An Unnoticed Apocalypse
How recency bias blinds us to an unfolding crisis…
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? What if you DID hear it, but it was a few years back and you really can’t recall what it sounded like? Memory is fickle but history is fixed — so let’s fix our memories in place before we wake up to find tomorrow’s history made more fickle!
Enjoy!
An Unnoticed Apocalypse
This past September my father-in-law came to visit. After dinner one evening he offered to take the kids out for a walk around the neighborhood; as he tied his shoes he asked me if there were any nearby spots where they could watch fireflies.
The answer was on the tip of my tongue — the piney grove between two housing developments, just past the mailbox and where I had often seen those dull, almost incandescent, lights flashing on summer nights — but my words failed as I realized I’d not seen a single firefly amongst those branches in the entire past summer. I explained as much to him, and he said it was too bad before taking the kids for a walk around the block instead.
Outwardly I smiled and waved them off, but a sickening heat rose in my gut. Confused, over the next few days I asked others in the neighborhood if they'd perhaps seen a few fireflies this year. Their responses were uniform: a moment of reflection before confessing that no, they also had not seen a single firefly in 2023.
It was a foul mood I could neither articulate nor shake, an aching nostalgia tinged with the horror of creeping amnesia, that this once nightly miracle had not only vanished, but it had done so without me even noticing.
It only grew worse with time. A week later while watching my children at the playground, another parent called over a small boy to show us what he’d caught in his net box. He turned it upwards to reveal a single lost ant and a dead invasive moth amongst its ripped grass bedding. I came home to find two bumblebees twitching in their death throes upon the round golden pillows of a pair of my marigolds.
Setting Insectoid Expectations
My frustration found some semblance of structure in a recent interview Nate Hagens held with scientist Nick Haddad on insect population decline. It’s a fascinating conversation with two extremely salient points:
Insect populations have been declining at a rate of 2% per year for many years, and the trend shows no sign of stopping
The broader populace is unaware, except in the case of pollinators due to their (now struggling) role supporting agriculture
For the first point some evidence was presented in the form of broad annual field sampling programs, and possible measurement challenges mentioned in regards to the challenges of sampling aquatic and subterranean insects, but ultimately no scientific data is needed to verify the reality of the situation for any adult. Everyone born before 1970 remembers their parents having to pull off the road on a family trip so their father could wipe bug splatter off the car windshield, and ‘only 90’s kids will remember’ (as I do) being able to hunt several full sized grasshoppers in any suburban neighborhood in just a few minutes — the drifting haze of fireflies that greeted us each night, and just how much louder the crickets were as full sized orchestra. Walking in those same neighborhoods now you’ll be lucky to find a single grasshopper in an hour, and the nights are often eerily quiet.
The reasons why this is happening are equally obvious — mass use of glyphosate on every square inch of green in human sight, along with generalized habitat destruction. The problem is obvious; the solution is obvious. Yet those in power have no motivation to take any of the necessary actions to reverse this decline. We all can and must make changes on what small amount of the environment we do control, but ultimately this level of global ecological mismanagement is only something we can endure at the individual level.
Shifting Baselines
What most interests me is the second point however, how this all happened beneath our notice. The key culprit being the concept of ‘shifting baselines’, which is the gradual shift in expectations over time as to what a ‘normal’ ecosystem looks like.
2% less crickets chirping and bugs splattering on your windshield from one summer to the next is hard to observe at a casual level — and may even be appreciated for its slight convenience. It all seems fairly minor until the cumulative effect over a decade or more leads to truly drastic changes, most noticeable as the environment begins misfiring due to the collapse of a base layer in the form of crops stunted by lack of pollination, bird population decline, and large mammal extinction.
The creeping nature of shifting baselines is captured well by its originator, Daniel Pauly:
“An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct — it gets rare. So you don’t lose abundant animals, you always lose rare animals. And therefore they aren’t perceived as a big loss.”
Part of this memory issue is likely the result of an evolutionary pressure that selected for ancient humans who thought primarily in days and seasons, rather than decades and centuries, in order to maximize their own odds of survival in the often feast or famine world they inhabited. This was a very logical choice in the migratory hunter-gatherer setting, where the environment was never under the sustained pressure of agricultural human civilizations.
But for a decline that occurs over many decades, we are also limited by the challenges of communicating experiences across generations. I never experienced camping in an American forest in 1965 like my father did, and he rarely spoke of it. Similarly, he never encountered bison wandering the Kentucky wilderness the way the colonial longhunters often did. Each of us has only our childhood as a starting baseline.
Pauly also discusses at length the way our failure to treat historical accounts with enough seriousness contributes to this collapse of norms. Fisheries, for example, do not have any interest in incorporating ancient explorer accounts of oceans teeming with life and islands full of turtles ready to dragged aboard passing ships. And we also have the issue that historical texts often fail to document certain things precisely because they were normal.
Should this insect decline continue, how would my grandson ever know that car windshields could be covered with bug splatter? Unless I pass it on via the very fallible form of an oral tradition, would he ever know that praying mantis, just like bison living east of the Mississippi, used to simply be a common sight? Once just a small part of the background noise of our lives.
This is a profound loss. There is a great hideousness in the unnecessary death of so many animals and the many unknowable repercussions that lie ahead, but there is something even more evil in letting something so beautiful slip from the world unmourned. We recoil from the pain of loss, but there is power in mourning. In crying over a coffin we are empowered by the knowing of what we once possessed, even if that memory brings us anguish. To empower future generations with the knowledge of what has been taken from them is to both make them wiser and give them the framework to imagine that such a world could even be reclaimed.
Putting Stakes in the Ground
I see two solutions to the cognitive challenge that shifting baselines presents us with.
Firstly we need to be loud about it, obnoxious even. We must remind people again and again that ecological collapse is actively happening all around them, and why it is happening.
This can be expressed as educating one another on the concept of shifting baselines directly, or just trawling people’s memories on the ecological standards of past decades. People need to feel the pain to be acutely aware of what they are losing. It may also include documenting our specific circumstances through pictures, journals, and other concrete records of what normalcy was, is, and will become.
Secondly we must create sanctuaries from the destruction. In a direct sense this means islands not directly sprayed by glyphosate and its toxic competitors, but even more significantly this is a call for a shift in mindset. The existence of insect life should not be seen as a problem to be solved, but as a valuable resource. An abundance of pests is almost always a poverty of predators. Suburban neighborhoods love to pen in little corners as ‘wetland preserves’, but we should view every lawn and field of our towns as an opportunity to convert solar energy into thriving plant growth, which can then enter the living energy flow of the local ecology be being consumed by living things.
Replace stubby sterile grass lawns with insect habitat gardens — and not just for the cute little butterflies. This is a topic I will be aggressively experimenting with and sharing my progress on. I’ve remembered now. I’m gratefully in mourning and will preserve whatever small bounty of crawly, jumpy, noisily buzzing nature I can muster against the dark silence of the summer nights ahead.
Chilling to think about. Cicada and cricket populations come to mind. Some nights it can be just deafening, and some nights it is frightening how silent it is, breeding cycles or not.