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Remember when you were a kid, and after long road trips, your parents would have to scrape all the dead bugs off the windshield? Now think about your last road trip. Fewer bugs, right?
In his new book, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World, Oliver Milman shares how scientists began studying the decline of insects and what that means for us.
Insects don’t get the respect they deserve. We often cast them off as annoying pests when, in reality, they play a critical role in a functioning ecosystem. And it’s more than just bees!
But the sad reality is that the changes in climate, plus the liberal use of pesticides, are creating a world that kills the insects we want, like bees and butterflies, and leaves us with those that are undesired (think mosquitos and cockroaches).
During my co-host, James Connolly’s interview with Oliver, they get into:
- The importance of insect decline
- Is this the sixth mass extinction
- All about pollinators
- The baseline syndrome
- The necessary actions of dung beetles
- Why lawns are lifeless and unnecessary
Resources:
The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Resnicks and almond farming
Connect with Oliver:
Website: Oliver Milman
Twitter: @olliemilman
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
For the month of January, my Sustainavore course is 50% off. If you’re struggling with holiday weight gain or finally ready to regenerate your health, It’s a great time to take my course. You’ll learn how to set and track your protein goals, which foods to include and what to avoid, and info on sourcing the right ingredients. The course includes instant access to eight easy-to-follow modules, 60 days of inspiring emails, 20 hours of bonus videos, a free cookbook, and more.
Go to sustainavore.com and use code JAN50 for 50% off.
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you.
James Connolly
Hi, this is James Connolly for Sustainable Dish podcast; I have a guest on today that I am actually really excited about. Excited meaning I can’t necessarily say it’s an exciting topic in some sort of ways. It’s sort of… it’s a really interesting aspect of the world that I kind of coexist with now, where I get to really just interview people that I find absolutely fascinating, who I think are bringing in topics that I think are sort of seminal points that are part of the idea of sustainability, and going forward into the 21st century as what kind of world that do we want to live in. And so I brought on Oliver Milman, he wrote a book that just came out recently. It’s called The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World. And Oliver is, he’s a writer for The Guardian, and just a really interesting person. One of the things I kind of wanted to start with this is… you have a passage in your book where you kind of talk about, it’s as early as like 1935, we had entomologists talking about the insect crisis, primarily focused on pesticides, but also focused on a number of different aspects of the way that we were converting the biomass of the world in order to create civilization and to feed ourselves, the conversion of that biomass. Meaning that we’re, in essence, some really, for lack of a better term, destroying the biodiversity of the world in order to create a sort of 20th-century industrialized farming and agricultural movement that is sort of moved out into the rest of the world. So Oliver, thank you so much for coming on. And taking the time. Thank you so much for this book, as well.
Oliver Milman
Yeah, thanks for having me on, James. It’s really good to be here and chat about these topics. It’s really important; I think it only really the importance of it really kind of dawned on me through writing this book. So it’s good to actually kind of get into some of this stuff because I feel it’s going to be the… some of the defining themes of this kind of century and beyond really, when we’re thinking about the kind of issues that we’re confronted with in terms of our own sustainability, in terms of society. And so and so yeah, these are really good issues to get into.
James Connolly
I kind of want to talk about a… you have multiple stories in the book of scientists who kind of came into studying insect decline, primarily because they had seen a fundamental shift in their childhood, from any number of degree of biodiversity that they had grown up with. And it could be even just like, scraping insects off of the glass on long road trips when they were kids growing up and seeing a decline in the number of insects that they’re that are on their windshields, but they in essence became passion projects. Was that something that occurred with you as well?
