Insects are disappearing
across the world.
If we lost our pollinators,
we would lose 80 to 90% of the plants on the planet.
That is not an option.
It's the ecosystems on this planet
that keep humans alive.
Scientists warn us
that the insect apocalypse
is entirely possible.
As we expand the human population,
we keep making these sterile landscapes,
and nature is pushed out.
Without the ecological services
that insects provide,
we are doomed.
(upbeat music)
Insects are the most abundant animals on earth.
It's estimated that the total weight
of our insect population
is at least 17 times greater than all of humanity.
They provide the essential services necessary
to support life.
They pollinate about 80% of all plants,
including about 75% of our food crops.
They decompose dead plants and animals
and thereby recycle nutrients back into the system.
They manage the soil,
and they are the essential food base
for other animals, especially birds and freshwater fish.
Annual ecosystem services provided
by wild insects in the U.S,
have been estimated at $57 billion.
Scientists have identified
and described about 66,000 animal and fish species.
In contrast, insect species add up to about a million,
and the number yet to be identified
could amount to another 20 million or more.
There are more than 160,000 kinds of moths in the world.
Butterflies add up to about 17,500 species.
There are nearly 20,000 types of bees
and more than 12,000 kinds of ants.
Beetle species total nearly 400,000.
In light of those huge numbers,
it's easy to believe that the insect abundance is endless,
but is it?
(upbeat music)
As these trillions upon trillions of insects remain busy
with the central ecological tasks,
entomologists and concerned citizen scientists
are noticing troubling trends
in the woods, fields and back yards.
Is it possible that the world's insect population
is beginning to crash?
Scientists knew there were serious ecological problems
stemming from habitat loss, climate change,
and the pervasive use of pesticides and herbicides.
But there was little data to quantify the extent
of the damage to insect populations
and nothing to support a global alarm,
until a long-term study
by a German entomological club came to light.
The Krefeld entomological society near Dusseldorf
has collected and curated insect specimen records
since 1864.
Over the years, these citizen scientists maintain
a rigidly consistent collection program,
and they preserved the insects they caught
using standardized nets
and meticulous identification and storage routines.
In later years, they were noticing fewer
and fewer insects filling their jars and boxes
from their seasonal trips
to 63 nature preserves representing virtually every type
of natural habitat in the region.
They employed a unique method of weighing their collection
and shared the results with university scientists
who confirmed a 76% seasonal decline
over the previous 27 years,
and the mid summer decline amounted to a shocking 82%.
It was time to sound the alarm.
Ecology professor and author, Dr. Dave Goulson
of the university of Sussex explains the situation.
There's one aspect of insect declines
that people have noticed,
particularly if they're of a certain age,
I guess maybe 50 or more years old.
I can remember when I was a kid,
that if we drove any distance in the summer,
we'd have to stop and clean the windscreen
of the car every hour or two,
because it would be literally impossible to see through
because it was covered in splattered insects,
today that just doesn't happen.
In 2014, a panel
of scientists synthesized current insect populations studies
and found that most of the monitored species
had declined on average by 45%.
This disappearance of insects
is something that people should take really seriously
because whatever you think about them,
insects are vitally important
to every single human on the planet.
They can be intimately involved
in more or less every ecological process
that you can think of: nutrient cycling,
keeping the soils healthy, breaking down dead bodies,
dead trees, leaves, bio control,
controlling pest numbers and so on and so on.
And most famously of course, they pollinate our crops.
75% of the crops we grow globally
require insect pollination.
So we wouldn't have a whole sway,
the fruits and vegetables that we require
to keep us healthy.
Everything from apples and cherries to blueberries,
raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes, squashes, pumpkin,
I could go on and on and on,
even includes coffee and chocolate
all require insect pollination.
So life would be pretty miserable without these things,
and the horrible truth is the millions of people
would starve to death if we didn't have insect pollinators.
So whatever you think about insects, we need them,
and we need to look after them.
So far as we know,
insect declines are being driven by a whole bunch
of different factors.
Probably the biggest globally is habitat loss
from the tropical forests
to the flower rich hay meadows of the UK.
In the UK we-
a hundred years ago,
we had about 7 million hectares
of flower rich grasslands, hay meadows, and Jordan.
They would have been teeming with butterflies
and bumblebees and all sorts of other insects.
And we destroyed 97% of it in the 20th century,
and so habitat loss is a big one,
but then on top of that,
and it's kind of associated with it,
a lot of that habitat loss is too intensive.
Farming, which involves
a lot of pesticide use,
a whole barrage of insecticides and fungicides
and herbicides going on to farmland all the time.
We shouldn't really be surprised if they disappear.
This issue seems to have come upon us quickly.
Large scale declines that have happened
within my lifetime,
and to think that, you know,
more than half the butterflies have gone
since I was a kid,
is really disturbing.
It's not just Europe,
it's certainly happening in North America,
there's good data on Monarch butterflies,
and how they've been fairing,
but they've all but disappeared.
Scientists estimate
that a complete insect population collapse
would mean the end of human life
within two months.
