Source: The Guardian
Biodiversity is not an optional extra. It is the web that holds all life, including human life.
The most recent study concluded that insect biomass is decreasing around the world at a rate of 2.5% a year. At that rate, half the insects in the world will be gone in 50 years’ time, and all of them in a century – although no one will be keeping track of centuries then.
The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history. In a major WWF report 59 scientists worldwide estmate Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilization.
Insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.
The threatened extinction of insect populations around the world raises the prospect of a much more general catastrophe, which would implicate plants, birds, fish, small mammals, and everything else that depends on insects. That’s just the start. Other species, and we ourselves, depend on the animals and plants that need insects. When they go, we go. This is not just a greater catastrophe. It’s a much more plausible one.
What might accurately be dubbed insectageddon is being driven by the agrichemicals industry. This situation is compounded by compliant politicians and policymakers who fall prey to lobbying pressure and then refuse to implement science-driven policy to protect wildlife. This has meant that over the past five decades conventional farmers have forgotten the natural systems they once relied on to control pests. Non-organic agricultural systems are highly dependent on chemicals, so feeding a vicious circle.
The agrichemical industry is literally writing pesticide assessments that are then presented as the work of regulators. For example, a recent report exposed how EU regulators based a decision to relicense controversial glyphosate on an assessment plagiarised from industry reports. Around 50% of some chapters were actually a copy-and-paste job from papers Monsanto and other agrichemical corporates had written.
Agrichemical companys are solely profit driven and blind to the fact that killing any aspect of the biodiversity web itself will undermine other interlinked species. So for example to ensure that some key crops such as wheat are not troubled by insect predators, they are wiping out the very insects that crops such as oilseed rape need to be pollinated and to produce their flowers and oil-rich fruits.
Tearing apart the web of life damages us all. Only a farming system that views itself as part of this web has a long-term future, and only organic farming does that.
The chief driver of this catastrophe is unchecked human greed. For all our individual and even collective cleverness, we behave as a species with as little foresight as a colony of nematode worms that will consume everything it can reach until all is gone and it dies off naturally.
The challenge of behaving more intelligently than creatures that have no brain at all will not be easy. But unlike the nematodes, we know what to do. The UN convention on biodiversity was signed in 1992, alongside the convention on climate change. Giving it the strength to curb our appetites is now urgent.