I don’t think we need to worry about Global Warming because, by then, Nature will be over anyway. We could do something about it but we probably won’t. If you don’t believe me you should read Dave Goulson’s quite wonderful book “SILENT EARTH, avoiding the Insect Apocalypse” (Jonathon Cape, 2021); it’s the best £20 you’ll ever spend. Then buy a copy for your children and grandchildren, and for as many of your friends as you can afford. You’ve got to be old like me( 84 next week) to remember what the world was like when we were young: wild flowers everywhere, butterflies bees and grasshoppers, the summer skies full of swifts and skylarks, cuckoos calling through the summer woods, ponds full of cockchafers, sticklebacks and newts……. Forty years ago I was lucky enough to spend 3 weeks in the Serengeti, and I wondered why such a magic spot of wildness was still left. The answer turned out to be a couple of insects, the tsetse fly and the mosquito. They kept the herdsmen and the farmers out. One good spraying, and it will all be over. In Britain our farmers spray their fields about fifteen times every year with insecticides, herbicides and fungicides thousands of times more lethal than the DDT we were wise enough to ban after Rachel Carson warned us just in time. Yes fifteen times! I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t read Goulson . We’ve all got to read it before it’s too late. But it may be already. As Jane Goodall has said : “We inherited the Earth from our Parents, but we’ve stolen it from our children”.
Posts Tagged ‘nature’
WE MUST MUST LOOK AFTER OUR INSECTS OR WE WILL GO WITH THEM
October 16, 2023THE END OF NATURE?
September 30, 2021I don’t think we need to worry about Global Warming because, by then, Nature will be over anyway. We could do something about it but we probably won’t. If you don’t believe me you should read Dave Goulson’s quite wonderful book “SILENT EARTH, avoiding the Insect Apocalypse” (Jonathon Cape, 2021); it’s the best £20 you’ll ever spend. Then buy a copy for your children and grandchildren, and for as many of your friends as you can afford. You’ve got to be old like me( 84 next week) to remember what the world was like when we were young: wild flowers everywhere, butterflies bees and grasshoppers, the summer skies full of swifts and skylarks, cuckoos calling through the summer woods, ponds full of cockchafers, sticklebacks and newts……. Forty years ago I was lucky enough to spend 3 weeks in the Serengeti, and I wondered why such a magic spot of wildness was still left. The answer turned out to be a couple of insects, the tsetse fly and the mosquito. They kept the herdsmen and the farmers out. One good spraying, and it will all be over. In Britain our farmers spray their fields about fifteen times every year with insecticides, herbicides and fungicides thousands of times more lethal than the DDT we were wise enough to ban after Rachel Carson warned us just in time. Yes fifteen times! I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t read Goulson . We’ve all got to read it before it’s too late. But it may be already. As Jane Goodall has said : “We inherited the Earth from our Parents, but we’ve stolen it from our children”.
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