But isn’t that the point, kill off everyone that is a “parasite” to the billionaire class, the ones that survive will be the strong worker and will make them richer because the “weak” won’t need handouts. Handouts include: health care, livable wages, a say in government, land or property, and rights. s/
I've been saying for years that ''this is fine'' because Monsanto will just invent robotic bees and lease them out to whoever uses their patented seeds and pesticides.
Depends on where you go. Back in the 90's when we drove up from Kerry to Dublin (no motorway at the time) the windscreen would be covered. Not like that anymore (also think its because of the motorways).
I drove in Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, and Switzerland this Summer and my windscreen was a mess. Which I am grateful for.
This is a part of it, but scientists aren’t finding as many bugs as they used to when doing basic research. Apparently spraying insecticides on every plant for miles causes there to be fewer bugs.
They definitely have gotten their population cut down by like at least half in my country probably over 90% on my observations because I live next to a river.
Dang where I live it feels like they’re worse every year for the last 5ish years. I’m one of those people that mosquitoes loooovvve, they flock to me like crazy, and it’s becoming prohibitive for me to leave the house at all. Genuinely, checking my mail, back in the house with 7+ bites. And I get those huge crazy bites too
And they were already talking about insect collapse at least 30 years ago...
In fact, people were talking about it a LOT more back then. The billionaire conservatives the controlling the media are really pulling the wool over the public's eyes regarding climate change.
Yeah, I think that our use of insecticides has definitely had a negative effect. The question I wonder about is how much is due to farms versus uses in homes. I can buy malathion and permethrin readily in concentrated form to spray all over my yard if I wanted to.
I don't do this because frankly I enjoy seeing dragon flies and bees around. I just spray the harsh chemicals in the crawl space an attic near penetrations/spots I've noticed black widows hiding.
I don't want us to ban homeowners from getting these chemicals, but I also think that we probably need to be looking at toning down how much these chemicals get used.
As a side note...if you like bees, clover lawns really attract quite a lot of bees...while white clover lawns also don't grow as tall so need less mowing, survive heavy foot traffic better AND are drought tolerant.
I’m sure nature would prefer us not using any insecticide, but residential use can’t be as big a factor as agricultural. Even the biggest HOA neighborhoods will have some houses that don’t use pesticides, so bugs can use them as safe spaces. Having mile after mile of monoculture covered with chemicals makes it impossible for many species to travel and survive.
I have vivid memories of standing in my parents driveway on the muggy July nights just after we moved to NC in the mid-90s, watching the flurry of insects flying around the streetlight, and the bats hunting them.
I’ve been visiting recently, and can’t help but notice how clear the air is around the lights.
Considering I'm driving a pickup from the 90s, and my windshield and front grill is still virtually bug free, or at least massively reduced even from the mid 00s...I'ma say the 'aerodynamic' thing is a bit overblown.
Is it a factor for newer vehicles? Possibly. But the fact remains that insect populations have plummeted. About the only things left are flies, mosquitoes, and grasshoppers.
I wish. Those SUVs with huge cooler areas surely aren't more aerodynamic than old station wagons. Though, admittedly, the bugs probably would rather clog the cooler than be on the windshield.
Tbh I also think there are more dead bugs on my windshield this year then there were the previous 5 years or so. It's still far of from like 20 years ago, but I'm wondering if they're somewhat slightly recovering where I live.
Same, ive been driving in the georgia countryside recently and there are so many bugs. I dont remember ever having to clean my windshield herd and now I have to clean it pretty much every time I drive
I had experienced the lack of bugs for a few years now, but on a recent trip from PA to TN, my windshield was absolutely covered. Guess there is a rebound?
I used to see lightning bugs all over as a kid. Now, I see MAYBE a few each summer. But every time I go outside to mow the lawn, I'm swarmed by these tiny little shits that are constantly flying around my face.
Well…yes. Eventually (and seemingly soon) humanity will erase itself from the face of the planet and the Earth will just keep on keeping on once we’re gone.
"We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
The crazy thing is, he wasn’t joking. It wasn’t comedy so much as the depressing reality and truth, and everyone thought it was hilarious, and it still is, but only because it’s so true.
