Buzzzzzzzzz

Something to actually do about insect decline

Mike and Tawnya Kiernan tending the native plants in a solar field near Morrisville Vermont.

Look, every column inch not spent writing about the rise of fascism in America is probably wasted—right now President Trump and his odious henchman Stephen Miller are trying to bait the people of Los Angeles into some kind of violent reaction, so they can swing public opinion back to their side on the issue of immigration. It’s sick, it’s calculated, and I’m not sure what do do about it except—and this could not be more important—remind you all to make sure everyone you know is signed up for No Kings Day next Saturday.

So in my impotence, I’m going to write about something else—a hopeful take on another crisis gripping the entire earth, one that threatens not democracies but kingdoms, in this case the insect kingdom.

First the crisis: new data indicates the ongoing collapse of insect populations around the world. Tess McLure has an invaluable piece in the Guardian that focuses on the work of legendary tropical biologist Dan Jantzen. In 1978—which is less than half a century ago—he was working at the Guanacaste Field Station in the forest of Costa Rica when one night he stretched out a bed sheet with a light behind it, and took pictures of what landed.

In that first photograph, taken in 1978, the lit-up sheet is so thickly studded with moths that in places the fabric is barely visible, transformed into what looks like densely patterned, crawling wallpaper.

Scientists identified an astonishing 3,000 species from that light trap, and the trajectory of Janzen’s career was transformed, from the study of seeds to a lifetime specialising in the forest’s barely documented populations of caterpillars and moths.

Now 86, Janzen still works in the same research hut in the Guanacaste conservation area, alongside his longtime collaborator, spouse and fellow ecologist, Winnie Hallwachs. But in the forest that surrounds them, something has changed. Trees that once crawled with insects lie uncannily still.

The hum of wild bees has faded, and leaves that should be chewed to the stem hang whole and un-nibbled. It is these glossy, untouched leaves that most spook Janzen and Hallwachs. They are more like a pristine greenhouse than a living ecosystem: a wilderness that has been fumigated and left sterile. Not a forest, but a museum.

Over the decades, Janzen has repeated his light traps, hanging the sheet, watching for what comes. Today, some moths flutter to the glow, but their numbers are far fewer.

“It’s the same sheet, with the same lights, in the same place, looking over the same vegetation. Same time of year, same time of the moon cycle, everything about it is identical,” he says. “There’s just no moths on that sheet.”

What’s uniquely scary about this account, as McLure makes clear, is not that insect populations are dwindling—we’ve known that for a long time, first from the work of citizen-entomologists in Germany and then in many other parts of the world. That steady decline—estimated at two percent a year, though some biologists think its higher—has largely been blamed on habitat loss and pesticide use. But in the case of Guanacaste, and other similar untouched forests, those things don’t apply. What we’re seeing is the steady effect of climate change. As Hallwachs explains,

A tropical forest ecosystem is “a finely tuned Swiss watch,” perfectly engineered to sustain a vastly biodiverse system of creatures.

Each element is delicately tuned and interlocks with the rest: the heat, the humidity, the rainfall, the unfolding of leaves, the length of the seasons, the start and stop of the life cycles of insects and animals.

With each incremental turn of one cog, the rest of the system responds. Insects and animals have evolved to time their hibernations and breeding times precisely to small signals from the system: a change in humidity, a lengthening of the light hours of the day, a small rise or fall in temperature.

But now, the system has one gear spinning wildly out of time: the climate.

“When I arrived here in 1963 the dry season was four months. Today, it is six months,” Janzen says. Insects that typically spend four months underground, waiting for the rains, are now forced to try to survive another two months of hot, dry weather. Many are not succeeding.

Alongside the changing seasons are other shifts, such as in rainfall or humidity. “It’s just a general disruption of all the little cues and synchronies that would be out there,” Janzen says. Across the entire clock of the forest, plants and creatures are falling out of sync. In the background, the temperature is rising.

“The killer – the cause that’s pulling the trigger – is actually water,” says Wagner. For insects, staying hydrated is a unique physiological challenge: rather than lungs, their bodies are riddled with holes, called spiracles, that carry oxygen directly into the tissue.

“They’re all surface area,” says Wagner. “Insects can’t hold water.” Even a brief drought lasting just a few days can wipe out millions of humidity-dependent insects.

This is by no means confined to the wet tropics. Researchers in lots of other areas—the hot desert southwest, for instance—are seeing the same things. Biologist David Wagner describes a recent trip to Texas, calling it “the most unsuccessful I’ve ever taken. There just wasn’t any insect life to speak of.”

It was not only the insects missing, he told McLure, it was…everything. “Everything was crispy, fried; the lizard numbers were down to the lowest numbers I can ever remember. And then the things that eat lizards were not present – I didn’t see a single snake the entire time.”

