Insects are essential but rapidly disappearing

>>> From Damian Carrington, The Guardian, February 10, 2019

Exclusive: Insects could vanish within a century at the current rate of decline

Why are insects in decline, and can we do anything about it?

The world’s insects are going down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But 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, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”

The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, who wrote the review with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.

The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”

One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.

The new analysis selected the 73 best studies done to date to assess the insect decline. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit. For example, the number of widespread butterfly species fell by 58% on farmed land in England between 2000 and 2009. The UK has suffered the biggest recorded insect falls overall, though that is probably a result of being more intensely studied than most places.

Bees have also been seriously affected, with only half of the bumblebee species found in Oklahoma in the US in 1949 being present in 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since.

There are more than 350,000 species of beetle and many are thought to have declined, especially dung beetles. But there are also big gaps in knowledge, with very little known about many flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs and crickets. Experts say there is no reason to think they are faring any better than the studied species.

A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses. “There are always some species that take advantage of vacuum left by the extinction of other species,” said Sanchez-Bayo. In the US, the common eastern bumblebee is increasing due to its tolerance of pesticides.

Most of the studies analysed were done in western Europe and the US, with a few ranging from Australia to China and Brazil to South Africa, but very few exist elsewhere.

“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.” He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached “alarming proportions” over the last two decades.

He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: “They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs.” This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.

The world must change the way it produces food, Sánchez-Bayo said, noting that organic farms had more insects and that occasional pesticide use in the past did not cause the level of decline seen in recent decades. “Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems,” he said.

In the tropics, where industrial agriculture is often not yet present, the rising temperatures due to climate change are thought to be a significant factor in the decline. The species there have adapted to very stable conditions and have little ability to change, as seen in Puerto Rico.

Sánchez-Bayo said the unusually strong language used in the review was not alarmist. “We wanted to really wake people up” and the reviewers and editor agreed, he said. “When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”

Other scientists agree that it is becoming clear that insect losses are now a serious global problem. “The evidence all points in the same direction,” said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK. “It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or loathe them, we humans cannot survive without insects.”

Matt Shardlow, at the conservation charity Buglife, said: “It is gravely sobering to see this collation of evidence that demonstrates the pitiful state of the world’s insect populations. It is increasingly obvious that the planet’s ecology is breaking and there is a need for an intense and global effort to halt and reverse these dreadful trends.” In his opinion, the review slightly overemphasises the role of pesticides and underplays global warming, though other unstudied factors such as light pollution might prove to be significant.

Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford University in the US, has seen insects vanish first-hand, through his work on checkerspot butterflies on Stanford’s Jasper Ridge reserve. He first studied them in 1960 but they had all gone by 2000, largely due to climate change.

Ehrlich praised the review, saying: “It is extraordinary to have gone through all those studies and analysed them as well as they have.” He said the particularly large declines in aquatic insects were striking. “But they don’t mention that it is human overpopulation and overconsumption that is driving all the things [eradicating insects], including climate change,” he said.

Sánchez-Bayo said he had recently witnessed an insect crash himself. A recent family holiday involved a 400-mile (700km) drive across rural Australia, but he had not once had to clean the windscreen, he said. “Years ago you had to do this constantly.”

How much plastic is in our garbage?

From the Press Release, WVU Today, April 25, 2018

West Virginia University English professor Stephanie Foote has been named one of the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellows for her work related to cultural production in and around the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activity has had a global effect on Earth’s climate and environment.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York awards the high-profile fellowship, known as the “brainy award.” Foote was chosen from among 270 nominees from across the country and is the first WVU professor to receive the prestigious recognition.

The fellowship recognizes “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to some of the most pressing issues of our times, shows potential for meaningful impact on a field of study and has the capacity for dissemination to a broad audience.”

Each member of the class of 31 scholars will receive up to $200,000 in order to devote time to significant research, writing and publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

“Stephanie Foote is the most recent example of how West Virginia University’s faculty are finding creative and exciting ways to address the challenges that face modern society,” said President E. Gordon Gee. “It is an example of the tremendous quality of our faculty research and a reminder of the power that higher education has to transform our state and the world.”

Provost Joyce McConnell called the Carnegie Fellowship “an exciting next step” for Foote, who has already been recognized as a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where she is in residence this year.

“Stephanie Foote’s work is both urgent and important to our region,” McConnell said. “More than that, it has tremendous potential to change the way we think about our place in the world.”

For Foote, Jackson and Nichols Professor of English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, the fellowship will support her research in the emerging field of environmental humanities.

She will complete her third book, “The Art of Waste: Narrative, Trash, and Contemporary Culture,” which argues that garbage, perhaps the most ubiquitous feature of contemporary life, is the richest, most powerful text of our time.

