Book review: The Insect Crisis
The Insect Crisis, The Fall of the Mighty Empires that Run the World
by Oliver Milman
“A world without insects would be a particularly horrifying, grim place, and certainly not a place we would want to live in—and indeed it wouldn't be a place we would be able to live in.” - Oliver Milman
The recently released book The Insect Crisis is a wakeup call of the very real threat to our global ecosystem from collapsing insect populations across our already degraded planet. In his book Oliver Milman explores the little understood emergency of declining insect populations and argues that its consequences could rival climate change. The threat of an “insect apocalypse,” or “insectageddon” is very real and entomologists are frantically trying to figure out what is happening across our insect populations.
However, this book also offers hope and practical ideas to counter insect declines. As Milman writes, “addressing the insect crisis can be viewed as surprisingly straightforward” and he argues that doing things to help insects may not be necessary if we stop doing things that harm them. He also invites us to shift our environmental focus beyond the large, iconic creatures of the animal kingdom such as polar bears and pandas and consider the threats to these minute invertebrates. He also highlights how we continue to be fixated on domesticated insect species, such as honeybees, while largely ignoring the fate of their wild cousins the bumblebee.
Three out of every four of our planet’s known animal species are insects. In The Insect Crisis, journalist Oliver Milman ploughs through the increasing amount of data that suggests that insects are suffering their greatest existential crisis in their 400-million-year history. Of the world’s estimated 5.5 million to 30 million different kinds of insects, only one million have been identified to date and many will likely vanish before we have even named them.
The steep decline in insects not only further threatens our existence on our already polluted planet but reveals our fragile dependence on insects for our key food supply, medicines and our ability to sustain ourselves. Milman lays out in great detail in the book just how dependent we are on a number of insect species for their services of pollination, waste disposal, pest control and nutrient recycling. Many of the most unloved insects such as cockroaches, flies and wasps play crucial ecological roles and their continued decline will profoundly shape our lives in the future. Even mosquitos are critical pollinators to plants such as orchids and despite their reputation as mankind’s biggest killer only 10 of the 3,500 species of mosquito are responsible for transmitting diseases to humans.
Milman makes The Insect Crisis personal through his trips and conversations with often underappreciated scientists around the world who have been tracking insect declines. From the mountains of Mexico that host the dwindling, migration of monarch butterflies; to the rapid insect loss in the rainforests of Porto Rico; to the English countryside that has largely been emptied of insect life and vast monoculture crop fields. He reveals the story of ecologist Anders Pape Møller who has been systematically driving two Danish roads since 1996 in a Ford Anglia counting the windshield splats. Anders recent results show that collisions with insects had declined 80 percent along the first roadway, and a staggering 97 percent along the second.
The blame for the current insect crisis falls on a range of biodiversity threats like habitat loss and climate change, as well as insect-specific challenges such as light pollution and the excessive use of pesticides. Milman draws particular attention to the way industrial agriculture has transformed once-varied rural landscapes into vast monocultures that lack the diverse plant life necessary to support an insect community. As agricultural ecologist Barbara Smith put it in the book: “It’s like if the only food available was chips. Chips for everybody even if you don’t eat chips.”
However, the insect crisis is not a single downward sloping line on a graph and more like a lot of different lines. Milman explains that while many species are indeed plummeting, some are holding steady, zigzagging or for some pests like bedbugs that thrive alongside people are actually increasing. Many don’t appear on a graph at all because no one has ever studied them. In reality, insects will always be around, long after we’re gone, but exactly which species will be around is the question:
“Insects are being shifted to an unhappy state where there will be far more bedbugs and mosquitoes and far fewer bumblebees and monarch butterflies*,” Milman writes.
[*Note: Monarch butterflies were added to the endangered species list in July 2022].
As much as the rapid decline of insects is a crisis of pesticides and habitat loss, it is also one of indifference and neglect and of our failure to appreciate what is at our feet. A crisis scientist Dave Goulson has labelled the “unnoticed apocalypse”.
Milson does make real suggestions of the little things we can all do to make a difference for the future of our insects. Like letting our lawns go wild and leaving more leaves on the grass. Planting more native species. Avoiding pesticides whenever possible – and abandoning Roundup and other deadly pesticides. For farmers, its recognizing that insects have a value. Ultimately, we need to revise our worldview to embrace a messier more chaotic world that will be more attractive to insects.
In summary, this is a great book. It’s easy to grasp the key issues (highlighted with compelling examples) and is well written to appeal to a broad audience. I am sure this book will alter your attitude toward many insects as it has mine. I will definitely be going easier on weeds from now on and will also convert some of our lawn to wildflowers in an effort to improve the future prospects for our insects.
Black Teal Bay Books rating: 8.5/10
