| 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! |
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.