What then are our prospects for a positive outcome?
Good news,
insects can recover.
Rather few of them have gone extinct yet,
lots of them heading towards it
but if we take action now it's not too late.
And the nice thing about insects
is they actually breed very quickly
given the right conditions,
so they could recover in no time at all
if we gave them somewhere to live,
something to eat,
stop poisoning them and so on.
But insects need places to recover
and our scattered collection
of nature parks and forest won't be enough.
Right now,
at least 85% of the land East of the Mississippi
is privately owned,
and much of that property is a monoculture
of suburban and urban lawns,
or is being used for large scale food production.
Landscapes that for insect
and ecological purposes
might as well be parking lots.
In short we've drained, cut and paved nature,
and we've curved it into pieces too small
and isolated to sustain the native insects and animals
that make our ecosystems work.
Douglas Tallamy,
the chief entomology professor
at the university of Delaware,
has a New York times bestseller out,
"Nature's Best Hope".
And he has a plan.
(birds chirping)
If you look at the way we landscape,
humans are here and nature some place else,
and then there's no more someplace else's.
And as we expand the human population,
we keep making these sterile landscapes,
and nature is pushed out.
So that is why things are declining.
You might think
that with so many species of insects
in their abundance,
the system should be able to adjust
to human population expansion and lifestyles,
but that's not how it works,
in fact, 90% of the insects that eat plants,
develop and reproduce only on certain plants
with which they share an evolutionary history.
Specialization is really common
in the world of insects,
both with pollinators
and with the insects that eat plants.
We've got over 4,000 species of native bees,
and at least a third of them can only reproduce
in the pollen of particular plant genera.
And the reason all these insects are so specialized
is because plants don't want to be eaten,
they want to capture the energy
from the sun and use it
for their own growth and reproduction,
so they protect their tissues with nasty compounds,
and the insects have to adapt
to those phytochemicals in order
to be able to eat the plant.
So they develop specialized enzymes and behaviors
and life history adaptations
that minimize their exposure to these compounds.
The Monarch, for example, is good at milkweeds,
but it wouldn't be able to handle Oak trees,
and that's why if you want to have caterpillars
in your yard,
you need to have the plants that create those caterpillars.
They're not going to eat any other plants.
Why would you want caterpillars in your yard?
Well, if you want birds in your yard
you got to have these Caterpillar.
Chickadees, for example
take 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars
to make one clutch of chickadees.
An insect apocalypse
would devastate the animals
that depend on them for food,
including humans.
We would lose at least a third of our crops,
and our food web would collapse.
If insects were to disappear,
particularly our pollinators,
it would hit certain aspects of our agriculture very hard.
The production of fruits and vegetables,
apples, for example, depend on bee pollination, tomatoes.
Most of the fruits are being pollinated.
So matter of fact, in China,
where they have lost a lot of their pollinators,
they've got guys up on ladders
with paintbrushes trying to pollinate peaches
and other crops that you know-
It's possible, but boy,
it is sure easier to keep the pollinators around.
The real reason we can't lose our pollinators
is because they're pollinating 80% of all plants,
and 90% of all flowering plants.
If we lost our pollinators,
we would lose 80 to 90% of the plants on the planet,
that is not an option.
So we need pollinators every place we need plants,
which is every place.
Anybody who's managing land anywhere,
in your yard, your corporate landscape,
your roadside,
they need to be making pollinators,
absolutely everywhere.
(suspenseful music)
So the familiar issues
of overdevelopment, pesticides
and our ever expanding population
are to blame for the insect population decline.
But what can we do about it?
Tallamy points out that the national parks and preserves,
while well-intentioned, only separate us from nature,
and cannot do enough
to foster the interconnectivity necessary
for biodiversity and recovery.
Meanwhile, across the United States and around the world,
millions upon millions of acres of land
are covered in lawn grass,
a symbol of prosperity and social order,
but otherwise an ecological wasteland.
More than 80% of the United States
is privately owned.
Tallamy sees that this is where we must join together
to create the solution.
We must practice conservation right where we live,
work and farm.
Dr. Tallamy notes,
that more than 40 million acres of land
East of the Mississippi,
an area, the size of new England
is dedicated to lawn space,
and turf grass does essentially nothing
to foster biodiversity.
He proposes the concept of a home grown national park.
Conservation has to happen everywhere,
which means we've got to learn
to share our human dominated spaces with nature.
The easiest thing for a typical homeowner to do
is think about reducing the lawn.
We have over 40 million acres of land in the U.S,
it's a dead space.
So I recommend cutting the lawn in half,
cut your area of lawn in half.
If everybody did that,
that would give us 20 million acres of land
we could use in conservation.
Replanting just half
of our lawn space with native plants,
especially flowering plants,
will support the insects
that support us and our food web.
We need the native plants to feed native bugs,
and even the odds for insect and human survival.
If we do this,
we will create ecological patches and corridors
that would equal an area
as large as all of our major national parks,
Yellowstone, Yosemite, the grand Tetons,
the grand Canyon, Denali, the great Smokies and so on.
