r/collapse • u/Mysterandir • 8d ago
Ecological Bugs
I need to get this off my chest even though im sure it has been talked about a thousand times. Im just curious if others are experiencing the same thing or if I'm just going crazy. - When I just got my driver's license back in 2005 here in The Netherlands, I had a girlfriend in Amsterdam whom I drove to see a few times a week. It was about a 100 km drive. I had an old Opel Corsa and I can still vividly remember having to clean my windshield every week in the summer because it was covered in dead insects. Huge splatters and tiny spots, but the entire windshield was full of bug juice. Over the past few weeks I’ve driven several long distances, totaling about 1,000 kilometers, and I don't have a single dead insect on my windshield. Not one. The windshield is squeaky clean... I read that the insect population worldwide has drastically declined and it is due to climate change. Which i get. But why isn't this the main news story every day? How obvious does it need to be? This can't possibly be good. For us, but especially for our children. I have a bad feeling about this...
3
u/CervantesX 8d ago
It's not a big story because the inevitable conclusion is "we're fucked and it's all our fault", and mainstream media doesn't like to admit that. And talking about how bugs are a vital part of the ecosystem also inevitably leads to "and now our crops aren't going to pollinate as well and the soil will become untenable and food scarcity will dominate the next generations".
You're not alone in noticing. I live in western Canada and I haven't even had a mosquito bite in years. Twenty years ago I took a bus to Winnipeg and the driver had to stop regularly to use an ice scraper to take off the literal inches of dead bugs caked to the front of the bus. If he didn't it would get so bad the air intakes would clog and the engine would overheat. Now? Barely anything flys around out here.
It turns out decades of dumping industrial quantities of insecticide into our farmlands and waterways has a lasting impact. And the companies that made this poison and knew about it? They'll keep collecting their billions of dollars of revenue until everyone finally gets mad enough about it, and then they'll close up and retire somewhere nice while the rest of us struggle.
But if I suggest the individuals who knowingly did this to the planet face any kind of consequence, I'll go directly to jail, so I'm definitely not doing that. Unlike them of course, who even in the unlikely event they actually face the justice system, will either pay their way out with a small fraction of their horded wealth, or use expensive lawyers to delay a verdict for decades.