[anigbrowl]

Yeah hold on while I take 5-10 years out to get a bio degree and publish research so I can start putting out papers saying it's too late and we've passed the point of no return, which will be denied and ignored by the people who are most likely to be causing the problem. Much better than possibly pissing anyone off.

[Dove]

The concern is not pissing people off, exactly. It's crying wolf until the relevant people stop listening. It's drowning out the voices of those who really did spend three decades studying the problem in order to come up with the right answer.

See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse.

Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.

[anigbrowl]

By the way, I'm sorry for the snarky tone of my grandparent comment, at which point I was a bit tired and frustrated. But I do think that waiting for the 'right answer' is a bad strategy. Blind action is ineffective, but so is risk aversion.

[anigbrowl]

But you are the relevant people. And just like in business, while it's important to research and plan effectively, if you never take any risks you never get any rewards and the opportunity slips away. Getting involved and taking action isn't going to drown out the voices of research scientists, because while we operate serially as individuals we operate in parallel as a species.

You're never going to persuade everyone. There are people who know how dirty fossil fuels are, how risky pollutants are, and so on. They know that research costs money and that preserving a healthy environment will require major changes - and they don't care. Maybe because they're old and bitter, maybe because they're selfish and figure they'll ride it out while the rest of the world goes to hell, maybe because they have a death wish. You're never going to convert that group, and in fact they'll oppose you every step of teh way because they're assholes. Too bad.

The large mass of uncommitted people in the middle want to be told what to do, and the best way to tell them is to lead by example. You don't have to rush out and start dismantling pipelines, but you do have to do something - whether that's raising awareness, embarrassing a political opponent in public, blocking the loading of chemicals you've decided are especially toxic, establish a weekly neighborhood cleanup crew or whatever.

Carrying on with your own life while waiting for something you can just vote or donate to is not working very well, is it? I don't mean that as a criticism of you, but of the system that purports to offer you environmental policy as a set of consumption choices that you can choose and feel good about. I've been doing recycling and conscious consumption and 1-1 advocacy for maybe 30 years. Those efforts are great, but we're not going to conserve our way out of the problem any more than you can become wealthy by saving a few $ a week. You can outsource it by making donations to organizations you approve of, but let's be honest here, unless you can throw large sums of money at a cause on a rolling basis you might as well be flinging quarters at an oncoming steamroller. Devoting some of your time and labor and investing a bit of your capital if you can is more likely to be effective, because people are primarily motivated by the example of others. And you need to think boldly, or you won't have any impact.

Of course people who are predisposed to study and able to do so should consider academic routes. But we already have lots of highly qualified scientists, while the head of the Environmental Protection Agency likes to do photo opportunities with coal miners to show he's not a creature of the evil science lobby. There is a political conflict here and it needs activists as well as researchers, because just having the correct answer isn't enough.

[Dove]

Doing something is unproductive, and often counterproductive. It is the battle cry of doctors who prescribe unnecessary antibiotics because they cannot hurt and are what patients want, and wind up contributing to the development of antibiotic resistant microbes. It is the philosophy of politicians who make laws for show without solving problems (and often creating problems in the process).

Do not do something. Do something effective.

To suppose that the insect biomass is reduced because of problems with the environment, and that doing good things for the environment will help fix it, is sloppy, superstitious thinking. Will recycling help? Dunno. Will establishing a neighborhood cleanup crew help? Seems unlikely. Will raising awareness help? Only if it serves to better identify the problem or uncover a real solution.

Back when leaded gasoline was poisoning everyone, no amount of recycling, environmental advocacy, neighborhood cleanup, embarrassing politicians, etc., would have helped. The problem had to be understood well enough that people could be persuaded to agree to act in concert to solve it specifically and at great cost. This takes time and study.

Nature is not a moral agent. It will not heal and be kind simply because we act piously toward it. We must understand problems in the specific and fix them in the specific. If you want to help with this insect biomass thing, begin by studying it. Is it really happening? Is it really a problem? What is the cause? Then ask what we can do. Then try to persuade people to do it.

You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.

I am committed to acting vigorously on problems that I know are real, in ways that I am convinced are effective. There is plenty of that to go around!

[anigbrowl]

All true, but the point I'm trying to make (poorly) is that there's more to life than truth-seeking. That's the function of science, but even if science hands you a definitive answer you still need to create the political will to implement it. And it's a fact that there are people who have economic interests in not fixing problems.

I don't care about insect biomass in particular. I care about it as a possibly-wrong indicator of general environmental degradation, of which we have numerous indicators. I also have a possibly-wrong model of the root causes of this and other problems.

You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.

You can't solve everything overnight, but you can lose everything overnight while you're fretting over whether a problem exists or vacillating over its severity or dithering between a multiplicity of unpleasant solutions. An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory, and my exhortations to act, which will sometimes lead to unproductive or ineffective results, are the product of decades of observation and thought.

I'm sorry that this doesn't lead to a neatly wrapped General Unified Theory of Sustainable Sociopolitical Development - because I too would love to have a verifiable roadmap to a brighter future - but chaos is preferable to predictably circling down into a drain. Overall, I have concluded that the world is getting shittier, that this trend is accelerating, and that the costs of your gradualist approach exceed the benefits.

[lotharbot]

personally, I've seen several circumstances where the costs of "doing something" are much higher than the benefits of deliberate study and taking correct action, even on a global scale.