Particularly prominent in that sad list are birds. Just in this country, ornithologists at Cornell (the same people who brought you Merlin, and if you don’t have it on your phone why do you have a phone?) reported that America was missing about three billion birds—and about 2.9 billion of them, according to a subsequent study, were birds that depended on eating insects. (Which would explain why there may still be plenty of chickadees at your feeder).

So—and here begins the good news—you might not be surprised to learn how happy I was to read in PV magazine of another new study, this one from Germany, about how birds were thriving in the country’s growing number of solar arrays.

Biologist Matthias Stoefer said the high density of breeding larks in one of Germany’s largest solar parks in Brandenburg, north of Berlin, is astonishing. In his breeding territory mapping, he counted 178 spots within the solar park and surrounding areas. On average, there are 21 to 47 breeding pairs per 10 hectares. This is the highest lark density he has ever encountered. The reference area on a nearby field has only 33 spots, equivalent to 7.6 lark pairs per 10 hectares. Whether they can breed successfully there when the farmer sprays, fertilizes, and harvests throughout the summer is questionable, however.

The high numbers in the ground-mounted PV systems are also surprising because larks avoid vertical structures. The birds prefer open, wide landscapes away from forests and forest edges. However, the long photovoltaic rows with six modules stacked on top of each other do not seem to bother them. Instead, they benefit from the advantages of the location.

People rarely visit the fenced-in facility. The vegetation is kept short by sheep, which are currently lying in the sun with their lambs between the rows of modules. The sheep’s droppings and a changing selection of flowering herbs provide the birds with a varied insect buffet.

t’s not just larks who appreciate this. Right at the entrance to the solar park, a small bird, a wheatear, which is threatened with extinction in Germany, is bobbing on the edge of a module. During his monitoring two years ago, Stoefer discovered only one breeding pair. This year, he doesn’t have to search far.

Birds are learning, too. Initially nesting only at the edge or in surrounding compensation areas, they are increasingly migrating between the rows. White wagtails, corn buntings, whitethroats, red-backed shrikes, and yellow wagtails breed under solar roofs. In addition, there are bird species that are only there to forage or migratory birds, such as the red kite circling in the sky in search of mice and other small animals. Stoefer has observed a total of 17 different species.

If you’re wondering, skylarks are big-time insectivores, especially when they need protein for their young. I think it’s pretty clear what’s happening here: these solar fields are providing habitat for bugs, which in turn are providing dinner for birds. I think this is the case because I’ve watched it up close here in Vermont. Last summer, reporting for my new book, I spent time with a couple of neighbors, Mike and Tawnya Kiernan, who have set up a small non-profit business that grows plants that native pollinators like between the rows of 20 Vermont solar fields.

When the Kiernans are hired by a solar developer, it’s usually to plant on what was until recently a farm field; because the fields are typically monoculture and have been treated with pesticides for years, “the pollinator density is really low.” Mike uses a pollinator-counting method that involves walking on the margin of a field and counting wasps and flies and moths for seven and a half minutes. Then a random-number generator tells him which row of solar panels to walk along, and as he walks he counts the pollinators he sees in seven and a half minutes, then adds the two numbers together. “On those abandoned farm fields, we might get a count of forty or fifty in fifteen minutes,” Mike said. “But now, once we’ve done our thing, you can see ten at a glance. You can see three hundred in fifteen minutes.”

Insects that entomologists had assumed were extirpated from Vermont somehow sniffed out that the plants they liked had returned, and so did they

“That’s Triepeolus pectoralis, a native, but one we rarely see! That’s only the tenth time it’s been seen in New England,” said Mike, as we ambled through a set of solar arrays next to a soccer field at a school in central Vermont. Next he was on his knees beside a particularly vibrant swamp milkweed. “That bluish-black wasp is a mud dauber,” he said. “He can catch a spider and keep it up on your rafters with a little bit of mud.” Pulling out his iPhone to take a picture, he added, “This bee with the red on his abdomen I’ve never seen before. Sometimes you need to get the male genitalia under a microscope to make an identification. You wouldn’t think so, but it’s really, really species-specific.”

Here’s the thing: to our untrained eye, a corn field looks more “natural” than an array of solar panels. But a corn field is a biological desert—basically there are no pollinators there at all (corn is self-pollinating) because they are sprayed with pesticides and herbicides. Put up some solar panels, and add some plants that only need to be mowed once a year or so (sometimes with sheep) and you see an explosion of life.

And—remember—those same solar panels are the only scaleable way we have of fighting the global heating that is now the biggest cause of insect decline.

Everything is falling apart in our world, but nature stands ready to give us a hand if we want it. Energy from the sun, funneled to panels that provide shade and cover for all kinds of life. (New data even shows solar farms in China are allowing desert soils to reform and stopping some of the giant dust storms that plague that country’s north).