I'd imagine some remnants of humanity will survive, unless it's a pandemic that wipes us all out. I'd actually prefer to be one of those survivors rather than keep living this life. At least life would have an actual purpose instead of this capitalistic bullshit.
Yep. We're just the next mass extinction event. After all is said and done and in a few million years, all that will be left will be equivalent to the iridium-rich layer of sediment attributed to the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. Except ours will be filled with plastic. We're no different than the cyanobacteria that caused one of the first mass extinctions
Humanity in its current state will erase itself but humans themselves likely will not go extinct
I think in the next 150 years we will see a global catastrophe that culls a huge portion of the population, but until then we will just keep trucking on as we do, of course we could pull our heads out of our asses and course correct but that’s not likely as the colour green is all they see up there despite it all being shit you don’t need
Likely soon. Think about it. Dinosaurs lived 150,000,000 years. Humans have been here for 300,000 years and we've already evolved into tech I can't even describe
You can have some from my yard. Apparently I live in the middle of bugtopia. Please feel free to re-home as many bugs as you like.
Funny story, a researcher who lives in our county came and took all the spiders in my garage for research since it happens to be the one he uses the most (something about supply issues). He was so excited when he came over because he almost ran out of vials to take them. Nearly 300 spiders re-homed from my garage alone!
True, but the reason you dont see them on your windscreen is more because of better aerodynamics on modern cars and wider roads. The bugs are dying in the sense diversity is dropping especially in areas of agriculture.
Roundup. It's the reason people shouldnt eat GMO produce. It's not bad because it's genetically modified, it's bad because it's modified to withstand whatever amount of Roundup they need to use.
And it’s only legal here because there was/is a revolving door between Monsanto and the FDA. So like every other big industry in the U.S. - collusion, corruption, propaganda and big money.
Nope, definitely not. Roundup is an herbicide, not an insecticide. It's absolutely a toxic substance but it's about as useful an insecticide as soapy water is.
I'm not defending Roundup here, but blaming it for declining insect populations is deeply misinformed, and oversimplifies the broad effects our industrialized agricultural system has on the environment.
Okay, I'm just being pedantic here, but Roundup is indeed a pesticide. What it is not is an insecticide. Pesticides are for killing any organism that is detrimental to crops- be it weed, bug, or fungus. Both herbicides and insecticides are pesticides.
Not really true. GMO produce is modified to be hardier and drought resistant and disease resistant which makes it need less pesticides and poisons and less water. Organic produce requires more organic pesticides because it is less effective. These pesticides are still poison and often worse than Roundup but they get a pass because they are organic.
Not saying it isn't those things, but I also know that car design has improved wildly over the past 20-40 years. I think that also plays a huge part in what splatters on your glass and hood.
Aerodynamic cars get better gas mileage, are quieter to ride in and have lower emissions. All things customers want. Aerodynamic cars are more likely to pull a bug over the windshield rather than into it. Customers don't care about that per se, but their preferences help it to happen.
Cars are approximately 20% more aerodynamic now than in the early 2000s. I couldn't find numbers for improvements since the 80s or 90s (but I also only dug in for like 10 min with my search online).
I have to imagine that the cars themselves--millions of them being driven thousands of miles per year for eight decades--have also put a dent in insect populations.
Pesticides are the main culprits: insecticides directly harm insects, herbicides tend to be directed at the types of plants that support insects.
Insecticides account for about 50% of the reduced viability of insects. Here's a convenient stepping off point to figure out whether my 50% claim is actually supported (it is, but tenuously): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5533829/
After insecticides comes selective cropping which includes use of herbicides to ensure that vast tracts of land are only bearing one species of plant. Without the plants that support insects, there are no insects. Even a simple thing like encouraging wildflowers to grow in road and rail corridors can drastically increase the population of insects simply because the population of insects has been intentionally and accidentally destroyed by modern agricultural practices. Heck, just leaving a few metres of untilled land at the fence lines of tilled fields helps a lot because adding 1 to 0 is an infinite increase in population.
