I actually was sitting outside a few nights ago and realized that there was no more fireflies, and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I used to go out all the time during summer as a kid to catch them, they would light up whole fields. That was just like 15 years ago. Pretty sobering realization
I'm in Chicago (in a neighborhood close to downtown) and in previous years I'd hardly ever seen any fireflies. This year, they're everywhere -- in parks and even in trees on neighborhood streets.
I understand fireflies are sensitive to light pollution. I can't imagine Chicago's any different from other major cities. COVID has people staying home a lot more but that has nothing to do with street lighting. I wonder what's going on.
I do think that living organisms are extraordinarily adaptable if the changes are gradual and bounded. Most of us have this idea that an ecosystem is this delicate and fragile thing, but nature actually has a lot of robustness and redundancies built-in (which are inefficient but increase chances of group survival).
We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago.
I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even after I sprayed my vineyard with insecticide to deal with japanese beetles they were fine, and continued to prosper in and around there.
It may just be that we've had an unusually hot dry year, I assume where you have as well. Maybe that's advantageous for them somehow?
> We live rural southern Ontario and fireflies are usually just a single weekend or so at the end of June or beginning of July. But this year they went on for almost two months. They only just stopped about a week ago.
I wonder if this is cyclical behavior. We had a year like that last year down in NJ. This year it was back to maybe only a week. I live in the west part of the state surrounded by parkland. Rainfall was the only thing that was dramatically different this year. Last year was extremely wet spring and early summer (when they appeared) followed by an extremely dry end of summer into fall. This year we've had average rain in almost every month. The rain evidence isn't anecdotal, I have a state rainfall gauge a couple miles down the road from me with records going back at least a few decades.
Wouldn’t have been a good memory if you were _running_ through the midwest. A good chunk of the summer, they dive-bomb anyone who looks at their bush funny. Those birds are my personal nemeses - but they’re winning.
In the upper st lawrence / great lakes basin it's really becoming more and more erratic. More ice storms, more drastic swings in the winter, lower snowfall some years, more droughts in some summers, more record rainfalls in others, etc. It's a recognizable change even in the 25 years I've lived here.
Maybe, but last year was wet and cool, this year heat wave and drought. The great lakes are still up near their record water levels though (after last year and the year before), whereas a few years ago they were at record lows.
i mean, at least where I live many records about average and max temperature have been broken 3 years in a row now. I suppose if this continues it will actually start to be not unusual for this to happen.
Well, this year we for one don't, in fact we're having the exact opposite, but last year we did have a hot year and everyone said it's definitely climate change. I think we're not yet at the point where we can feel it, we're just projecting.
The personal subjective feeling at this point is fewer places having snowy winters and more frequent and severe heatwaves — the phrase “9 of the hottest years on record were in the last decade” being in the news most (or all?) years since the late 1990s.
Most individual people won’t feel the change that’s happened over their lifetime unless they’re wondering why it doesn’t snow any more or how they ever managed without air conditioning; it shows up in higher costs for national-scale-multi-year weather damage or crop and fishing productivity.
And of course, this is a global rather than local effect, so some places have more change than others. My first trip to the USA was the 2014/15 winter when there was simultaneously record cold on the Atlantic coast and record warm on the Pacific coast.
Those of us into winter sports are keenly conscious of the winter weather patterns, in a way the bulk of the population is not. Snow in southern Ontario for example has always been unreliable, with rain and snow mixes common, but snowfall is getting much much less reliable.
>I do think that living organisms are extraordinarily adaptable if the changes are gradual and bounded. Most of us have this idea that an ecosystem is this delicate and fragile thing, but nature actually has a lot of robustness and redundancies built-in (which are inefficient but increase chances of group survival).
Chicago used to be orange at night, now it's blue. I wonder if the color temperature and intensity changes in the shift to LED street lighting played a role. They certainly do in human sleep.
I drove a Scion xB for 13 years which had all the sleek aerodynamics of a toaster. When I got it in 2005 after driving a sedan for years, I IMMEDIATELY noticed how much more buggy the windshield got during the summer. It was one of the few things I disliked about that ugly, lovely little Lego brick.