We will be part of the solution
instead of part of the problem.
We've got to think about plants
as more than decoration,
they do important things,
and they've got to start performing
those ecological roles in our landscapes.
And if we choose the wrong plants,
the ones that don't perform those roles,
that creates local ecosystem collapse.
And if everybody does it,
then you get general ecosystem collapse,
and there are big ramifications to that.
It's the ecosystems on this planet
that keep humans alive.
They produce ecosystem services, you know,
oxygen, clean water, all that stuff.
That has to happen everywhere,
not just in little parks and preserves.
You can create a new national park,
call it Homegrown national park.
You know, 20 million acres
is bigger than all of our major national parks combined.
So you're going to choose those powerful plants,
I call them Keystone plants,
Oaks being the most important plant
you could put in your yard.
Another thing that any landowners should consider:
remove the invasive plants
that you have planted ornamentally
on your yard.
These things have run a muck in our natural areas,
and we end up with an understory
of invasive ornamentals from Asia
that aren't supporting our insects
because our insects have not been here long enough
to be able to come up
with the adaptations needed
to get around the chemical defenses
that are in those plants from Asia.
So it creates biological deserts,
and the most responsible thing we can do
is to make sure that our property
doesn't have any of those invasive plants on it.
Pollination is one
of the most critical functions
that insects perform,
and to accomplish that
they need to have good reasons to travel
from place to place,
and from yard to yard,
and across the country.
And they need to be on the job pretty much all year long.
Plant what we call pollinator gardens,
and it's simply a matter of adding flowering plants
to your landscape.
Pollinators need forage all season long.
There are native bees flying
from March to November in new England.
So in the rest of the country,
they're around nearly all the time,
which means we need blooming phases
as continuously as possible.
What more can we do?
Another very important thing we need to do though,
is think about light pollution at night.
We turn on our security lights,
we have our porch lights on,
everybody's got to have a light on.
Those lights are killing insects all the time,
and I understand people say,
"I gotta have my security light on
or the bad man will come."
If you put a motion sensor on your security light,
it only turns on when the bad man comes,
and the first thing you realize
is how often the bad man does not come.
If we create this homegrown national park,
we will bring nature essentially right to our living spaces.
Won't be like going to Yosemite,
it won't be like going to Yellowstone,
you won't have bison,
but you will have a lot of those specialized
natural interactions right in your yard,
and it'll give you the opportunity
to either create a personal relationship
with nature for the first time
or recreate one that you've lost
that you might've had as a child.
But particularly for our kids,
so many of our kids have never had a chance
to interact with nature at all.
(upbeat music)
If our kids can walk out their door
at their yard and get to establish
a relationship with some part of the natural world,
because it's right there in their yard.
Our kids are the future stewards of our planet,
and if they don't know what they're stewarding
or that they have to steward,
they're going to be lousy stewards.
So this is an investment in our future,
it's an investment in our current health,
there's all kinds of health benefits
to peaceful times in the natural world,
and it will save the biodiversity
that runs our ecosystems.
So, is this a big ask of a basic property owner?
And where's the proof
that this is worth the effort?
Tallemy's experience with his own 10 acre place,
just 15 miles from his office and university classrooms
has turned out
to be an ideal suburban ecological experiment.
He replaced the invasive plants with native species,
and so far he's counted and photographed
more than a thousand species of moths.
It's an indication of what a person
with minimal expense and experience can do
to be part of an ecological recovery.
My wife and I bought a farm
that had been broken up in Southeast Pennsylvania
with 10 acres,
but it had been mowed for hay.
I mean, there was not much there when we moved in,
and actually they had stopped mowing us for hay,
and what was there were all the invasive species
from Asia.
So our goal was to remove them
and put in native plants,
and in the meantime,
I started to realize how important all of this was.
About four years ago,
I had noticed so many moth species at our house
that I made it a goal to start photographing
as many as I could.
That would be my photographic record
of the number of species at our house.
I am up to 1,013 species of moths at our house.
The greatest benefit
of the homegrown national park concept
is that it will provide ecological corridors
for insects to use, to connect and thrive,
which will allow us to do the same.
Well, we've also recorded 59 species
of terrestrial birds that bred at our house.
That's 38% of all the terrestrial birds in Pennsylvania
on just 10 acres,
which simply says,
if you put the plants
that support our wildlife back into our spaces,
the wildlife will come.
It's not going to come after they're extinct,
so we we've got to do it soon.
World Wildlife Fund two weeks ago said,
well, we've lost two thirds
of the wildlife on planet earth since 1970,
and I'm thinking, "Not at my house."
We've gained at least two-thirds,
I'm sure we've increased biodiversity by more than that,
simply by putting the plants back.
So the message there is it's reversible.
This is not impossible,
it is a very gloomy statistic,
but if everybody made it a goal to recreate life
where they live,
85% of the U.S is privately owned,
or at least East of the Mississippi.
We'd be 85% done.
(upbeat music)