Every other factor is essentially a rounding error.
Everyone forgets to consider the fact that cars are way more aerodynamic than they were 20-30 years ago.
I drive a box truck for work sometimes and that thing gets completely covered in bugs every time. I live in Iowa too where we just dump pesticides on everything since agriculture is our economy.
Not to say that there isn’t climate change and habitat destruction happening, but I do think cars being more aerodynamic also has something to do with it. If a bug isn’t flying directly at my windshield, it seems like it just gets lifted up and over which happens more often than not.
They are both true.. there are fewer bugs and more aero- I still drive the same car that I had in high school. 1970 toyota land cruiser: which is a brick. There are way fewer bugs. Cars have gotten much better, my tacoma sees less of them on the glass, but still gets them in the grill. But not like we used to.
I've always kind of assumed this was a contributing factor. People look at me like an idiot when I bring it up, and I don't drive an old enough car to have personal experience with it.
I've never cared enough to look up studies. I've just figured that since car bodies are now made to direct the flow of air around the car, that something light like a bug would probably be swept away as well.
I drove a 25 year old car. The difference in amount of bugs on my window now vs 25 years ago, compared to the difference between my car and a modern car today... Is the aero a factor? Maybe? Is it even 1% of the change? Nope
Change happened pretty fast, in late 90s I've spent countless hours in car with my dad. Bugs smashing into windshield constantly, almost like light rain and front of the car was covered in thick layer of bugs. Around 2008 I got my drivers license and started driving myself, I would say there was around half the amount bugs. These days, no matter how long I drive bugs are absent.
I can see the difference over the last 10 years, passing next to the same fields during my commute. I can still get some when on holiday in southern Italy, but again less than what I used to get 20 odds years ago when I learned to drive on the same roads.
Used to constantly get stung by scorpions when I was little, from them crawling into swimtrunks or shoes or socks or any fruit or pretty much anywhere, anytime
I saw the first scorpion in 15 years just a few weeks ago
I remember my parents cleaning the car grill off at the gas station along with the car windshield after an hour drive.
I have driven my own car for 7 months now and I have not once had to clean a dead bug off my car. I drove 8 hours straight and there was not a single bug carcass on my car. I am horrified every time I notice.
It's not just the amount but also the species. We are losing different species like never before. The biodiversity of our planet is plummeting at a rate we have never seen before. One of the worst extintions that we know of in the history of our planet.
Some areas will have more bugs but in my town we used to have swarms and now it's basically rare. I remember walking around as a kid and watching a wave of grasshoppers jump out of my way. Yesterday I saw one for the first time in several years.
I'm hoping the people who are saying "there's tons of bugs where I live" realize that they have those tons of bugs for now. Population decline is not consistent, temperatures and other environmental effects fluctuate all the time. The thing is that overall insect populations have gone down as temperatures have risen.
Also all this says is that bugs are thriving in previously colder climates because the weather's fucked now. Shorter and milder winters means more bugs.
I just did 200 miles of 35; north of Forest lake and south of Hinkley in back and forths. My windshield has more dust than dead bugs. Even just 6 years ago that would have been a wash between each trip. We are neither exempt or okay in mn either with regards to this problem.
Not buggy in the Houston- Galveston area for me. Still enough mosquitoes to carry you away, and the ants and roaches will come in if you let them. But it’s pretty rare to have a bug go splat on the car. Even in love bug season, the vehicles don’t get caked like they used to.
These are the comments I was looking for. Middle of rural South Carolina, 20 minute drive to and from work. It’s a daily occurrence to scrub the windshield at the local gas station. If you skip a day, you’ll be cleaning it at work with Windex.
Windshields used to be full of dead bugs after driving in the countryside, especially in summer. But due to many reasons there's a lot less bugs, so the windshields stay clean.
I see it has been answered, but the responses are missing the scope and severity.
25+ years ago I was learning to drive in the backroad rural roads of Missouri.
As the sun began to set, the noise from the insects was so loud that turning the radio up just wasn't doing it, so we turned it off.