By 2015, the bugs has drastically diminished enough for me to remark upon it before coming across any studies. The confounding factor here though is that the county I was in had a lot of development in it over that time. My routes stayed mostly the same (meaning both ‘where I drove’ and ‘how many buildings were along them’) but I can’t discount the expansion of the surrounding sprawl as a big factor.
Even after I moved to a neighboring more-rural county though, with a longer commute to the same workplace, I did not really see an increase.
This does not seem to have any influence. Even with 'oldtimers' you get less squashed bugs nowadays.
Even accounting for this, there is sufficient evidence for a significant drop in insect populations. While it's hard to have exact numbers, the estimations in decline of population range from 70% to 90% since the 1980.
I remember that a couple of years ago, there was a study that was based on squashed bugs on licence plates. Basically they used the standardized surface of the plates to measure the bugs in a certain area. No idea what came from it.
There's also memory. I remember when driving at night 35 years ago I saw a lot more insects in my headlights than I see these days. The difference is very noticeable.
There definitely more to it than aerodynamics.
Actually average CdA (drag area) would certainly have gone up in most parts of the world due to SUVs becoming popular. Looking at values on Wikipedia [1] definitely does not show an obvious reduction over the the last 20 years.
More... But that's because I drive at unusual hours, not when the squashed bugs are spread out over peak traffic (which has definitely increased, esp. trucks).
Could it be that because of COVID you have time to pay more attention? I wonder that sometimes about things I've "noticed" during the past 6 months. Maybe it accounts for some of it at least.
I've noticed the uptick in fireflies too, but I attributed it to the mild winter we had compared to the deep freeze of 2018-2019. Spring was also warm and wet very early.
We also had the sub-Brood XIII cicadas launch out in the western suburbs which was insane. They came early and they came out in huge numbers.
Ecosystems are delicate and fragile. But if you destroy one, there’s a good chance it very soon will be replaced with a new one, where the new niches are occupied by different species. At first it will be species that that aren’t very specialised, like rats and cockroaches. But after just a few million years you might have something as diverse and rich as the system you destroyed.
I don't want highly specialized pigeons and rats, thank you.
And at any rate, specialization only works if the problems stay relatively stable, or temporary. If we aren't stopped/don't stop ourselves we will keep inventing new insults every ten years and nothing can adapt to anywhere near that rate of change.
You're also forgetting the Carboniferous period. It took 50 million years for anything to puzzle out how to benefit from surplus lignin. In 50 million years are we going to be around? In 50 million years is anyone going to remember that Alpha Centauri is a system humans used to live in (before we used it up)?
I'm probably a bit North of you (Southern Canada) and this is the first year I've seen lots of fireflies at night. So there's a good chance it's more a case of migratory patterns changing than a mass die-off. Don't mean to make light of the matter, but it might not be as grim as it appears right now either.
For me it's red wasps. Growing up in Texas there used to be so many, you could see them flying low searching for spiders in the grass. Last Sunday, in the heart of summer, I couldn't find a single red wasp where there used to be hundreds.
I have a fallow field, and in perhaps two hours of dedicated observation I've got about 10 species of insect I need to identify, and for a couple of them I'm not even sure what kind of bug they are (I'm probably going to have to scan a field guide).
The lot is between the river and our local garden district. I suspect I'm part of a migration route between them (I figured I was too far from the river for dragonflies, but I see at least 2 a day) It's changing my plans for the space a bit.
Would highly suggest checking out the iNaturalist app. It doesn't always nail down insects/plants/etc, but a lot of the times it gives you a good guess and other, more experienced people will come along and give a better id.
I used to work summers out of college in an AK cannery. Some years there were barely any fish and the season would be closed early. Other years there was so much fish the cannery could barely keep up. Unless you're monitoring things regularly its hard to say whether there is an actual decline or not.
I didn't take the insect apocalypse seriously until I realized how much less time I'm spending washing bugs off my car. It was sort of my Silent Spring moment.
