Overcoming environmental doom and gloom
Environmental news is full of doom and gloom, with headlines that look something like: “Climate change will destroy life on earth”, “Another 10 species on the edge of extinction”, or “Massive oil spill poisons the Gulf”. Just reading stuff like this plummets my hope for the future of the planet. One area that has been especially depressing to read about lately is the collapse of insect populations. Every book, article, and study I’ve read on the subject talks about how insect abundance is declining every decade because of pesticides, climate change, and loss of habitat. I’ve even seen the decline near my home firsthand.
I noticed a haunting absence of insects in my daily life. They weren’t in my yard, they weren’t in the parks, and they definitely weren’t in the city. I started to believe they were actually gone, but I needed to see for myself if what I had been reading was true. Luckily for me, I landed a job studying bats in US National Forests, and since bats’ and insects’ lives are closely intertwined, I was hoping to get some answers.
At the start of my new job, I received a box of bat-detector microphones that I needed to get familiar with, so I went to my brother’s place to test one out. He recently purchased an old farmhouse in the woods with a few acres of un-mowed fields and a pond hidden in the grasses — an ideal place to find bats. My plan was to set up a detector near the pond and hope to record some echolocation calls away from the city noise. So, I went out there one afternoon and waded through the waist high grasses to get to the pond. I only needed to walk about 50 feet into the brush, but I moved slowly with constant stops to check for snakes near my feet and ticks on my legs.
However, after a few stops I noticed hundreds of grasshoppers were moving with me. Each step I took they would fly out of the grass, and when I stopped, they did too, like a big game of Simon says. I also saw butterflies, and a banana spider the size of my hand, and even a dragonfly perched on a decayed fencepost. The swarm of grasshoppers and friends distracted me from the thought of a copperhead biting my ankle. In fact, there were a lot of distractions, but eventually, I made it to the pond where I focused just long enough to set up my detector with no issues. I wasn’t ready to head back though, instead I walked further into the unkept grasses and continued to admire the healthy, non-collapsed, insect population I had wandered upon.
I spent at least two hours in that field, ignoring the fact it was 97F outside. I took blurry photos of some dragonflies to try and identify later, then I chased butterflies and forgot about the hours I had spent reading about their demise.
Throughout the summer I continued to travel to remote locations with my job. I visited ecosystems that were untouched by HOA’s, shopping centers, and pesticides. I saw places where insects still thrive, places that let me know insects are not done for.
Now I don’t let the environmental doom and gloom dampen my perspective of the future anymore. Yes, environmental news is incredibly depressing a lot of the time, but there is always hope. For example, the field behind my brother’s house was likely mowed and sprayed plenty in the past, but after a few months of letting nature be nature, the insects came back in an impressive way. So, no matter how bad things look, we’re not doomed, nature can heal, and it will if we let it.
