WHERE have all the beetles gone? No, it is not a bad spell for the Fabulous Four — The Beatles. After all, Liverpudlians do come and go singing one song or the other. I am talking of something we consider less fabulous, but indeed are more: beetles. And, of course, insects in general.
Yes, insects are disappearing. I am no entomologist but I know an insect when I see one. And the insects, and animals too, know humans when they see us. Only that we are not gifted enough to know that. Those who own cows know this. They shed tears when their owners are about to die. Call it the bovine sixth sense. Oh, do not go killing the cows, we will die anyway. Eventually.
One famous biologist, whose name I forget, said of insects that they are the little things that run the world. And we are the big things that overrun their world. If scientists’ estimates are right, there are some 120 billion of the little things around. Or should I say were around?
Look at us. We clear the forests with no thought for them. When trees are felled, the bees have no nectar to feed on and none to take home to other bees. The honey comb must remain a distant dream. You see, when the bees suckle for nectar, they think of us.
They pollinate flowers to turn them into fruits so that we can feed on them. We digital kinds say that they are programmed to do so. We check into their world any time we like just to make them leave.
We selfishly coat plants with poisonous pesticides, killing the insects slowly but surely. But we do not realise that we are killing the planet that houses us and everything in it that feeds us. Yes, we are ruining the manna from heaven.
We, who live in a very networked world, fail really miserably to understand that everything is connected with everything else.
No insects means no food for birds. No birds no... dung beetle. We must be the most disconnected species on Earth.
Is it any surprise we are facing a great ecological disaster? Little wonder the United Kingdom’s The Economist saw it fit to scream in print: Is insectageddon imminent?
The New York Times sounded a similar alarm a year earlier: The insect apocalypse is here. The Guardian too, came screaming: Plummeting insect numbers “threaten collapse of nature”.
The message: there is ample evidence to show the Earth is spiralling out of control.
One place to find such evidence is the journal of Biological Conservation.
Reviewing 73 historical reports of insect declines across the globe, Francisco Sanchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney, Australia, and Kris A.G. Wyckhuys of Beijing’s Academy of Agricultural Sciences said 40 per cent of insect species were threatened with extinction over the next few decades.
Butterflies and moths come in for really bad treatment in Europe and America. If you think Malaysia is spared, think again.
The review’s bad news is this: moth population in Mount Kinabalu was down 19 per cent between 1965 and 2007. What has happened since then is anybody’s guess.
As the climate gets warmer, even in Mount Kinabalu, the moths are moving higher to their death and decline.
We are very good at being inhospitable.
Those old enough will remember Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a season silenced by pesticides and herbicides. She was writing of the 1960s. Today, we have added more than five decades of grime and dirt to what was already there.
But she was right: some of our children do not know what the sounds of birds are. A generation after Carson does not know what bugging people mean.
Carson was a brave woman. You must be to take on an industry as big as the chemical industry. The environmental movement of today owes a huge debt to her.
When Carson saw things go out of kilter, she put pen to paper so that people would know who are causing us to lose balance. Contamination of the Earth may have started earlier, but Carson etched it in our memory.
This is no ode to a woman, but thanks to this, Pennsylvanian DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is just a bad memory.
According to one estimate, two thirds of life forms are insects. Wipe them out, and 80 per cent of our plants, which are angiosperms or flowering plants, will disappear.
Remember: more than half of the human diet is from flowering plants. Think rice, fruits and vegetables. Animals eat them too.
E.O. Wilson, the entomologist of entomologists, warned us long ago: If mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate. If the insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. We were not listening then. We are not listening now. Perhaps we never will.
The point is this: insects are heading down the path of extinction. If they go, so will we. The choice is ours to make. And the blame, too, is ours to take.
The writer is NST leader writer