The insect crisis is one leg of the biodiversity loss problem that has cascading effects on the ecosystem and threatens human survival. To share the causes of and the solutions to insect decline, joining me this week is Oliver Milman, author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.”
Oliver is an environmental journalist based in New York City and writing for The Guardian, a British daily newspaper. The title of his book is a play on the name of naturalist E.O. Wilson’s famous essay “The Little Things That Run the World, ” which touted the importance of invertebrate conservation.
Oliver Milman is an environmental journalist and the author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.” (Photo Courtesy of Oliver Milman)
Oliver grew up in southern England, not too far outside of London, he says, and he had a fascination with bugs as many children do. “I was really into ants for a while, and I think I passed that on to my son,” he says.
Ants have an amazing ability to dig tunnels, creating complex colonies and a sense of a small town, he says. That interested him as a child just as it does his 7-year-old son now.
He says the environmental journalism beat gravitates toward flashy things like the climate crisis, polar bears, lions, giraffes, coral reefs and rainforests — things like that.
“Creepy crawlies — as we kind of rudely call them — are kind of there in the background holding up all this life, but we tend not to think about them as much,” Oliver says.
Until a few years ago, he didn’t think about them in a holistic way either, in terms of how insects bind the world together, he says.
Silent Crisis
The collapse of the insect population worldwide threatens everything from wild birds to the food on our plates. That alarming bit of information should be a wake-up call. It is happening fast, but people still see enough insects around them that they don’t recognize there is a problem. There are some insects that many people would be happy to see go away, without realizing how catastrophic it would be if we continue at the rate that we’re going. We’ve had incredibly large declines in a relatively short period of time as history measures it, and the consequences will catch up with us.
Through speaking to scientists in the field of conservation biology, it became clear to Oliver that insect decline is a silent crisis. He said it was going on in the background but needed to be foregrounded, and that’s what he sought to do with his book.
We connect in an empathetic way with the animals that are most like us, Oliver says. That’s usually mammals with big eyes, expressive faces — cuddly things that we can relate to on some level. When a large mammal like a tiger goes extinct, we tend to notice it, and it makes us sad because they are big beautiful animals. But it doesn’t affect the larger world. It would be a hideous crime to lose tigers, though the food system would not collapse around us.
“That’s why you have huge conservation dollars going towards orangutans and rhinos, rather than insects,” he says.
We don’t notice insect decline, but the loss of insects, collectively, can be devastating to ecology worldwide. Our forests and grasslands would collapse quickly without insects.
Insects, according to one entomologist Oliver spoke to for his book, are like aliens on Earth. “They are incredible looking,” Oliver says. “They are kind of cryptic a lot of the time. They have extraordinary abilities that if you saw a larger creature like a cockroach running around beheaded for two weeks, crawling into small spaces, running vertically up walls, you would think you’re in some kind of superhero movie, wouldn’t you? So they have these kind of incredible abilities that we can’t really relate to. And obviously, some of them annoy us and some of them sting and bite us, and so we kind of had this deficit of empathy.”
Insect decline has an invisibility, both in terms of the impact and the cause, Oliver notes. So it’s that much easier to miss.
“We’re killing off insects in huge numbers without even really realizing it in places that we would consider to be fairly safe for them,” he says.
The loss of insects is more difficult to notice and call attention to compared to large mammals and other charismatic animals. (Photo: Amy Prentice)
A Crisis on a Scale with Climate Change
The loss of insects is comparable to climate change in terms of scale, according to Oliver.
“Climate change causes havoc with our food system, with agricultural production. And so does insect loss, even more,” he says. “Climate change affects our surroundings in terms of dieback of certain animals, vegetation and so on — and so does insect loss.”
Research shows that some species of birds are declining due to insect loss, Oliver notes. “A lot of people love birds. So if you love birds, you should really care about insects too.”
Insect loss has cascading effects through the food web, which will reach humans.
The ranges of various native insect species are moving, growing or shrinking in response to changes in climate. (Photo: Amy Prentice)
Who’s Counting?
Oliver said that up until recently, no one was counting insects. Even scientists didn’t see the point in it because insects are everywhere. It is far more interesting to scientists to describe new species and look at behaviors and changes to habitats. Counting insects also seems like a monumental and tedious task, and was seen as rather pointless.
“Some of the studies that have come out in the last few years are really kind of instructive because they, for the first time, shine a light on what’s actually happening to insect populations,” Oliver says. “And some of those population drops are just astonishing.”
Oliver spoke to entomologist Brad Lister of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Brad visited the El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico in the 1970s to investigate insect populations. It is the only rainforest in U.S. territory and quite pristine.
Brad put plates with sticky substances on the forest floor and in the canopy and returned the next morning to see how many insects were stuck there.