Oliver Milman
Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, I mean, a lot, a lot of this kind of came from anecdote from kind of just talking to scientists about other things. And then realizing there was this kind of silent emergency going on with insects, and yet, a lot of them could put their finger on it because there wasn’t the data. And there still is kind of lacking a lack of data in certain places in the world, such as the tropics, where most of insect life lives. But in the last kind of four or five, six years, we’ve been getting these this kind of drip, drip drip of research coming out from various countries around the world showing these kind of quite incredible declines in insect numbers. It’s just the problem is before that, there didn’t seem to be any point to counting them. And why would you count insects? I mean, they’re everywhere, aren’t they? They’re around us to an annoying extent. At times, it feels like biting us and, you know, spiraling around our lights around our heads when we’re outside. So it never really seemed important to conduct any kind of population trend analysis on them. It was always far more interesting for anthropologists and valuable scientifically, valuable to discover new species, to name new behaviors and so on. So it’s only in the last kind of four or five years we’ve begun to get a kind of handle on what’s happening within insect numbers. And yeah, the signs aren’t great, it’s pretty grim. We’re seeing, you know, some pretty alarming declines, the kind of numbers you don’t really see in conservation biology, often, I mean, we are kind of like to where how, you know, the world’s lost about 95% of the world’s… of the world’s tigers. But we’ve done that over kind of 100-250 years of kind of hunting, habitat loss and so on. In some parts of the world, we’ve been losing kind of 80, 90, 95% of insects in just kind of 30-40 years. I mean, there’s that kind of seminal study that came out of Germany, showing three quarters of flying insects, by biomass have declined in nature reserves there since 1989. So, you know, since the time that the Berlin Wall has fallen down, and Germany’s last three quarters, and it’s flying insects in its most protected areas, which is kind of incredible, when you think about it, like that, you know, there’s studies in kind of Puerto Rico from Denmark, some other places in the US, Australia, UK has lost half of its butterflies in the last 50 years, I mean, the list kind of goes on and on, really. It’s quite a kind of grim tale. But it kind of tells us a lot, I think about the way we’ve conducted our lives, how we’ve ordered the world around us and how that’s, you know, that’s completely the polar opposite to what insects need. We’re kind of have diametrically opposed ways of ordering our lives to the interests of insects. And it’s, I think it’s coming back to bite us now. No, no pun intended.
James Connolly
Yeah, you have this wonderful metaphor in the book, where you kind of talk about old sort of 70s photographs of people who had gone fishing and a sort of border development of the next 30 or 40 years where you see people holding up fish, and they’re getting smaller and smaller, but to that younger generation that wouldn’t necessarily understand that there is a cause to that because that is their new normal. And, you know, I think one of the cautionary tales that I always try to tell me a mantra, I tell myself, is that looking at a degraded landscape now and saying that this is normal? It is one of the fears that we have kind of going into the climate crisis.
Oliver Milman
Yeah, yeah, that kind of shifting baseline syndrome, what was normal to us, were we normal to our children, and grandchildren, I think those photographs of shrinking catches a fish of the fishing tours of the Florida Keys are a really good example of that, in that people aren’t disappointed, generation after generation that their catches got smaller, because then it’s normal. It’s normal you’d only catch a fish that’s, you know, the size of your forearm. Whereas before you would be getting fish the size of you. So that’s the issue with climate change. And it’s issue with insects. I mean, there is this kind of shorthand of the windshield effect that scientists talk about, which is, as you mentioned before, the bugs there’s smeared across your windshield after you take a drive across country. And I think for people for certain age, I certainly remember that being an issue when I was growing up in England and driving across country with my mom and my brother, and you’d see bugs on the windshield of the end of the trip. And that was quite normal. Now that’s becoming less so you kind of speak to lots of people who notice now that that’s becoming less and less of a thing. I kind of spent some time in Montana last year, I was driving around for about a week in some very cool remote areas in Montana, and not a single bug on my wind windshield at the end of that week. And, you know, that’s a kind of very sparsely populated part of the US. It’s not somewhere you think would be short of insects, but we’re seeing these kind of incredible kind of changes to kind of live memory almost, but to the next generation, that’s not going to seem unusual. It’s not going to seem unusual to have your windshield clear of bugs or to go outside on a summer’s day and not have insects circling the light or buzzing around you that’s gonna seem the new baseline. And that’s what we have kind of have to be aware of and think about when we think about what is normal. Quotation marks.
