Not just the bees, all bugs in North America have seen a 75% die off in the last 20 years.
Big shocker that songbirds, which eat those bugs, have also seen a massive die off.
Despite those deniers that still blame housecats, the true culprit is almost certainly pollution and pesticides.
Despite those deniers that still blame housecats
Both things can be true. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Also we have less pollution and pesticide use than we did in the 60s and 70s. Why is it just becoming a problem now?
I bet that while we have less general pollution and less dumping trash in the environment kinda things, we have developed much more potent insecticides. And if those insecticides do not degrade within a few weeks they will accumulate in the earth and the water.
Edit: Wikipedia about one type of modern pesticides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid
Yeah, pretty sure your lawn has almost nothing to do with insects vanishing. It’s much more likely the insane amounts of highly potent pesticides we put directly into our food chain. Those pesticides obviously aren’t classified as pollution so we aren’t polluting, we’re killing the environment on purpose.
Btw. The development and use of neonicotines corelate quiet nicely with the drop in the insects population.
less pollution? that cannot possibly be true. according to dr google 1970s world population was 3.7b, now we’re more than double that
I’m the US, the EPA was created in the 1970’s. We definitely have less pollution (of certain types) today than we did in the past. Some notable examples of how disgustingly polluted American skies and waterways were in the past:
Coal Production has also been declining
And then of course less visible examples like the Montreal Protocol stopping corporations from depleting the ozone layer.
My point is in terms of greenhouse gas production we are much higher than in the 60’s and 70’s, but we have massively improved in a lot of areas. Of course there is still room to improve.
I find grass so useless. Every boomer parent I’ve known is just obsessed with it, too. They think that not having a green, green monoculture lawn means you’ve failed morally or something, and that it’s how they show the neighborhood how responsible they are. One GF’s dad came over to our random Winconsin lawn of grass and weeds and strawberries and was “I WOULD JUST PULL THIS ALL UP AND START OVER”. Uh… no?
Then I had an across the street neighbor (guy with a bumper sticker “I’ve never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW”) who would mow his lawn every single day with a riding mower. You couldn’t even tell what part he had done yet. I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn. I left my backyard just go and it was awesome… after a few years, birds started nesting in the middle of the prairie, and I had flowers growing I’d never seen anywhere else.
They all seem obsessed with plastic grass now which is even worse.
My garden is mostly weeds. Haven’t cut it in 15 years. I pretend to be a trendsetting wild gardener, but really I’m just a lazy bastard.
I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn.
This happened to me too.
are so violently obsessed with inch-high fuzzy green rectangles of obedience that they’ll sometimes invade your property to make more of them, overriding any of their own pretenses about the sanctity of private property in the process.I think he thought he was doing me a favor, but really was just jerking off his lawn obsession. Same guy told me one time “HEY i saw a bear in your driveway and I was gonna come run it off so it didn’t mess with your garbage but it left!” I was uh, okay… no, please don’t come confront a bear in my driveway. Dude drank light beer all day.
In my case, it was deliberate aggression because I had told him, in person and to his face, that those were protected native plants and I had a legal right to have them on my property.
But
“did me a favor” with a disgusting little smirk when I confronted him about it later. He even implied that I got nothing to prove what he did because I don’t have the surveillance state shit that he has on his side of the fence.
