Dave Goulson Quotes

It took many millions of years for evolution to slowly create unique assemblages of plants and animals in each region of our planet, and only a couple of hundred years for us to muddle them up.

I am not suggesting that petitions are a waste of time – they actually take up very little time – but don’t expect them to achieve much. There is a danger that people feel that the job is done, just because their favoured petition has reached a certain number of signatures. We will not save the planet simply by signing petitions, no matter how many we sign; they are a little more than a displacement activity.

One man’s weed is another man’s wildflower.

‘Normal’ is different for every generation.

We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so that we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?

Supporters of the chemtrail theory are generally dismissed as crackpots, and rightly so, because it is absurd to believe that a conspiracy on the scale they describe could possibly be kept quiet. It is not much more plausible than suggesting that the Earth is flat.

Truth was defined by those who shouted loudest, or had the money to buy it.

It is sometimes said that humanity is at war with nature, but the word ‘war’ implies a two-way conflict. Our chemical onslaught on nature is more akin to genocide.

The £3.5 billion a year in farm subsidies currently takes taxpayers’ money and uses it to support an industrial farming system that produces copious greenhouse gases, damages the soil, overgrazes the uplands, employs few people, pollutes rivers with fertilisers and pesticides, drives wildlife declines, and over-produces unhealthy food stuffs while under-producing food that is good for us. Why exactly should we pay our hard-earned taxes to subsidise all of this?

So, one can argue that insects are important, practically and economically, and one can argue that they bring us joy, inspiration and wonder, but both arguments are ultimately selfish, for both focus on what insects do for us. There is a final line of reasoning for looking after insects and the rest of the life on our planet, big and small, and it is one that is not focused on human well-being. One can argue that all of the organisms on Earth have as much right to be here as we do. If you are of a religious bent do you really think that God created all of this amazing life just so we could recklessly destroy it? Do you think He or She intended for coral reefs to be bleached and dead, littered with plastic trash? Does it seem plausible that He or She went to the trouble of creating five million species of insect so that we could drive many of them extinct without ever even registering their existence?
If on the other hand you are not a believer, and accept the scientific evidence that species evolved over billions of years rather than being created by a supernatural being with a beetle obsession, then you must realize that we are just a particularly intelligent and destructive species of monkey, nothing more than one of the perhaps ten million species of animal and plant on Earth. In that view, nobody granted us dominion over the beasts; we have no God-given moral right to pillage, destroy and exterminate.
Religious or not, most humans agree that the rich and powerful should not be allowed to oppress or dispossess the poor and powerless (though of course we do allow it to happen all the time). Similarly, in dozens of sci-fi movies from The War of the Worlds onwards, aliens more intelligent than ourselves arrive, decide that the human race is redundant, and set about wiping us out so they can plunder the Earth for their own ends, or build an interstellar bypass. Of course, in these films we see the aliens as the bad guys, and we root for the inferior humans who usually somehow triumph in the end despite the odds being stacked against them.
When will we realise the hypocrisy of our position? On our own planet we are the bad guys, thoughtlessly annihilating life of all kinds for our own convenience. We intuitively grasp that the aliens of the movie Independence Day have no right to take our planet; I wonder what goes through the mind of an orang-utan as it sees its forest home bulldozed to the ground? There should not have to be a ‘point of slugs’ for us to allow them their existence. Do we not have a moral duty to look after our fellow travellers on planet Earth, beautiful or ugly, providing vital ecosystem services or utterly inconsequential, be they penguins, pandas, or silverfish?

Personally, I do not think we should dismiss GM technology. However, so far most GM crops have been developed by large corporations, with the clear goal of lining their pockets rather than benefiting people or the environment.

Globally, beef provides just 2 per cent of the calories we consume, yet 60 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production.

Similar issues affect the 211,000 km² protected by the USA’s sixty-two National Parks. These are supposed to be wilderness areas unaffected by man’s activities, yet many are affected by oil and gas drilling, or by invasive species, while quite a few allow hunting, and climate change is affecting them all. The Everglades National Park, for example, is being damaged by over-extraction of water to irrigate crops, by fertiliser and pesticide pollution, and by no fewer than 1,392 different invasive species, spanning everything from Burmese pythons to spreading spans of Australian tea trees.
It is clear that trying to set aside areas for nature has not been adequate as a strategy to prevent biodiversity loss – though nature reserves undoubtedly have value – and that we need to do much more. We do not have to continue headlong towards environmental Armageddon, but to halt this process requires us to recognize that our current strategies are not working, and that we cannot carry on as we have in the past. It is not too late to save our planet, but to do so we need to learn to live alongside nature, to value and cherish it, to respect all life as equal to our own, especially the small creatures.

Why he was asked to comment on a subject on which he has no expertise is unclear, but in these strange times it seems common for the opinions of celebrities to be valued regardless of qualifications or experience.

Glyphosate is a general-purpose herbicide, killing any plant it touches. It is systemic, which means that it spreads through the tissues of the plant to kill the roots. I hate to admit this now, but I once used to use it quite a lot in my garden, as I believed the manufacturers when they claimed that it was non-toxic to wildlife and broke down very quickly in the environment. I used to be very naïve.