James Connolly
You talk a lot in the book about the media response to some of these reports that came out specifically in Germany and in Denmark about insect declines. And a lot of it was hyperbolic. But you also kind of go through some of the scientists who didn’t necessarily want to be put into the spotlight on this or their research to be sort of galvanized in a way that would get the public involved in this. But now they almost some of them will actually kind of come back and say, Well, this was really a warning sign. And we should be taking insect-aggedon or any number of different headlines that kind of came out. How are you feeling about it now?
Oliver Milman
I mean, sure. Well, I feel quite conflicted on the inside. Like to get an insect apocalypse up because it is hyperbolic in many respects. We’re not going to lose all insects, we’re going to almost certainly depart this planet before insects to as a species, you know. They are the great survivors, you know, they were here before dinosaurs. They survived five mass extinctions through their adaptability, through obviously their range and breadth of numbers and species. So there’s always been species that squeezed through those kind of bottlenecks of extinctions. We’re now kind of entering what many scientists believe is the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth. And it’s, you know, hammering insects, just like it’s hammering many other creatures in the world, but they will survive in some form. Beyond this, so we shouldn’t be thinking that they’re going to be completely wiped out. I think the kind of issue for us from a kind of selfish human sexual point of view is that we’re destroying many the kind of kinds of insects that we really value, the ones that pollinator food, being the primary example of that. The butterflies that give us kind of beauty and solace in the world, you know, the things that we find really valuable and pretty and worthwhile. And we’re creating a world that is kind of warmer and damper in a lot of places. And, obviously, with a growing global population, when with more people, and more waste, and so on. And you know, those are great conditions for mosquitoes and cockroaches and bedbugs, and all the things we dislike. So sure, we won’t lose insects. But if we have one with an insect, well, we have far more bed bugs and mosquitoes and far fewer bumblebees, and monarch butterflies. I don’t think that’s a trade most of us would want to make. It’s not something I think we would welcome. And it would have an ease having profound implications in terms of our food production, in terms of these kind of vital ecosystem services, to keep our kind of forests and grasslands, everything around us healthy and functioning, and it’s having an impact upon the food chain. A lot of scientists said to me, Well, you know, it’s hard for us to get people to care about insects, but you know, they care about birds, and they care about amphibians. They care about other creatures, and we’re already seeing in some places of the world -declines of birds that specialize in eating insects because they have nothing to eat. So you see these kind of cascading kind of issues rolling through the world and I think the worries of this starts hitting limits… starts hitting limits to hurt us, we need a certain amount of pollination, for the food. We produce these, you know, ecosystem services to break down waste, and dead bodies and so on. We need these things too for things to keep ticking over. So we’re kind of pulling away at those kind of life support systems through it’s kind of selfish point of view, as well as for all other life on Earth. So I think there is alarm to be had there. It’s not apocalyptic in a kind of Biblical sense, but it’s something we should be worried about and should be far more focused on doing something about.
James Connolly
Well, I have to be honest with you, when I first bought your book, I had to put it down. It was much more terrifying than I would have expected. And I do read a lot of the worst thing that humans have done in human history. I had to sort of pick it up again with the notion that we’re going to get to a place where because I don’t think we can conceptualize in many different ways the degree to which our food production system is really heavily dependent on not just honeybees, but wild pollinators as well. And so I wonder if you can dig into that a little bit. Throw some numbers at me like when I walked to the supermarket, what percentage of the foods that I see that are not packaged in the middle aisles are heavily dependent upon, you know, wild pollinators and honeybees, and what is happening with it that the pollinator species?
