life forms. Bees have been around for hundreds of millions of years. So have cockroaches, mayflies, dragonflies. Ants, as the late Edward O. Wilson observed in his stunning study (with Bert Holldobler), The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies (2009), first appeared some 100 million years ago. The role of these creatures in natural food chains, waste management and our own agriculture is enormous. We are putting all that at risk, Milman shows, through our land use and ‘pest-control’.
The term ‘the Sixth Extinction’ has been in common use now for some years. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin disseminated the expression in 1996, with The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival. More recently, Elizabeth Kolbert reissued it, in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014). I can’t readily think of a book which has driven home more clearly just how real this is than The Insect Crisis. Quite simply, Milman argues, insects are fundamental, we disdain them, we exterminate them, their numbers are collapsing in a very large number of cases and the consequences – to which we are mostly oblivious – will be very serious indeed.
The book has nine chapters, following Milman’s Prologue: An Intricate Dance, Winners and Losers, ‘Zero Insect Days’, The Peak of the Pesticide, In the Teeth of the Climate Emergency, The Labor of Honeybees, A Monarch’s Journey, The Inaction Plan and A Human Emergency. If you read just one chapter out of the none, it probably should be ‘Zero Insect Days.’ If it doesn’t grab your imagination and get you thinking, you are a lost cause.
The chapter centres on a Danish ornithologist called Anders Pape Moller, who has spent half a century studying birds, especially barn swallows. Barn swallows consume prodigious quantities of insects. What Moller began to notice, as early as the 1980s, was that the insects seemed to be disappearing. In their wake, bird numbers began to drop as well. In 1996, he began a simply scientific experiment: driving a car along the same roads again and again and counting the number of insects that smashed into his windscreen.
He’s been doing this for more than twenty years. The results, when published, were stunning. Over that time interval, insect numbers, going by his proxy measure, dropped by 80 percent.
Early on, he would have to stop several times to clear his windscreen of insect bodies. As the years passed, however, there was a growing number of zero insect days – no insects smashed into his windscreen. As Milman remarks, this was a biological earthquake. ‘Insects had been almost completely erased from a seemingly stable, unchanged swath of Denmark’.
This is happening in wide stretches of our world. Bees were among the first to be noticed, because they are more visible than many other kinds of insect, more favourably regarded and vital to pollination for a wide range of crops. California’s Central Valley, the heartland of hyper-industrial, chemically-driven agriculture, now imports huge quantities of bees from across America, seasonally, to do its pollination, because its own insect population has been virtually wiped out.
How has this happened? Three key vectors are at the root of the problem: our own numbers and prodigious appetites, our modern practice of monocultures, which wipe away wilderness and the habitats of flowers, insects and birds; and the prodigal use of toxic insecticides, especially, in the 21st century, a species of insecticide called neonicotinoids. All these things are integral to what, in the 1970s, was dubbed the ‘Green Revolution’. We have increased food output enormously and now feed more human beings more or less adequately than ever before. But the ecological cost is high and rapidly closing in on us.
Read this book as a matter of some priority. Do so instead of reading your latest novel, whatever it is, or anything to do with mere human navel-gazing. This is a consequential story. The realities to which it points need to penetrate our collective awareness and alter the way we think about insects, birds, agriculture and our place in the larger scheme of things. Yes. It’s that significant.
Paul Monk is an analyst of world affairs, poet and speaker. He is the author of The West in a Nutshell and Credo and Twelve Poems among other books. His latest book, to be released this month, is an illustrated book of poetry, The Three Graces: Companionship, Discretion, Passion.