Is the world being destroyed?

You keep making posts to push this ideological narrative©.

[the thread itself is] about the basis for the current material, rather than spiritual, reasons for questioning the future quality of life on this planet.

I don't see what your complaint is.

Practically every article I post gets the same treatment – "Why are you posting this? Why don't you post positive news? This is extremism that makes everything worse!"

... you oppose capitalism and you seem to have an aversion to technology.

But it is unclear what you propose to do.

Getting rid of plastics would have an inordinate on people in poverty who depend on plastic for housing, water, and medicine...

If you were talking about practical solutions, rather than just harping on problems, that might be a little more productive.

9) No personal arguments ad nauseum

If a personal dispute between members drags on and on and gets in the way of others being able to discuss a topic (or crosses from topic to topic) members may be suspended.

Insects have been around for a very long time. Their ancestors evolved in the primordial ooze of the ocean floors, half a billion years ago. They make up the bulk of known species on our planet – ants alone outnumber humans by a million to one – so if we were to lose many of our insects, overall biodiversity would of course be significantly reduced. Moreover, given their diversity and abundance, it is inevitable that insects are intimately involved in all terrestrial and freshwater food chains and food webs. Caterpillars, aphids, caddisfly larvae and grasshoppers are herbivores, for instance, turning plant material into tasty insect protein that is far more easily digested by larger animals. Others, such as wasps, ground beetles and mantises, occupy the next level in the food chain, as predators of the herbivores. All of them are prey for a multitude of birds, bats, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals and fish, which would have little or nothing to eat if it weren’t for insects. In their turn, the top predators such as sparrowhawks, herons and osprey that prey on the insectivorous starlings, frogs, shrews or salmon would themselves go hungry without insects.

(...)

Aside from their role as food, insects perform a plethora of other vital services in ecosystems. For example, 87% of all plant species require animal pollination, most of it delivered by insects. The colourful petals, scent and nectar of flowers evolved to attract pollinators. Without pollination, wild flowers would not set seed, and most would eventually disappear. There would be no cornflowers or poppies, foxgloves or forget-me-nots. But an absence of pollinators would have a far more devastating ecological impact than just the loss of wild flowers. Approximately three-quarters of the crop types we grow also require pollination by insects, and if the bulk of plant species could no longer set seed and died out, then every community on land would be profoundly altered and impoverished, given that plants are the basis of every food chain.

(...)

Insects are also intimately involved in the breakdown of organic matter, such as fallen leaves, timber and animal faeces. This is vitally important work, for it recycles the nutrients, making them available once more for plant growth. Most decomposers are never noticed. For example, your garden soil – and particularly your compost heap, if you have one – almost certainly contains countless millions of springtails (Collembola). These minute, primitive relatives of insects, often less than 1mm long, are named for their clever trick of firing themselves as high as 100mm into the air to escape predators. This army of minuscule high-jumpers does an important job, nibbling on tiny fragments of organic matter and helping to break them up into even smaller pieces which are then further decomposed by bacteria, releasing the nutrients for plants to use.

Other insects, the undertakers of the natural world, are similarly efficient at disposing of dead bodies. With uncanny speed, flies such as bluebottles and greenbottles locate corpses within minutes of death, laying masses of eggs that hatch within hours into maggots that race to consume the carcass before other insects arrive. Their relatives, the flesh flies, have an edge in this race, as they give birth directly to maggots, skipping the egg stage entirely. Burying and carrion beetles arrive next and consume both the corpse and the developing maggots. Burying beetles drag the corpses of small animals underground, lay their eggs on them, then remain to care for their offspring. This sequence of events is sufficiently predictable even to be used by forensic entomologists to judge the approximate time of death of human corpses when the circumstances of death are suspicious.

(...)

On top of all this, burrowing, soil-dwelling insects help to aerate the soil. Ants disperse seeds, carrying them back to their nests to eat, but often losing a few, which can then germinate. Silk moths give us silk, and honeybees give us honey. In total, the ecosystem services provided by insects are estimated to be worth at least $57bn a year in the US alone, although this is a pretty meaningless calculation since, as EO Wilson once said, without insects “the environment would collapse into chaos” and billions would starve.