By paying close attention to garbage, we can trace the histories of the global and local circulation and transformation of raw material, the human costs of making, using and discarding commodities and the intense anxiety about personal responsibility toward environmental toxicity embodied by trash.

Further, these stories allow us to grasp the ethical challenges driven not only by physical consequences on the world, but also by our investments in the material world.

Foote looks at social, medical, psychological, industrial, historical, literary and statistical evidence. For example, she analyzes a broad range of data from how garbage circulates globally, to records of how it is burned, buried, salvaged or resold, to psychological models about the intensity of our relationships to objects and how it expresses our cultural values.

“I use the stories garbage tells and the stories that we tell about garbage to explore a broad range of cultural narratives about human choices and environmental degradation,” Foote said. “If literary creation is the sign of human civilization, garbage is the visible sign of its costs.”

In addition to completing her book, Foote is planning to use the fellowship to fund the establishment of a public humanities website and the formation of a working group to where scholars can collaborate on issues related to the environmental humanities.

She will also organize a symposium in which scholars, activists and citizens from the Appalachian coal-producing region can exchange ideas about the global and local circulation of garbage.

-WVU-

Anthropocene Working Group honorary chair Colin Waters says the geological reality of the Anthropocene is now clear.(NASA Photo)

From an Article by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams, October 2, 2017

From climate change to invasive species to changes in the planets fundamental chemical cycles, the markers indicating profound change make clear that the Holocene is over.

A group of scientists says that the scope of human impact on planet Earth is so great that the “Anthropocene” warrants a formal place the Geological Time Scale.

“Our findings suggest that the Anthropocene should follow on from the Holocene Epoch that has seen 11.7 thousand years of relative environmental stability, since the retreat of the last Ice Age, as we enter a more unstable and rapidly evolving phase of our planet’s history,” said Professor Jan Zalasiewicz from the University of Leicester’s School of Geography, Geology, and the Environment, in a statement released Monday.

The scientsts write:

We conclude that human impact has now grown to the point that it has changed the course of Earth history by at least many millennia, in terms of the anticipated long-term climate effects (e.g. postponement of the next glacial maximum: see Ganopolski et al., 2016; Clark et al., 2016), and in terms of the extensive and ongoing transformation of the biota, including a geologically unprecedented phase of human-mediated species invasions, and by species extinctions which are accelerating (Williams et al., 2015, 2016).

Defining characteristics of the period include: marked acceleration of rates of erosion and sedimentation; large-scale chemical perturbations to the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements; the inception of significant change in global climate and sea level; and biotic changes including unprecedented levels of species invasions across the Earth.

Many of these changes are geologically long-lasting, and some are effectively irreversible.

The findings from the international team led by the University of Leicester were presented last year at the International Geological Congress at Cape Town, South Africa, but were just published online in the journal Anthropocene.

Use of the word coined by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen in 2000 is not new, but so far it’s been merely an informal description of the time period when human activity started significantly altering the planet. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), which comprises experts from a range of fields, has been tackling the issue of whether it should be a formal declaration since 2009.

According to the group, the answer is clear: the Anthropocene is real; it should be formalized; and it should be defined as an epoch (rather than another classification such as a sub-age or era). The group suggested that the new epoch’s “golden spike” (or physical reference point) that marks its start is the plutonium fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s.

Going forward, they write, it seems likely that “human impacts will become increasingly significant.”

Getting the formal classification is not a done deal, as more analysis is needed, and a stamp of approval from the International Commission of Stratigraphy (ICS) could be years off. Still, says honorary chair of AWG, Colin Waters of the Geology Depart of the University of Leicister, “Whatever decision is ultimately made, the geological reality of the Anthropocene is now clear.”

Geologic Time Goes Over Billions of Years

A Planet With Brains? Peril & Potential of Self-Aware Geological Change

From an Article by David Grinspoon, 13.7 NPR Blog, December 18, 2016

The universe is 13.7 billion years old.  Now we have something new! Recent years have seen a vigorous debate over whether or not we have entered a new epoch of geologic time, the “Anthropocene,” characterized by humanity as a new geologic force.

Much of this has centered over when this age began. Three candidates for this include: an “Early Anthropocene” many thousand years ago when humans first started large-scale modification of land and climate; the beginning of the industrial revolution with its CO2 emissions; and the nuclear test horizon. Choosing a single moment of origin may be less important than the realization that we are now in it. However, the debate has been fruitful, as all these candidates mark interesting steps in our journey from being just another primate to becoming a dominant geological force.

As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life. I want to frame our current time as a stage in the cosmic life of our planet. What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start — but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?

Although it has been proposed as a new epoch, we may in fact be experiencing something much more unusual. Picture the “geologic time scale” you’ve seen where the various phases of Earth’s history are represented by a sequence of different layers corresponding to the rocks from different geological ages, with the most recent periods drawn at the top. New epochs are actually rather common in Earth’s history. They typically last for millions of years. They are marked by the relatively thin layers in geological time. Their boundaries are often characterized by episodes of global change and extinction events. Much more rare and consequential are the boundaries, separating the longest phases, the billion-year-scale chunks of time called eons.