Yeah, I remember my parents needing to clean their windshield every time we went on the highway. It'd get absolutely caked in yellow and brown spatters after merely an hour or two.
As for me, I've never cleaned my windshield in my life. The rain washes off the little bits of dust. There's nothing else to clean.
It depends where in the UK you are driving, I have to wash the car after every major journey > 1hr long because its covered in dead insects and the red, I guess blood, staining the paint. I would say there has been more sightings of wildlife and more insects this year because of lockdown, more hedgehogs seen walking on the roads, more deer, rabbits and plenty of insects especially at night at the moment. So I normally walk my dog with a headtorch at night as its cooler for him to run around off the lead but the insects getting attracted to my headtorch this year is a stupid amount to the point I've stopped taking him out at night. Germany may be onto something by reducing the light sources. Where I live we do have LED street lamps which cast a very definite circle of light on the road, but there is no "side leakage" of light so its darker walking between street lamps. You also dont get any orange glow into your house or bedroom window like the old style street lamps used to do which can keep you awake especially when stressed. The number of small birds nesting in the area has also gone up over the last two years but its nice watching them feeding on insects crawling up and down plants like rose bushes, or hanging onto the side of brick houses getting the odd bug.
It hit me a couple of years back, a night time drive through the Australian countryside and your car would be plastered with insects - not anymore. And fireflies, I haven't seen one in years,
Yes 10 or 15 years ago driving from Adelaide to Melbourne would require a halfway pit stop to manually clean the windscreen because the wipers weren't able to cope with all the bug guts. Last year i did it and didn't need to even use the wipers once.
Our insect loss is much more likely due to climate change than light pollution though due to our sparse population between the cities.
Unless there is actual data it’s probably best to not trust your memory. Every time you remember something the reality of it changes. Memory is lossy. Bias and selection are favored over improvement or precision of recall. Every recollection is inferior to the previous one.
I have a few memories of extensive fire fly experiences back in the day. But when I really think about it, I don’t remember all the days and years without a dramatic memory. And the ones I have may be distorted.
No doubt. I was just pointing to a single instance and not saying they don’t remember well or that there isn’t data regarding insects in general.
I had a similar thought a few years back and researched it only to find that the fire fly population where I lived hadn’t really changed. I just happened to be keying on a memory that had a large amount of them and not taking into consideration that wasn’t the standard case. That their yearly population is dependent on certain weather conditions during specific months. And that some years they have a bumper crop and others not so much, but on average look about the same. That doesn’t mean it’s the same story where they live of course.
My grand-father lived through WW2. I’d say he was able to give a recollection of memories and experiences that are not found in any books and even though I agree that “good sources for truth” may vary for the use-case, we shouldn’t bee (pun intended) too insecure about believing some of our “past-memory-gut-feel”/“anecdotes”.
There is ample evidence about research being “sponsored by the right people showing the right results” or media outlets shaping certain opinions.
And even though it may be true that the HN reader has a diverse set of sources to form an opinion - this isn’t necessarily right for “average people”. E.g., the effect and the implications of inflation. For decades I have been hearing that “there is no inflation on Europe, the currency is stable”; yet, recalling “what money could buy back then” stories - I probably get a different vibe.
History often repeats itself and “true objective data” may either be spotty and distorted; I have probably grown old and cynic enough to say things like “maybe it’s a good idea to look into the past and remember real good what people said or saw...”
Driving on a highway for 10h without any bugs on it - common sight in Europe nowadays. 10years ago, I would need to handwash it after 3h on the highway.
Anecdotes can be a very powerful tool for critical thinking.
I agree to an extent on most you’ve written but I do think we need to be careful too. A general insect decline (objective data points to this) seems to exist. But a single persons observation that they remember more fire flies than today doesn’t necessarily hold water. I replied to another response that I had a similar thought only to eventually realize I was biasing a small number of events from the past that were probably a standard deviation or more in the “lots of Fire flies” direction. I wasn’t considering all the times there weren’t.
Our brains do this. We key on certain experiences and memory favors the extreme. Over time our memory does distort. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But that we should be careful with anecdotal memories to make generalized pr specific statements about today’s reality.