There are thirty million acres of cornfield in the U.S. that are used for growing ethanol, and in the process providing about one percent of our energy needs. Scientists estimate those thirty million acres, covered in solar panels, would provide all the power the country requires.

Meanwhile we teargas protesters in Los Angeles and haul off men waiting for work outside Home Depot. We have so many good things we could be doing—that’s part of what breaks one’s heart.

In other energy and climate news:

+Brandon Daly has a devastating account of the cuts to polar research that the Trump administration is making. They’re actually retaining most of the infrastructure, apparently reasoning it might be useful for military purposes as the poles melt, but the research budget was cut 71 percent.

This attack is part of the wider dismantling of NSF-funded geoscience with a 59% cut to Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, 65% cut to Earth Sciences, 64% cut to Ocean Sciences, and a 68% cut to Research, Innovation, Synergies, and Education.

The number of people to be involved in NSF activities is planned to drop from 330,100 to just 90,000. Senior researchers will be reduced by 28%, postdoctoral researchers will be reduced by 18%, graduate students will be reduced by 30%, and undergraduate students will be reduced by 21%

+I can’t avoid Elon Musk entirely. A New York Times account by Louise Perry attempting to rehabilitate his image (bizarrely enough by comparing him to Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia) has the single most scientifically-illiterate passage I may ever have read in the paper of record, one that apparently comes from the world’s richest man himself.

Mr. Musk’s vision goes well beyond Washington. He has always been clear on this point and continues to tell anyone who will listen. “Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,” he told Fox News last month. “The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.”

“At some point” is doing a lot of work here. The sun is about halfway through its 8 billion year stay on the stable “main sequence” of its life, meaning that we have about another 3.5 billion years before we need to escape its expansion. Given that human civilization has lasted about ten thousand years so far, that would seem to give us some leeway. People, the sun is our friend. It already gives us light and warmth and photosynthesis and now (see above) it is happy to offer all the power we could ever need. Stop dissing it!

+Good for New York comptroller (and current mayoral candidate) Brad Lander for trying to force the money managers handling the city’s $250 billion pension fund to stop destroying the planet on which we’re supposed to someday retire.

Asset managers have until June 30 to submit their climate strategies to the city. Officials will evaluate those net-zero plans to ensure that they’re “real and actionable.” If an asset manager’s plans fail to meet those climate standards, they’ll be sent to a “rebid” process, meaning they’ll have to bid again for the pension funds’ business, and the funds could then move their money to a different, cleaner asset manager. As part of any new bidding process, Lander will recommend evaluating an asset manager’s corporate-level climate behavior as well.

“What we’re doing is getting the New York City pension funds to use their buying power to shift money from dirtier money managers like BlackRock, who are bad on climate, to cleaner money managers,” says Pete Sikora, climate campaigns director with New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit that campaigned for these new standards. Activists hope that by taking business away from the less climate friendly asset managers, those companies will be forced to clean up their portfolios in order to get back the pension funds’ business.

If other blue state and city treasurers would join in this action, Blackrock et al would back down. Most of the electoral votes are in rural red state America; about two-thirds of the money is with the blue corners of the country

+Floodlight has a good account of how new oil export terminals are turning a “slice of heaven” town on the Gulf Coast—Ingleside, Texas—into a toxic mess.

Within a 2-mile radius of Ingleside on the Bay’s City Hall are three massive crude oil export terminals, which send tankers the length of a football field into the Gulf. The facilities are located at and near the site of a decommissioned U.S. Navy installation.

Local and federal governments have spent nearly half a billion dollars deepening the channel for the massive tankers. A 6-foot-tall pile of dirt from the dredging now blocks the Corpus Christi skyline. And white foamy gunk has started floating on the water. Dead sea turtles have washed ashore.

One’s sympathy for the mostly white and affluent residents is slightly tempered by the fact that the Drill Baby Drill ticket carried the town by fifty percent; the other fenceline communities (Port Arthur, say) consist mostly of poor people of color. But Big Oil has a way of educating everyone eventually…

+Here’s the court filing for the new case from Our Children’s Trust and the remarkable Julia Olson. It is comprehensive and devastating—support this important organization. The named plaintiffs are led by a young Montana, Eva Lighthiser, who I got to share a stage with last summer; she is remarkable, a formidable symbol of all that is right with the next generation.

+Podcast worth listening to: one of my heroes is Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Ministry for the Future, and here he is talking to Mike Digirolamo from Mongabay.

+The reliable Adam Welz has an account of how new technologies (some of them pretty simple, like a painted stripe) can dramatically reduce bird collisions with wind turbines. In his native South Africa,

Several bird species are at significant risk from wind farms, among them the endangered black harrier, a striking, medium-sized raptor with a declining population of fewer than 1,300 birds. A recent study estimates that a loss of just three to five adults per year will drive the species extinct in less than a century. BirdLife South Africa research shows that wind farms already kill an average of at least 3.8 black harriers per year, a rate that must be reduced.