Oliver Milman
Sure, so the kind of figure that always gets bandied about is that one in every three bites of food is reliant upon animal pollinators. I mean, that figure can vary depending on what kind of source you’re looking at. But certainly about a third of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators in some way. And animals can mean kind of bats, but they primarily mean insects. Insects are doing the brunt of that work. Bees are forefronts. They get celebrated for that work. We all kind of love bees. The second most important pollinator is flies which we celebrate far less. We can go pointless and we’d all want to kill. I think very few of us appreciate that without flies, we’d have no chocolate, because the tiny midge is what gets inside the cacao plant to pollinate it. Seems like this 100 billion dollar a year industry that’s completely dependent on a tiny little midge. I don’t think any of us would praise any flies when we’re eating some Lindt’s, Hershey’s or whatever. But that’s what’s creating it and there’s no real substitute for it. So, you know, the value of food produced by inter pollination is about, you know, half a trillion dollars a year. You know, it’s everything from coffee, chocolate, apples, cranberries, melons, almonds, broccoli, blueberries, cherries, I mean, the list kind of goes on and on, is essentially the kind of all the colorful stuff on your plate that’s nutritious and healthy. And there’s already kind of some concern that as pollination services become stretched as the global population rises, there’s a huge increase in pollination demand. And there’s already been something like a 300% increase in pollination demand over the last 50 years at a time when the populations obviously, growing and pollinators coming out of the stresses is already concerned that we’re going to start seeing instances of disease and malnutrition cropping up in the poorer parts of the world. Of course, unfortunately, because of this lack of pollination, because of lot in low developing countries, the pollination services are very directly impacting in terms of in terms of food source, you have a plot of land and you farm yourself, you know, you sustain yourself through your own labels. So whereas supermarkets and us, you’ll probably start paying a little bit more money for certain fruits and vegetables, I think is fair enough to imagine that scenario. In other parts of the world, they just won’t be available, obviously, for poor people in the US and Europe and other countries is going to be out of reach. You already have the issue of obviously, healthy food deserts, don’t you? Where people can’t access enough kind of nutritious food. And I think this is only going to add to that problem because he’s going to be pushing certain foods out of reach financially. And so yeah, we’re kind of moving to that. And there’s already research showing that yields of certain fruits and vegetables in the US and Canada are declining blueberries and cherries, I think, were the products in subjects of recent research because they just simply can’t get the pollination needed. So I think that’s the issue. And the United Nations has warned there’s going to be a food security crisis that’s going to be slowly unfolding this century, something we’re gonna have to be thinking about quite carefully, as these kind of various trends club kind of collide with each other very unhelpful trends colliding with.
James Connolly
You recently came back from COP27. Did you go to speak or just to report?
Oliver Milman
Just to report. Yeah, it’s a kind of manic place. And it’s a huge amount going on. And food managed to get into kind of cover text, into the agreement fairly high up for the first time. So there is a kind of recognition that agriculture and food is part of this problem affected by it feeds into it. So there is that growing recognition. But I mean, overall, this COP was pretty much a failure when it comes to cutting emissions. That was the kind of try and for this new loss and damage fund for developing countries to help them deal with climate impacts. But overall, I can’t say that we could say this was a success because we are going entirely in the wrong directions when it comes to emissions. And this conference did pretty much nothing to averting that.
James Connolly
Yeah. My director for my last film was a presenter over at COP27. And it was the same. We just podcasted about it yesterday. But she said it was utter chaos. It was even really hard to find places to eat.
Oliver Milman
It was yeah, there was no food for the first few days, though. I think it was on the third or fourth day there was literally a river of raw sewage that started flowing out towards the end, where people were getting taxis and buses. And that I think for many of us summed up the whole process there. There was literal feces everywhere. But that yeah, it was… tt wasn’t very well organized. There was the kind of concerns about surveillance and issues of human rights due to the repressive regime of El Sisi, the Egyptian autocrat. So there were quite a lot of issues bound up in it. A lot of people felt it was one of the worst COPs when it comes to organization. And yeah, that didn’t help the overall vibe. The overall vibe was not amazing.
James Connolly
Yeah. And it’s just really disappointing, I think, really want to we’re sort of living in this realm where I think there is hyper attention focused on what we’re determining to be sustainable and ecologically friendly, that supports biodiversity but also feeds people nutrient-dense foods. And as we’re shuttling into this, these sort of goals of 2030, 2050 it’s really hard to see the level of chaos that’s kind of happening even at these places that should be well funded and at, you know, at least come up with some degree of consensus about one thing. You know, when Coca-Cola was sponsoring it, and you know, you just get this, this level of incredulity that’s happening within the people in the sphere.
Oliver Milman
Yeah, I think it really shut… I think last few years have really shown us about the limits of consensus, right? You have to get nearly 200 countries to agree to something. You know, Russia and Saudi Arabia are not going to agree or agree to phasing out coal, I mean, oil and gas, I mean, that’s not, that’s the entire basis their economies, then that’s not in their interest. So they’re gonna block any language that goes into an agreement that stays as such, we’re finding it hard. Although there is this kind of growing climate movement, obviously driven by young people, Greta Thunberg. And the developing world, they have that kind of moral standing to kind of demand more or less, and we’re seeing some really good kind of pressure building from that. But in terms of getting us or, as a world to agree on this is really hard. I mean, it’s like one of those kind of alien movies we, you know, in the movie, you see everyone in the world united to defeat the alien. President somebody, they just want to happen with it. And only half of us who would want to fight. Half of us would think it’s a hoax, it’s not happening. Some people would think, you know, it’s a good thing they are coming to destroy our cities. You know, we can’t all agree whether to get vaccines or wear a mask for a pandemic, we can’t all agree on, you know, basic ideas of democracy and in elections. So many, it’s hard to find consensus on things at the moment. And I think the COP is a really good example of that. It’s been 30 years of trying to herd cats, trying to get countries to agree to something and only kind of getting kind of inching progress towards those shared goals.
James Connolly
Yeah, and then getting people to care about insects.
Oliver Milman
Right, yeah. And publishing a book during the pandemic, when there’s war going on in Europe, and you’re, you know, energy and food prices are going up. And you’re saying, hey, what about the insects? But I mean, these things are all intertwined. They’re all Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we need to get a handle on by handling an insect crisis, I think we’ll get a handle on lots of other things too that benefit, not just insects, but humans, too.
James Connolly
You have a point in the book that I actually found fairly profound. I was reading Charles Mann’s book, Wizard and the Prophet. And he makes the case that if we weren’t dealing specifically with climate change, heating of the planet, our secondary concern would probably be nitrogen pollution. You know, as a close second, I would actually put your work and the work of a lot of these entomologists up there as well. I think it would probably be one of the primary crises of our time is dealing with the insect decline. You know, I think it is a crisis. And, you know, you kind of talk about what is charismatic megafauna when we’re talking about diversity, but really, we are losing enormous number of species that would just never get back again, in the insect world.
Oliver Milman
Yeah, for sure. And we have these kind of inbuilt biases, don’t we, about what’s important and what’s worth saving. And we spent an inordinate amount of time, conservation dollars and effort into saving, you know, the things we think are, you know, titanic and important, you know, charismatic in our world. And those are, like tigers, and lions, and elephants, and rhinos, and so on. And these things are important. And they’re important, because intrinsically they deserve their space in the world. And they’re important ecologically to but in terms of their ecological importance, they’re nowhere near the the breadth of impact that insects have, especially selfishly, for our own needs. I mean, rhinos could die out, and it wouldn’t really affect us. Should insects die? I think E.O. Wilson, the great biologist said, we would all perish within kind of three to four months. And we’d be struck down by the kind of mass starvation ecosystems around us would start failing. It would just be a really miserable place. It wouldn’t be one we would survive very long in so we have this huge mismatch, this kind of cultural misappropriation of where our affections in that we kind of see insects is kind of largely we see them as kind of pointless or annoying, or, you know, irrelevant, where they’re the ones actually piloting this plane. We’re in the back sipping martinis, right? We’re not actually the ones driving this with Giraffes and Rhinos. And Tigers. We’re in the back and the insects and fungi and bacteria and we’ll be setting the column bill of things. Plants, actually the ones propping up life on Earth. And we’re kind of pulling away some of those support structures without really thinking about it.
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James Connolly
Right? Do you find it somewhat annoying that our we’re so hyper focused on the microbiome of our own bodies, but also not extrapolating that to the outside world? I mean, if we don’t have like… I actually spent a lot of time thinking about dung beetles now. You know, right. So unless you have detritovores, unless you have carnivorous insects or omnivorous insects, none of the waste that we produce human waste, or otherwise, are just we’re not going to have a functioning system. But when people talk about the microbiome, it’s like, all of this research funding is being thrown at this as, but I’m like, this is earth, this sort of guy applying it is the same thing. And if you want to soil foodweb, if you want a web of life, we have to start to look at these keystone species like the dung beetle. We’d have to start to look at them in sort of a wholesome glory to their function, not just for us, right?
Oliver Milman
Yeah, yeah, entirely. I think unfortunately, there is a bit like climate changes. We don’t really appreciate the changes underway until they kind of smacking us around the face, right? Whether it’s a, you know, record heatwave, or with the floods we’ve seen in Pakistan or whatever they may be. I think we’ve dung beetles is a great example of that smacking around the US around the faces when European settlers arrived in Australia, sort of moving cattle there and realize that the native insects could not break down the dung of cattle. So he started getting this poisoning of the land, essentially, whole tracts of land became infertile, can’t be used, because you’re just caked in cow dung. And they actually had to bring over dung beetles from Europe to help break it down. I mean, there was posed a kind of existential threat to farming in Australia, this kind of mismatch. But that kind of loss isn’t apparent to us most of the time. We don’t think about these services, insects do these kind of things in the background, without keeping things ticking over without us really paying much attention to them. We would very much say to them, they weren’t around. I think one entomologist put it really well. And she told me in the book, you know, it’d be like a river of poo everywhere and dead uncle Jeremy be floating on past you. Because…
James Connolly
It’s a memorable line. Yeah.
Oliver Milman
All these kind of horrible things would happen. Yeah, if it wasn’t for insects. But we tend not to think about that. We don’t think about things that could happen. But don’t we think about things that are happening to us right now. And how we, how we deal with them, you know, we can react quickly to wars and pandemics and things that crises, immediate crises that seizes these kind of long, unfolding slow emergencies, we’re not so good at confronting.
James Connolly
So I want to kind of pivot a little bit because you have some really great stuff towards the end, where you kind of talking about how farming in general, but people in general can be part of a solution with some caveats, right, milkweed and a honeybee. It seems like a lot of people get into honeybee farming. I want to kind of talk a little bit about the caveats with it, but also to kind of talk about how people who are listening to this podcast and can sort of build ecosystems that function really well, on an individual level to help support, you know, bringing insects back and stuff like that.
Oliver Milman
Yeah, I mean, I think farming and food production is a huge part of the problem also solution of how we dig ourselves out of many different messes. I mean, climate, the climate crisis being one and insect declines being another I mean, we’re already seeing some good work being done in Europe with connecting wildlife corridors, encouraging and paying farmers to have these kind of borders of fields so that you have… you can grow kind of spices or wildflowers or whatever it is, have a network running through the landscape where insects can live and move around and breed and so on. And that is then has this kind of, obviously beneficial effect because you then have more insects around help pollinate the crops and also eat the pests that you don’t want around – I mean, wasps, many people don’t like wasps, they eat the aphids and things that you don’t want on your crops. So there is kind of some promising signs of a new way of doing it. But I think, unfortunately, the status quo much of the world including us, primarily the US, in fact, is one of monocultural farming practices, you know, sprawling fields, single crops, there are certain chemicals with very little risk fringing plants, you know, cut right up. So up the road, up to the border, no kind of wildness there at all and hugely toxic. I mean by one measure US agriculture has become 48 times more toxic to insect life than it has in the last 25 years. Because there’s constant layering of chemicals, most notably neonicotinoids, which is this class of insecticides that’s very, very good at killing insects to all kinds of insects, not just the target ones, everything wiping them out. It’s about 7000 times more toxic to bees than DDT, which you’ll see this, that kind of famous target of Silent Spring, the book by Rachel Carson, that saw the decline of bald eagles. And you know, what’s more an American than that – mobilize the environmental movement that saw the phase out of DDT. But unfortunately, you’ve replaced DDT with something that’s in many respects even worse. So I think there’s a lot of work to be done in stamping out the use of neonicotinoids. I mean, European Union is already banned through the worst types of neonics. The US could do the same. The EPA is choosing not to, even though it’s been found in lettuce, in baby food, in onions, in people’s urine. And these chemicals are everywhere now.
James Connolly
Pregnant mothers,
Oliver Milman
Yeah, exactly ubiquitous. So I think there is a kind of good case to kind of pushing for reform on that. I do think farmers are thinking a bit more now about these issues, because they’re seeing the impacts I think they’re seeing. I think they’re seeing the impacts of pollinator loss, I mean, it’s become so automated and sterile now. I mean, I went to Central Valley in California as part of the book to see this kind of mass tracking of managed honey bee hives from around the country to the Central Valley to pollinate almonds each year. And it’s just an incredible kind of effort just to prop up the existing food system using a bee that’s not native to the US. It’s imported, it’s now been kind of used as a kind of contract is agricultural workers kind of input like a tractor, or a chemical or something like that. And they’re kind of, you know, carted around the country pollinating different things. And without them, the whole system would start wobbling, because there aren’t enough wild bees out there to produce the food that yields that we have come used to so yeah, the whole system I think needs a rethink. And but we’re seeing some kind of green shoots of progress on that I’d like.
James Connolly
Yeah, I think with almond production, especially the Resnicks really dominated California and almond, pistachio agriculture for so long. And they seem to be completely outside of the spectrum of and anything that any farmer… they’re just billionaires, right. But it is sort of strange that the, you can see pesticide application happening in and around the same time period when pollinators are being released into these almond orchards. You know, and you’re just looking at it. And just like one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. So strange to me, but we’ve done some drone footage of almond plantations in California, and it just goes on forever and ever. You know?
Oliver Milman
Yeah, it’s not a wild environment. It’s kind of factory floor. It’s an outdoor factory floor of food production is essentially what it is. And everything is unproductive has been taken out. That doesn’t create cash. So you don’t see many wildflowers, or hedgerows or anything like that. You just see rows and rows of crops. And that is become the model of farming that has, in many ways pretty successful in terms of increasing yields of food, but it’s come at a cost. And we’ve taken a big chunk out of our environmental budget, if you like by doing things that way.
James Connolly
Yeah, I think 80% of the world’s almonds come from California. Yeah, Central Valley. And just that the irrigation and groundwater depletion is you know, if you’re talking about migratory birds, or you know, aquatic species of insects, the groundwater depletion is just so absolute there. It’s a total desertification that’s happening. The subsidence of the land. I mean, we’re talking about like, not inches anymore. I was talking feet in terms of subsidence, 10,000 year aquifers that are being drained, you know, all for what I would consider to be unnecessary monoculture. You could probably do what almond production is in this one area in many different places and mitigate a lot of the concerns. But I don’t know. Just don’t get me on the Resnicks.
Oliver Milman
Yeah, I mean, it’s an incredible use of space. I always think about that when I especially want to fly over the US about how America uses its space. And it’s a really interesting topic because there’s… I see a large population a huge amount of land. And you see that land being used quite inefficiently when you look at housing, for example, sprawling suburbs take up a huge amount of land, none of it walkable. You need cars to get everywhere, none of it’s joined up with other things with, you know, malls or places where you work. That seems inefficient. The use of lawn. Lawn I found out through the book is the largest irrigated crop in America, more than corn, you know, the amount of resource that goes in the water, pesticides, all kinds of other things to keep kind of verdant, very boring, closely trimmed lawn that has no life in it. It just kind of looks in an aesthetic that we, that we feel our neighbors appreciate and kind of fits in with, you know, suburban life or whatever dream that entails. And farming too. I mean, yeah, like you’re saying huge, huge tracts of land just devoted to single crops. There’s going on as far as the eye can see, the number one producer agricultural output – US. Second is the Netherlands, the size of Maryland. Why is the Netherlands the second largest producer? It’s not because it’s got the most amount of land. It’s because he does think smarter, vertical farming, robotics seed to genetic stuff they’re doing with that. I mean, they’ve done things in a smarter way, and arguably a more environmentally friendly way, although obviously there’s downsides the way they do things too. But I think yes, space and how it’s used in the US. It’s a really kind of interesting topic and across many different areas.
James Connolly
Yeah, one of the interesting points that you make in the book is, in some ways, how you feel about what we, I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time in England, you have looked at that landscape in a very different way. You have a passage where you’re kind of talking about old growth forests, peatlands, bogs, you know, the, it is much more of an aesthetically pleasing place, but the level of biodiversity loss, it’s even happened in places like England, you know, is is is really like, it’s problematic, right?
Oliver Milman
Yeah, it is. And again, it’s the baseline syndrome. I mean, when I was growing up in the UK, you know, beauty was these kind of rolling fields, nice state, little stone walls, hedgerows, sheep in the fields, that kind of thing. But that isn’t aesthetic that was there up until a few 100 years ago, most of the country is forested. And that’s now been pretty much entirely chopped down. You have these remnants of temperate rainforests, which you mentioned there, you had those kind of cleaning on the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia to Tasmania, Chile and places like that, that these really are just fragments for remnants of what once was there. And yeah, I think it’s kind of interesting to think about what we consider to be beautiful, what we consider to be normal. Just going back to the lawns, I think a lot of things that are very tidy lawn is beautiful, normal, very colorful plants in there that are native plants, they’re kind of pricy. And it’s, you know, it’s in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it in terms of sustaining insect life in terms of creating kind of vibrant ecosystems around you? These are quite dead kind of lifeless places. And we are like paying the price for that now.
James Connolly
Yeah. Lawns are sort of a weird leftover from the aristocracy, because I think a lot of that stuff was centered around the closing of the commons, and then you would build out these places and hand cut lawns, because it you know, if it wasn’t associated with agricultural production, then obviously it was an inherent good. So these gardens that were kind of part of that, like, it’s like, it produces nothing except an aesthetically like manicured landscape that was part of kind of industrialization and all this other stuff. So America, the American middle class, kind of just took it on as like, a show of supportive wealth and, you know, a cultural construct, you know, yes. The planned divisions that were associated with like Disney, or Disney had this planned community, the lawns could not, couldn’t exceed more than one and a half inches, or you’d be fined. And, you know, suburbia, you know, urban sprawl and all that stuff.
Oliver Milman
The Dream Yes.
James Connolly
The dream. Yeah, I mean, I think your book is such an important element to our understanding of how we want to build a world that is part of putting biodiversity on a scale that, you know, would harken back to even just our grandfathers and great grandfather’s. I think that there is it’s such a… it’s such an important part of it. And I think you had a term in there, it’s like a, it’s an invisible crisis or something like that. I think we have to bring more visibility to this, especially people in cities I think need to really understand that what we’re building is, you know, is monoculture of planet wide monocultures. You know, so thank you so much for the book. I did say it was terrifying. It is terrifying, Oliver, it’s terrifying. But I do think you build a world that I would want my kids to live in and my grandchildren to live in. So thank you so much for that.
Oliver Milman
Thank you, James, this was very generous. He’s saying, yeah, if he can get beyond the terror in the book, there’s certainly some interesting things about how we can move forward from there. And there’s also some pretty cool facts about bees, they can play soccer, and they can recognize each other by face and they can count things like that. So there’s lots of interesting insects and facts in there, too. So it’s not just doom and gloom.
James Connolly
No. And, you know, one of the things that you made me, like really reconcile myself with is that, you know, I mean, if you’re looking at flies in a different way, as pollinators in the book, you say, they operate longer hours, and they can tolerate colder conditions, you know, in and they are effective pollinators. So getting people to kind of start to re-see what we consider pests as profitable to, you know, all of it is really important. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So how will people reach you? You’re on Twitter, I believe?
Oliver Milman
Yes. For now. Yeah, at the time of broadcast, yes. This is still on Twitter. And you can find me on The Guardian. My byline is on there. So yeah, hope people can engage with the writing. A lot of my writing is in this vein. So yeah, check out my work there.
James Connolly
Great. Great. Thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD
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