Dave Goulson Quotes

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?

As with most new technologies, however, our enthusiasm for the benefits blinded us for sometime to the downsides.

I have never grasped why some folk are so desperate to have a perfectly uniform, green lawn, unmarred by pretty flowers. The concept of a ‘weed’ is entirely within our heads; one man’s weed is another’s beautiful wildflower. If we could somehow engineer a shift in attitude, so that ‘weeds’ such as daisies or clovers were seen as desirable additions to a lawn, rather than enemies to be battled against, we would save ourselves an awful lot of time, money and stress, while helping nature into the bargain.

So far are we from fully appreciating the dire plight of the natural world that it is still regarded as a perfectly normal, acceptable hobby to kill animals for fun. Thirty-five million pheasants are reared and released each year in the UK alone, so that a small number of people can enjoy blasting away at these naïve, semi-tame animals. There are simply too many of us (and soon to be many more) for it to be acceptable to carry on killing animals for amusement. We need to somehow persuade everyone to treat our environment with respect, to teach children growing up that littering, killing, polluting, are just not socially acceptable. How can we do that when the supposedly great and the good slaughter pheasants and grouse just for weekend entertainment?

Suppose one were to invent a new wheat variety that gave twice the yield. Would the world’s wheat farmers turn half their land over to nature? Of course not. Wheat prices would collapse, and we would find ever-more-wasteful ways of using the surplus, for example by feeding more to animals or using more for biofuels. The farmers would end up farming harder than ever to make ends meet, and nature would not benefit at all.

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.

Ants alone outnumber us by about one million to one. Until perhaps the last 200 years, an alien looking down on Earth at any time in the last 400 million years would have concluded that this was the kingdom of the insects.

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?

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.

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?

Insecticides kill all insects, not just the ones that they are aimed at, whatever the doublethinkers who manufacture agrochemicals may ask you to believe.

One theory as to why metamorphosis is such a successful strategy is that it enables the immature stages and the adults to each specialise in different tasks, and to have a body designed for the purpose.‡
‡Please note that I am not suggesting intelligent design by a supreme being. ‘Design’ is shorthand for the blind tinkering of evolution over millennia.

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.

Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control.

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