The Hopefield wind farm, north of Cape Town, is known to kill 10 species of raptors, including black harriers. In early 2023, University of Cape Town ornithologist Rob Simmons selected 20 turbines within the wind farm for an experiment. He arranged for one blade on each of four particularly lethal turbines to be painted with broad red bands, leaving the remaining 16 turbines as controls. (He’d wanted black, but South African aviation safety authorities allowed only signal red.)

Bird deaths at Hopefield were monitored for 24 months before painting and 24 months after. According to Simmons, bird deaths went down by more than 80 percent at the four red-banded turbines, with the control turbines showing much less of a reduction. Significantly, Simmons says, the patterned turbines have killed only one bird of prey since painting, compared to seven before painting.

+Wyoming legislators thought they were handing the coal industry a break by mandating that power plants study carbon capture as an alternative before closing. Sadly, they found what everyone else does: it’s an impossibly expensive boondoggle.

“I have a concern that we’re continuing to implement something that does nothing but increases the rates of our ratepayers, number one, and drives up the price of coal fired power, which then does lead to alternatives such as nuclear or wind and solar,” said one state legislator.

Ha ha.

+A fascinating new study explaining more about the rapid increase in drought around the world. Basically ever warmer air is driving up “Atmospheric Evaporative Demand,” which Rebecca Dzombak of the Times helpfully described as the “thirstiness” of the air.

Dr. Gebrechorkos and his co-authors used multiple precipitation data sets, climate models and ways of calculating drought from 1901 to 2022 to assess how to capture atmospheric thirst and how it has been affecting droughts.

They found that it played an even bigger role than previously thought, drying out historically arid and wet regions alike.

“We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Dr. Gebrechorkos said. A sharp increase in drought activity in the last five years of the study, from 2018 to 2022, particularly alarmed him.

The area affected by droughts during that time was on average 74 percent larger than in the previous four decades. The drought area in the Western United States more than doubled during this time, as well as in Australia and southern South America. Atmospheric thirst was to blame.

+Just for the record: an important examination by a high-powered team at the Associated Press led by Seth Borenstein calculated the cost in lives and dollars of new EPA rollbacks of environmental regulations.

The EPA-targeted rules could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect, according to an Associated Press examination that included the agency’s own prior assessments as well as a wide range of other research.

But experts say the numbers are conservative and that even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems. It would also mean higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels.

“More people will die,” said Cory Zigler, a professor of biostatistics at Brown University who has studied air pollution deaths from coal-fired power plants. “More of this type of pollution that we know kills people will be in the air.”

+The Rev Jim Antal has a wonderful essay on why people of faith are signing up for SunDay

Imagine this call coming from thousands of pulpits as part of this Sun Day witness. Imagine thousands of congregations deciding to convene worship outside, alongside countless other Sun Day events, celebrating creation’s provision of endless energy made accessible by the miracle of science and the genius efforts of scientists and engineers. Imagine millions of people proclaiming that transitioning to clean energy is a moral and spiritual imperative.

Twenty-five percent of American adults—65,000,000 of us—gather for worship on any given weekend, according to a recent Pew study. Imagine if only half of those congregations participated in Sun Day by focusing their worship on our creator, the blessing of creation, and the opportunity our generation has been given to embrace clean, reliable, non-polluting energy.

Twenty-two percent of American adults—57,000,000 of us—identify as spiritual but not religious according to a 2023 Pew study. Imagine if only half of them hosted or participated in a local Sun Day event and shared with other participants how the event connects with their spirituality.

Meanwhile, SunDay has already made its way into the academic journals!

+A big loss in southern California, where the air quality board rejected, at least for now, an effort to get rid of new gas-powered appliances like water heaters and furnaces.

The two rules, designed to clean up one of the biggest sources of the region’s severe smog, would have set increasing targets for sales of zero-emission products in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties over the next decade — beginning with 30% in 2027. The targets would not have been mandatory, although manufacturers would pay fees for each natural gas water heater or furnace they sell.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District board in a 7-5 vote rejected its boldest smog-fighting proposal in years. The decision, driven mostly by concerns about affordability, was a rare rebuke of measures proposed by the agency’s staff, which came after years of compromise and efforts to scale back what originally was a mandate phasing out the polluting heaters.

+To send you out on a happy note, two things

One, some truly funny and informative videos from comedian David Cross and venerable Princeton climate guru Michael Oppenheimer.

And second, the largest solar panel mural in the world was erected in Edmonton Alberta this spring. Created by indigenous artist Lance Curtain, it covers the side of a mixed-use housing project, and features the seven sacred animals of the Cree totem, as well as the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac.