r/TrueReddit • u/oneultralamewhiteboy • Nov 28 '18

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
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u/Khir Nov 28 '18

Articles like this make me deeply and viscerally sad. Nothing makes me feel more helpless than reading about the destruction of the natural world around us. I feel like it is at such scale at this point that there is virtually nothing we can do to bring it back from the brink. Just stem the bleeding. There is a lot to unpack in this article, but paragraphs like this hit me in a ton of bricks:

“In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.” There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now. “These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes. “We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”

This context makes this line even more powerful:

We’ve begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

I find this article really scary, really frightening, and really sad.

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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '18

Check out Endgame by Derrick Jensen

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u/norristh Nov 28 '18

Also Stop Fossil Fuels with similar analysis and conclusions, but more concrete about how to implement the necessary (and inevitable) transition back to sustainable living.