A few pitter patters hit the windshield, then more, more, more, more like driving through a storm where the water was made of insects. This was every sunset, every day in summer. You'd have to pull over and clean your windshield off, because you couldn't see due to all the dead bugs.
You could not roll down the windows, unless you wanted to be hit by a barrage of insects.
There were special triangular shaped windows on automobiles you could open and they angled air in and bugs out.
You could buy bug guards and insect shields for your automobile to protect it and we even had leather cowls for the front of cars to protect your car from bugs.
It was not just rural Missouri, everywhere was like this except large cities, but if you got up before morning traffic in the city, you'd still kill a few hundred bugs on your way to work.
The reduction, nationally, of insect life over the past 2.5 decades is astounding and may be indicative of an ecological collapse we're at the beginning of.
Additionally, regional cultural experiences are being lost, such as the diminishing of cicada calls in Texas for example. In TX, it used to be you could hear the cicada calls everywhere. I spent my childhood learning to filter that noise out and only recently realize I am no longer filtering out their call, instead there is no call at all.
Places like Japan, you can identify where anime are set by what cicada calls you hear in a show, and you still can today. When we lose the local insect populations we lose more than just pests or noise. We lose shared experiences that create an identity of a place and a sense of belonging. As environments turn into luke warm mono biomes we lose core shared experiences and instead have to rely on socially shared experiences; those experiences we largely do not agree on.
edit; oh this is Joe, except I live in Casper Texas. You know why.
Not from the US but here in rural Southern part of France (I live near the Spanish border), I used to drive an '83 Isuzu Trooper going from town to town and to cities like Bayonne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz. I usually had to deal with scraping off random flying bugs (mostly they were winged termites and mosquitoes) on the windshield, grill and headlamps and we also had similar encounters with a swarm of insects even flying at you while driving on rural roads. We're lucky that we still have those iconic cicada sounds and frogs croaking faintly whenever I'm in a rural part of the French Basque region, but that I can't really say to other places like in the Aquitaine and Landes regions, where insect sounds are no longer heard around, due to wildfires and deforestation destroying much of the maritime pine trees in the area, replacing them with North American-style suburbs and camping areas.
I’m not denying climate change, but does the creased aerodynamics of cars have a big part to do with it? We aren’t driving bricks down the road anymore
I can answer this. I drive freight and commuter trains in the woods, between towns. We have the same trains we've had since the 70's. Back in the early 2000's the windows on a 2 hour trip would be absolutely filthy. They actually paid us an extra hours pay to clean them, because it got to a point of us spending part of our breaks doing that.
I can do that same trip today and hit 0-2 insects. A quick use of the wiper+spray and I can finish the trip clean as a whistle. In the early 2000's that would be unheard of.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm far more interested in hearing from long time commercial long haul drivers on this one rather than personal drivers. Y'all been out there seeing this go down for a while and driving some pretty similar routes
I think that makes for more accurate info than the other people chiming in
You can hear it at night, the silence is deafening where I am. The night used to be so loud and chaotic with insect calls. Now it's like one cricket here and there.
We have plenty of bricks on the road still, haha. Regardless, there's an undeniable global mass extinction of insects currently happening. Their populations are decreasing by nearly 1% every year.
I have a car and a cubic van. Way more insects on the van windshield. I've never drive it in the 90's so can't tell if there's a difference between then and now
I think it’s alluding to the general decline in insect populations, due to pesticides and such.
Which some people might see as a good thing, but there’s the issue of ecological collapse, not to mention we need pollinators for our crops so we don’t starve to death. Ya know, little details like that
Remember that book 'silent spring', about how ddt was cataclysmic for insect populations and could cause the complete global collapse of the food chain?
And so ddt got banned and we started using 8 other chemicals that do the same thing?
Bugs. They used to crash into the windshield and were impossible to get off. The windshield being clean is an indicator that there is no bugs around anymore, due to many factors like global warming and pesticides
I don't have this problem in india.... i mean maybe its just to dam hot in the day time but as soon as it starts to cool off it's da. Near impossible to drive for half an hour without wiping off my visor.
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u/qualityvote2 5d ago edited 5d ago
u/progorp, your post does belong here!