As for “history repeating itself” - does it? Or do historians who write history repeat themselves? Historians write about long sequences of events that seem inevitable and if only such and such action were taken then a disaster or triumph would have been avoided or accomplished. But the recording of select historical events is more a persons narrative - a story - rather than the actual past.
What are the motivations of the historian writing about the past? What have they negated? What have they chosen to focus on? What of their memories or the subjects they used to inform their history? Which people do you choose to understand what they “said or saw”?
What? He says he remembers fields full of fireflies. Why imply that it's memory distortion? I'm surrounded by fields and in the high point or July there are breathtaking displays of fireflies at night, and it's not my imagination. Why tell someone that they misremembered that?
Lots of fireflies in my backyard every night, probably because it is partially flooded due to the record high water levels in the Great lakes. Have been trying to film them. But subpar results so far.
I have a vintage 70-200 lens adopted to m4/3. It says macro on the lens, but I can't focus on anything close at all.
I have a similar lens that says macro but only focuses a tiny bit closer at the wide end. If you don’t want to buy a real macro lens try an 85-135mm prime with an extension ring.
So far I've only discovered the aftermath, drained husks hanging in a web. If I can catch a spider in the act though that would be great and I'd definitely film it.
I have had similar realization with regard to simply mosquitoes. We used to have to put bug-nets on doors and windows to stop bugs flying in during the summer. Now, not needed anymore - at most we get one bug flying in per week.
Yup, North of Boston here, fairly woodsy area, too many years seeing too few firefiles, although this summer there were a few more than past years - I hope it's a growth trend!
Used to be 100's or 1000's of them during the peak in summer where I lived. Now it's a handful. This is out in a rural area, so urban lighting doesn't explain the decline.
If I had to wager money, I'd say it was a blight introduced by another insect. Around the same year I saw an invasion of Asian lady bugs, the firefly memories stop. There were literally millions and millions of those Asian lady bugs released or hatched one year.
Plenty of fireflies in my yard. As prevalent as ever [1]. This is just an anecdote, but I give that anecdote as another person who lives in a somewhat rural location.
Speaking of the lady bug explosion, this year they are incredibly rare [2]. Not sure why, but they went from being a massive nuisance to being a very rare sight (of any variety).
Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a variety of dimensions, however on the flip side it does seem like insect populations massively fluctuate for entirely natural reasons. A bit of an early summer, or more rain in April, etc, and one insect type explodes and another wanes.
"Firefly populations are declining worldwide, for a variety of reasons.[25] Fireflies, like many other organisms, are directly affected by land-use change (e.g. loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems.[26] Pesticides and weed-killers have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline.[27]"
"Finally, since fireflies depend on their own light to reproduce [28] they are also very sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.[28][29] Multiple recent studies investigate deeply the effects of artificial night lighting on fireflies.[30][31]"
Fireflies certainly are in decline in urban areas, and from that in a holistic population sense. The amount of natural areas continues to decline worldwide leading to reduced habitat for a lot of insects and animals.
However I was replying to someone who stated that they live in a rural area so lighting isn't the cause. I also live in a rural area, albeit on the edge of a very large city (e.g. there is the large light bubble on the horizon, actually from several large cities in each direction), and fireflies are absolutely rampant, and have been for years. My comments makes zero claims about the worldwide population of fireflies, or about how many fireflies there are in your or anyone else's backyard. In mine there are loads.
However it is a reality that localized ebbs and flows happen. Nature is prone to waxing and waning. The reproductive potential of many insects is so enormous that one year can be a dearth and the next overwhelming. Small seasonal weather variations, of the completely ordinary and natural kind, can dramatically impact the mix.
To go back to the ladybugs, specifically the Asian ladybugs, last year they were everywhere. Every corner would have a bunch of them. They'd get in the house and then smash into the ceiling near every pot light leaving discolorations (blood or something). This year I've seen barely a dozen or so all season. It's just a complete 180.
Aside - I swear I am not intending to be combative, but the citations make me recall a prior comment-
The Wikipedia page you link cites the second link you gave as its source to demonstrate the worldwide decline in fireflies. That citation cites nothing as its source but fond recollections of youth.