Geologists separate our planet’s long history into only four eons. These represent fundamental branching points which each left the world permanently changed. I suspect we may now be at another of these pivotal moments, and our planet may be at the beginning of its fifth eon, which I propose we call the “Sapiezoic” (a hopeful, aspirational term meaning “age of wisdom”). Because what we are observing are the effects of not only a new geologic force, but a radically new type of geologic change. Never before has a geological force become aware of its own influence.

The first eon is named the Hadean because it was pure hell, with leftover debris from planet formation crashing down from space, erratically smashing, churning and heating Earth’s surface, making red-hot atmospheres first of vaporized rock and then of boiling steam. Eventually, the cosmic pounding subsided and the steam turned to rain, which filled the first oceans.

The transition to Earth’s second Eon, the Archean, came around 4 billion years ago and corresponds roughly to the coming of stable habitable conditions and the origin of life. Since then, biology has been a major agent of geologic change.

Earth’s third eon, the Proterozoic, beginning 2.5 billion years ago, corresponds roughly to the Great Oxygenation Event when, chemically, life took over the planet. In discovering solar energy, photosynthetic bacteria began to flood the atmosphere with oxygen, a poisonous gas that caused mass extinction, but also created the chemical conditions for animal respiration and the protective ozone layer that allowed life to leave the oceans and colonize the land.

Then, 540 million years ago, came the Cambrian Explosion — the sudden appearance of complex, multicellular animal and plant life forms. This enabled, among many other things, the evolution of intricate nervous systems, elaborate behavior and learning. This explosion of biological innovation is recognized as the beginning of the fourth and final (so far) eon of Earth’s history — the Phanerozoic Eon, which continues to this day.

Now, humans have become a dominant force of planetary change and, thus, we may have entered an eon of post-biological evolution in which cognitive systems have gained a powerful influence on the planet. The beginning of a time when self-aware cognitive processes become a key part of the way the planet functions is potentially as significant as the origin of life and the pivotal changes marking the two other eon boundaries in Earth’s history.

Yet to become a new eon, such a transition would require an additional quality: great longevity. Can this new force possibly persist for millions or billions of years? This is closely related to the subject of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), whose theorists have long recognized that the number of technological civilizations in the universe must be proportional to their average longevity. The literature of this field is filled with discussion of the potential longevity of human-like civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. What exactly do we mean by “human-like?” That is a wonderful question that connects questions of our essential nature, our exceptionalism compared to the rest of life, and our role on the planet. Can a civilization become integrated into the cyclic functioning of its planet in a sustainable way? This implies a different mode of interaction with the planet than is currently being exhibited by “intelligent” life.

From a systems perspective, the early stages of this transition are highly unstable because global influence precedes global control. Such a system is characterized by unstable positive feedbacks which threaten catastrophe. Hence the dangers of our current “Anthropocene dilemma”: We have global influence without global self-control. However, global technological influence clearly contains both peril and promise. Conscious awareness and control can also be sources of stabilizing negative feedback. This merely requires recognizing a problem and acting to fix it.

We’ve done this with our, so far, successful efforts to repair the ozone layer. There are pathways by which this stabilizing cognitive phenomenon could become a very long-lived and even permanent part of the Earth system. This would require that we reach a stage where we have a deep understanding of nature and an ability to forestall natural disasters, as well as the deep self-understanding necessary to forestall self-imposed disasters. In other words, it will require both technical and spiritual progress.

How does this affect the way we view our future? It reframes our task. And it puts our immediate challenges over the next century, stabilizing population and devising an energy system that can provide for the needs of this population without wrecking the natural systems upon which we depend, against the backdrop of a much longer-term challenge. Once we get over the relatively short-term, century-scale threat of destabilizing fossil-fuel induced climate change, we need to learn how to become a long-term stabilizing factor on the planet. This will include: over the next several hundred to thousand years, asteroid and comet defense; over the next several tens of thousands of years, learning how to prevent ice ages and natural episodes of dangerous global warming; over several billions of years, compensating for the warming sun and preventing the inevitable runaway global warming that will otherwise result from solar evolution.

Our current struggles and anxieties about the future must be faced with an awareness of the very long view. We need to have a vision of the world we want to create so that we can see ourselves as collaborators with future generations in the project of shaping it.

The story of our species is one of overcoming existential risk through new forms of cooperation and innovation. Our current dilemmas require these same skills applied on new temporal and spatial scales. Although right now we are initiating a mass extinction, in the long run, by preventing future extinctions and prolonging the life of the biosphere, we could be the best thing that ever happened to planet Earth.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net