The American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened the loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of an aeroplane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove 10, or 20 or 50, and at some point that we are entirely unable to predict, there will be a catastrophic failure, and the plane will fall from the sky. Insects are the rivets that keep ecosystems functioning.

(...)

Our planet has coped remarkably well so far with the blizzard of changes we have wrought, but we would be foolish to assume that it will continue to do so. A relatively small proportion of species have gone extinct so far, but almost all wild species now exist in numbers that are a fraction of their former abundance, subsisting in degraded and fragmented habitats and subjected to a multitude of ever-changing human-made problems. We do not understand anywhere near enough to be able to predict how much resilience is left in our depleted ecosystems, or how close we are to tipping points beyond which collapse becomes inevitable.

As the United States comes to grips with the climate crisis, fossil fuels will slowly recede from being primary sources of energy. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that the petrochemical industry is counting on greatly increasing the production of plastics and toxic chemicals made from fossil fuels to profit from its reserves of oil and gas.

That transition is why the challenges of climate, plastic pollution and chemical toxicity — which at first might each seem like distinct problems — are actually interrelated and require a systems approach to resolve. The danger is that if we focus on only a single metric, like greenhouse gas emissions, we may unintentionally encourage the shift from fuel to plastics and chemicals that are also unsafe and unsustainable.

Petrochemicals are ubiquitous in everyday products, and many of them are poisoning us and our children. Stain repellents, flame retardants, phthalates and other toxics are contributing to cancer, falling sperm counts, obesity and a host of neurological, reproductive and immune problems, research has shown.

Epidemiological studies over the past decade have found, moreover, that exposure in utero and in childhood to chemicals used as flame retardants, called polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, has been linked to significant declines in IQ. These chemicals, widely used since the 1970s in the United States, were largely phased out in recent years. But they have persisted in the environment. And the push to phase out PBDEs led to “regrettable substitutions,” as the authors of one study put it, replacing one type of phased-out toxic flame retardant with another one that is also harmful.

And plastics, of course, are inundating the planet.

Global chemical production is predicted to double by 2030, according to the United Nations. Plastic production could jump three- to fourfold by 2050, according to a World Economic Forum report in 2016. By that year, the ocean is expected to contain, by weight, more plastic than fish.

A recent study by the Minderoo Foundation, which is working to end plastic waste, found that single-use plastics account for over a third of plastics produced every year. Ninety-eight percent are made from fossil fuels, according to the study.

[...]

We can draw on lessons from the European Union. The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, recently proposed an aggressive plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050. It also has developed a plan to build a circular economy based on the reuse and recycling of products and to address the presence of hazardous chemicals in those products. Instead of building more plastic and chemical production facilities, companies should invest in innovative technologies to achieve circular production and reuse.

We now have the leadership to combat the three-headed hydra of climate change, plastic pollution and toxic chemicals threatening us and our ecosystems. Now we need strong legislation and continued investment in research and technology to achieve a healthier planet for our children.

I think this 75% number is a lie. I did some checking, the only 75% number I could find was on "biomass" from a single reserve in Germany.

An experiment measuring biomass in reserves in a small part of a single European country can be used to state the biomass in reservices in a small part of a single European country.

I think this 75% number is a lie. I did some checking, the only 75% number I could find was on "biomass" from a single reserve in Germany.

The work shows a massive biomass decline for insects over a large geographical region of Central Europe.

There is no "large geographical region" in central Europe.

There is no large geographical area in Central Europe. You are trying to extrapolate a single study from a small region into global significance. That is silly.

You are pushing a one-sided extreme ideological narrative©.

You are demanding the right to write political propaganda without it being challenged.

I think this 75% number is a lie. I did some checking, the only 75% number I could find was on "biomass" from a single reserve in Germany.

Information about insect populations in the tropics, where most insects live, is sparse. We can only guess what impacts deforestation of the Amazon, the Congo, or south-east Asian rainforests has had on insect life in those regions.

But it may be possible that insects, who have survived for millions of years through a great many biological catastrophes, are finding a way to survive our presence too.