> To go back to the ladybugs, specifically the Asian ladybugs, last year they were everywhere. Every corner would have a bunch of them. They'd get in the house and then smash into the ceiling near every pot light leaving discolorations (blood or something). This year I've seen barely a dozen or so all season. It's just a complete 180.
To me, it sounds like your area experienced an intentional release of the Asian Lady bug last year. TBD if they kill off all your fireflies, obviously that's pure speculation on my part.
As far as firefly decline, I don't live on the edge of a city or town. I'm actually quite rural. There are two places I've seen the decline. My home and my family's cabin 2 states away, both very rural. There has been no significant habitat change in either area, both having forest and established farms, very little development over my lifetime.
This is not an effect I noticed gradually or recently. It was about 15+ years ago now. Fireflies basically just disappeared, all at once. The colors of the remaining fireflies in both locations are also different. They were previously a yellow-green glow, and have been replaced by a more white-bluish glow.
Anyway, I don't know what caused their decline, but it's very apparent, and light pollution has nothing to do with it in my area.
If your cabins are near farms it is very possible the firefly decline you possibly noticed was caused by the introduction of neonics in the 90s. They are incredibly destructive and are part of the reason for the european honeybee issues that have gotten so much press here in the US.
They are widely believed to be a major factor in the current decline of insects.
it does seem like insect populations massively fluctuate for entirely natural reasons
Spot on, this is usually the real explanation for the typical 'I saw none'/'oh but I saw a bunch'/'I saw more than ever' rethoric applied to one single year or even multiple years of observations. Thinking of it, goes for basically all slowish trends related to nature. Unless you're approaching it scientifically, i.e. actual systematic counting which is hard btw, it's oh so easy to be fooled. That being said, see other post: yes fireflies are in decline (just like many other insects unfortunately) and light pollution is a factor.
I assume fireflies are declining from the loss of habitat, along with so many other insect species. The speculation about light being a cause seems logical, but is unproven. Indeed, even the population variations of fireflies is unproven -- the wiki citation in the other link uses as its authority a cite that merely notes that they recall more when they were kids. It is an extremely poor quality citation (but it will play well on HN).
"Doom!" is a very seductive narrative that we fall to regarding virtually every change in our environment. Sometimes reasonably, as with AGW, but other times just taking natural variations and screaming end times...then just going quiet when they recover again as we move to the next cause.
Habitat loss is a key factor, probably the key factor, but the reasearch around artifical night light and fireflies/glowworms goes way beyond 'recall more than they were kids' - not sure why you'd pick that as main argument from a Wikipedia page. See e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339213788_A_Global_... page 4 and beyond which reads
Observational and experimental studies provide evidence hat ALAN adversely affects firefly populations. Several studies have shown negative correlations between high levels of ALAN and firefly abundance.
and mentions several studies regarding the subject (though also warns it's hard to pinpoint the main cause amongst the variety of other negative factors).
I was specifically responding to the Wikipedia extract.
The citation for the statement "Firefly populations are declining worldwide, for a variety of reasons" is a link to firefly.org. That is a small, Texas group that appreciates Fireflies, which is nice. But it is home to no studies, no research, no analysis. Nor does it (that group, or the wiki page that was cited to apparently refute my personal anecdote...) cite the publication you mention. So I'm not really sure what we're discussing here.
I'm not disagreeing that there is a decline for a multitude of reasons, or that light is probably bad, but if someone says "my yard has no fireflies the apocalypse is upon us" it probably isn't credible.
> Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a variety of dimensions
This is incredibly obvious to be in my neighborhood. My landlord (very regretfully) has a company spray insecticide in our yard. There are no bugs, not a single bug sound.
The area I live in has many nature conscious people so about 1/10th of the yards are gardens, wildflowers, etc rather than grass. Just walking by them you hear a tremendous symphony of bugs! Then it almost entirely goes away in the next yard that is just grass.
In a local park there is about 1/4 acre that is only mown every couple of years as a "pollinator friendly" prairie-ish area, and the number of fireflies in just that section is astonishing. There are just hundreds and hundreds, it's beautiful.
