#DaveGoulson gave a speech about #insects at #TheBigOne #climate demo on Saturday 22nd April. This is the text:
”I’ve got 5 minutes to talk to you about *insects*. I love insects, always have. Let me tell you a bit about them. Insects have been around for 480 million years, that means they are twice as old as the oldest dinosaurs. They’ve survived the previous 5 mass extinction events.
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Over the millennia they’ve evolved into a bewildering variety of forms, colours, shapes, beautiful, weird and wonderful. There are over a million known species, and we suspect there may be another 3 or 4 million awaiting discovery.
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Insects are *hugely* important—they are food for many larger creatures such as birds and bats, they help to control crop pests, they recylce dung, dead bodies, leaves and so on, help to keep the soil healthy, and of course they pollinate wildflowers and 75% of our crops. The world would grind to a halt without insects. Love them or loathe them, we need insects.
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Sadly, insect populations are in rapid *decline*. In Germany, the biomass of flying insets fell by 76% over just 27 years. Here in the UK, insect abundance has fallen by 60% in 20 years. The ranges of butterflies have shurnk by over 40% since 1976.
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More broadly, we are in the sixth *mass extinction* event, with species going extinct faster than they have for 65 million years, since a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. Every day, every hour, species go extinct. Drip by drip, the lifeblood of our planet is draining away.
So what is our *government* doing about it? Nothing useful.
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Our *civilization*, our children’s health and wellbeing, and the future of much of the life that remains on our planet, hangs in the balance. For at least thirty years it has been painfully obvious that we are heading for disaster, yet our response has been woefully inadequate. Successive governments have abjectly failed to grasp the importance of the threat we face.
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They just don’t get it. Therese Coffey recently gave permission for UK sugar beet farmers to use *neonicotinoid pesticides*—these are banned across Europe because they are so toxic to bees and other insects. her own scientific advisory committee—the ECP—repeatedly advised against this. So much for following the science. Meanwhile, we’re opening a new coal mine, prospecting for more oil and gas, dumping raw sewage into our rivers 800 times per day… I could go on. They just don’t get it.
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Raw sewage is being dumped in rivers and the sea. I agree the government seem to be going round in circles, a sign they are out of ideas.
