Tom Murphy is a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. In the piece excerpted below, he presents a darkly humorous and rather grim exercise in attempting to quantify the economic value of bugs...
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I have pointed out before that humans now vastly outweigh wild mammals, to the point that we only have 2.5 kg of wild land mammal mass left per human on the planet.
The trends are falling fast: insect, bird, mammal, amphibian, and fish populations are losing ground to the tune of 1–2% per year, amounting to halving populations over a handful of decades. Inevitably, then, extinctions are up a thousand-fold, and increasing. This is decidedly not good, and perhaps the most glaring sign that modernity is a literal dead-end path.
The approach here is to assume that Earth’s ecology would crash without any arthropods (insects, spiders, centipedes, and crustaceans). The same might be said for fish, or birds, or any major group.
Bugs (an informal catch-all substitute for arthropods here) are particularly attractive to me for this exercise because they are so crucial in terms of food for others, soil conditioning, pollination, and other services, that it is hard to believe other phyla could carry on without them.
Evolution produces a complex interconnected web that cannot be expected to maintain its overall integrity if surgically plucked apart in this way — much as an organism cannot be expected to survive if completely removing any one of many key organs.
Therefore, no bugs = no humans. No them, no us.
Our economic regime is so narrowly imbecilic as to neglect the very thing that makes its own existence possible. It lacks context. By placing essentially zero (or even negative) value on bugs, it incentivizes its own destruction. It’s the metaphor of cutting off the branch you’re standing on: marvelous efficiency, but to an ultimately disastrous end.
How could this short-sightedness happen? Because markets can generate short term gains (profits) without consideration of such elements — for centuries, even. That’s good enough for markets to function and grow to dominate life, complete with insufferable economists bossing us about how it works.
But what are centuries against the 500 million years of evolution that gave the Earth its arthropod foundation — not to mention the billions of years that set the stage for even that step? Apparently, that’s worth nothing, economically?
Let’s be clear: the culture has it terribly wrong. Such an attitude can appear to work for a time, but the fate of the biophysical world is steady decline as one commodity after another is monetized, displacing the community of life and making various creatures’ existence progressively more difficult and dismal to the point of non-viability and extinction. Our culture might view this as unfortunate and unintended collateral damage, but not as an existential threat of our own making.
What I am saying is that a system powerful enough to destroy ecological health and biodiversity — which we have demonstrated in spades — cannot survive unless it deliberately refrains from using this power. It must invert the cultural hierarchy and place ecosystem health — the vitality of the biodiverse planet — above ALL other considerations.
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FULL ESSAY --
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-08/nothing-without-bugs/#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Biodiversity
