WYSIWYG and Armageddon

You’ll recall that once we had all jumped a step beyond our Radio Shack TRS-80’s and into a world of IBM’s or Mac’s, we were able to print exactly what was “on screen.”  Millennials will not comprehend this or several other facts in this post, but it’s true.

“WYSIWYG,” said an IBM IT guy to me back in 1978 or ‘79.  “That means ‘What you See Is What You Get,’ and that printer over there with the continuous roll of tissue-thin printing paper running on sprocket wheels will print exactly what you see on your screen.”  Remarkable! And I.T.?  That wasn’t even a term yet. 

Transition: a group of amateur science sleuths in Denmark decided to embark on a rather creative experiment to see if their worst suspicions were confirmed by the very concept of what one sees on the screen is what one has now.  The plan?  To drive through various habitats – “urban areas, forests, agricultural tracts, uncultivated open land and wetlands” with a band of volunteers to see if “something from the past (was) missing in the present.”

Any of us remembering the summer Sunday drives with the family or the long-distance road trips along venerable highways to “see the USA in a Chevrolet” will attest to the carnage of insects – beetles, butterflies, grasshoppers, gnats, etc. - covering the windshield and grill of the metal wagon like a bizarre Jackson Pollock painting.  But, today?  Make that drive and the need to pull over to the station and use the rough edge of the window squeegee is not nearly as necessary, if necessary at all. They’re gone, or going quickly. The insects.  In fact, entomologists have coined “the windshield phenomenon” to simplify the growing comprehension of the realization of change/loss.   

In a recent New York Times Magazine article entitled “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” writer Brooke Jarvis provides a pandemic warning of what is likely to come and how we all got to this point without noticing.  Especially loved insects like the Monarch butterfly are carefully watched, monitored and raised by thousands of people as a result of their declines. But the fondness for an orange and black wing is not simply an aesthetic; Monarchs provide needed pollination of untold numbers of plants upon we and other creatures depend. “In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarchs fell 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87% over the same period.”    

“Biologists suspect we’re living through the sixth major mass extinction. Earth has witnessed five, when more than 75% of species disappeared. Palaeontologists spot them when species go missing from the global fossil record, including the iconic specimens shown here. “We don’t always know what caused them but most had something to do with rapid climate change”, says Melbourne Museum palaeontologist Rolf Schmidt.”

The fifth (or last) great extinction took place 66 million years ago with a loss of species figured by fossil record at 76%.  Volcanic activity, climate alterations, and a final asteroid impact destroyed the dinosaurs and killed off most ammonites (think of one surviving species: chambered nautilus).  

Jarvis writes, “We’ve named and described a million species of insects, a stupefying array of thrips and firebrats and antlions and caddis flies and froghoppers and other enormous families of bugs that most of us can’t even name. (Technically, the word “bug” applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species that have tubelike mouths for piercing and sucking — and there are as many as 80,000 named varieties of those.) The ones we think we do know well, we don’t: There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles, so many that the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly quipped that God must have an inordinate fondness for them. A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet — that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.”

Not surprising, that is also part of the problem: the profusion of insects makes their decline over a longer period of time seem unlikely or worse, unnoticed.  Add to that the nature of scientific inquiry with long-term tracking studies of five years or less, then so much can occur unseen.  Likewise, we humans occupy such a ephemeral niche along the timeline of our earth, we notice little if any changes around us.  Jarvis also cites an experiment of consequence: 

“A 1995 study, by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman, of the way some children in Houston experienced pollution summed up our blindness this way: ‘With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm.” In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called “shifting baseline syndrome.’ The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen’s faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.’”

If climate change is culpable as one source for the increasing decline in insect populations, another factor is certainly the use of powerful insecticides and herbicides developed by three major companies: Bayer, Syngenta, and Monsanto.  “Neonicotinoids (aka neonics) are one of the most common pesticides used in agriculture and are also used extensively by home and garden centers. Unbeknownst to consumers, many “bee-friendly” garden plants have been pre-treated with these bee-killing pesticides. Exposure to neonics can kill bees directly and also makes them more susceptible to other impacts like pests, diseases, loss of habitat and a changing climate.”

“Glyphosate (a.k.a. Monsanto’s Roundup®) is the most widely used herbicide in the world. In the United States, glyphosate is wiping out milkweed, which monarch butterflies rely on as the only food for their young. Use of glyphosate has increased dramatically in the past two decades since Monsanto has launched corn, soy, canola and cotton products genetically infused with Roundup.

“Organophosphates are a class of toxic nerve agent pesticides that threaten human health and the environment. The EPA was set to ban all uses of chlorpyrifos (an organophosphate) nationwide until the Trump administration reversed that decision. This class of pesticides is so toxic that even the smallest doses lower children’s IQs, increase risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and learning disabilities, and structurally change the parts of the brain that control language and memory. Organophosphates are toxic to wildlife, including pollinators, birds and aquatic organisms — and chlorpyrifos poses a risk to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.” Maryland, Connecticut and Minnesota have all passed laws to protect pollinators from these chemical killers. Has Illinois?

And yet, the more horrifying outcomes of Jarvis’ article is not so much that millions of the multi-millions of six or eight-legged creatures are going, gone; but, instead, the obvious cascading effect of this loss.  The likely omega of this willful human ignorance?

“When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of “collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems” — spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where ‘the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing’ despite mass starvation and resource wars. ‘Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age,’ he adds, ‘the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs.’” 

In the amateur driving experiments through the woods and lands of northern Europe, the results were a sixty times loss of arthropods collected by net (instead of windshields). “It’s easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it’s sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.” ‘It was, you know, devastating,’ Lister told me. But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.’” 

I look out at my small chickadees, feisty wrens, acrobatic nuthatches, crimson cardinals, and so many, many others.  All of them dependent on insects at one time or another.  And then, to contemplate the great web of being to which we all belong, I feel greatly concerned. 

“By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species — including freshwater fish and a majority of birds — that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?”

Take a look at what Minnesota has done.  Give a call to your Illinois senator, representative, and Governor Pritzker to follow their lead.  Thank you.

Or...Go to Friends of the Environment to get involved.