“In the ’70s, they were kind of matted. These plates were kind of black with the insects,” Oliver says. “He went back a couple of years ago to repeat this experiment just to see if things had changed, and the contrast was astonishing. He said he was absolutely blown away by the change. It was just a couple of insects on these sticky plates in the morning.”
Brad discovered an 80% decline in insects in the canopy and a 98% decline on the forest floor, by biomass. A similar study in Germany in nature reserves in the height of summer found an 82% insect decline between 1989 and 1997.
Some scientists believe we are entering a sixth great extinction, and Oliver says insect decline is happening quickly in terms of evolutionary time scales. Many people have experienced this in their own lifetimes. They can recall road trips with their families when they would have to pull over to clean all the bugs off the windshield, but today, splattered bugs are no longer an issue because there are fewer bugs out there.
As a kid and into my early 20s hiking in the Piedmont region of the Appalachian Trail, I remember clouds and clouds of monarch butterflies. But now, in the 14 years that I have lived north of Atlanta, I can count the total number of monarch butterflies I have seen on just two hands.
Oliver points out that economic pressures in Mexico, where monarchs overwinter, threaten monarchs further. Logging is more appealing to many locals than monarch tourism.
A few studies and anecdotes don’t paint the full picture, as there is a data deficit, according to Oliver. “We know little about what’s happening in the world’s tropics, where a lot of the world’s insects live, but the snapshots we do have are pretty horrifying,” he says.
Monarch butterflies are threatened by pesticide use, particularly neonicotinoids. (Photo: Oliver Milman)
The Top Four Contributors to the Insect Crisis
- Climate change pushes insects into temperature bands that they have never been in before, altering their livable zone.
- Habitat loss, including both forest loss and the loss of wildflower-rich grasslands, devastates insect populations. Insect habitat has been largely destroyed for agricultural, residential and transportation uses.
- Pesticide use has poisoned the places where insects remained after their habitat was decimated. Pesticides, specifically neonicotinoids, are the chief contributor to monarch decline in the Midwest, a study released recently found. Pesticide use is something that is not out of our control. A few policy changes in the United States could have a huge impact, Oliver says.
- Light pollution, which is caused by human’s use of artificial light, has broken the hardwired evolutionary link between insects and night and day. When to emerge, feed, mate and migrate has all been confused by light pollution.
Grasslands with wildflowers have been lost due to habitat destruction. They are essential for the survival of many insect species. (Photo: Amy Prentice)
What Gardeners Can Do to Reverse the Insect Crisis
Insects can bounce back if we give them a break, Oliver says. One scientist told him the insect population is like a log in water with your foot on it; when you take your foot off, the log will float back up again quickly.
There are some common sense things that can be done, he says, like voting for people who are promising to act on pesticides, habitat loss and climate change.
If you happen to have a backyard, you can combat the insect crisis by planting native plants — the plants that insects are accustomed to. “Don’t be so zealous on cutting your lawn because insects like longer grass, and it looks nicer,” Oliver adds.
He also advises being aware of where your food comes from and valuing insects around children rather than demonizing them.
Gardeners and anyone who stewards land can help insects by keeping land wild and adding native plants where there are none. (Photo: Amy Prentice)
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Oliver Milman on the insect crisis, you can do so now by clicking the Play button on the green bar near the top of this post.
Have you experienced insect decline in your lifetime? Let us know your experience in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 071: Gardening for Wildlife: How-to Create an Inviting Habitat, with NWF’s David Mizijewski
Episode 077: The Beauty and Importance of Native Plants: The Ethos of Mt. Cuba Center
Episode 133: Native Plant Design in a Post-Wild World, with Thomas Rainer
Episode 134: Bird Population Decline and What Gardeners Can Do to Help
Episode 147: Monarchs and Milkweed: A Precarious Struggle Between Life and Death
Episode 152: The Native Plant Trust: Why Plant Choices Matter
Episode 232: Ecological Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, With Rebecca McMackin, Part I
Episode 233: Ecological Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, with Rebecca McMackin, Part II
Episode 237: Ecological Gardening: Creating Beauty & Biodiversity
Episode 244: Wasps: Getting to Know These Underappreciated Insects, with Heather Holm
Episode 252: The Underappreciated Value of Predatory Beneficial Insects in the Garden
Episode 258: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, with Dave Goulson
Episode 354: How Pesticide Regulations Fail Pollinators, with the Xerces Society
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Earthbound Expeditions: Discover South Africa with Joe Lamp’l
Fall Vegetable Gardening Masterclass webinar – Wednesday, July 31 – Two opportunities – Noon to 1:30 p.m. and 7 to 8:30 p.m., Eastern Time.
“The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World” by Oliver Milman
Oliver Milman on X | @olliemilman
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