Thinking about the increasing suburbanization of the US makes me sad. We subsidize this lifestyle so heavily here that it doesn't make sense to live anywhere else, but the land use is just awful.
It's not even wildlife and plants. I'm in southwest Ohio and the closest reasonably dark sky spot is almost 2 hours away. My S/O and I have been to some dark sky viewings hosted by a local observatory about 45 minutes away. I have really good night vision and can just barely see the milky way. My S/O /thought/ she could see it, but only realized the magnitude when we went to this national forest 2 hours away. It made me sad that she hadn't been able to see some of the wildness of our world.
I truly hope the "suburban dream" that has been pushed for so many decades starts dying off, so at least some of the wild areas in the US remain intact. There's already so little in the midwest.
We moved into a home last year with a ‘nice’ boomer lawn maintained with all the chemicals (there were almost 10 types of insect killer sprays in the basement, each for a different genus).
When digging for some conduit, my toddlers kept wanting to find worms in the dirt and waited in excitement as I dug about a yard of dirt.
German side streets are fairly dark already. This change will affect ‘large’ polluters, eg. floodlights in car parks, outside store areas, brightly lit buildings, etc.
It is a very welcomed change. In our neighbourhood ppl knowingly plant flowers and leave grass grow ‘wild’ to support insects.
I’ve left about a third of my garden as a wild “meadow” and it has been full of flowers and bumblebees all summer. Even the municipality has left some lawns in the parks uncut for the benefit of wild flowers and bees. (Sweden btw)
This kind of make sense. Even in busy cities there are not many ppl walking around at night in Germany (less weekends).
Most areas outside of the cities are completely dead at night. Also, general safety is very good. (At least where I have been so far)
I live in a fairly rural area in Germany and even if the nightsky is perfectly clear the cities in the distance cast a bright haze into the sky. They aren't that dark...
This reminds me of the movie Logan´s run all the time. The cites under their bubbles. Our's don't have the bubble over them, but look very similar from afar. All the illuminated haze. Fortunately I'm living right at the edge of one such large bubble, and can flee it within 30 minutes on a bicycle.
Yes. Light pollution leaks out pretty far away from the source. I don't know if there's any patch of land in Europe now where light pollution is zero. Maybe in a few places in Scandinavia.
Death Valley in California has pristine night skies. I cannot even begin to describe how different it is. Think - fine diamond dust on black velvet. There are stars everywhere you look. Amazing.
Even sometimes insanely dark. About five years ago I went to see Sanssouci in the evening in winter. It was so dark that I couldn't even see my hand, let alone the palace.
Search for wildflower seed bomb mix, you shouldn't get in trouble for this. My mom used to do this every year when I lived in Germany, looks pretty and zero maintenance.
Dresden. Don’t get me wrong the gardens are neat but ppl keep longer grass, bushes, lots of flowers. Don’t know much about the laws in Germany (only recently moved here) but I can see that ppl care about their environment.
I don't think any German cities bans you from having wild gardens. Quite the opposite, some cities consider banning people from replacing front yards with gravel.
I love this. Of course it's different if you're in a dangerous neighborhood, but if you're not, dark streets punctuated by orbs of light from reasonably bright street lights are romantic, mysterious, sometimes soothing. It makes that evening stroll a bit more magical.
I always just assumed that there are few insects now because there are so many more insecticides in use, this is the first time I've heard of lights. There's not much explaination in this article, but here's one with some more:
Nighttime Light Pollution May Be Cause of Insect Population Decline
"An analysis of the effects of artificial light at night on insects shows that there is strong evidence to suggest a link between nighttime light pollution and declines in insect populations."
It's a combination of factors. Insecticides, pollution, loss of habitat, light pollution(especially from daylight LEDs), global warming(throwing off reproduction timing), ubiquitous roadways and vehicles, flat surfaces(beetles get stuck on their back).
Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, makes a convincing case that one factor is the replacement of native plants with (often showier) aliens which local insect populations can't eat. This then reduces the populations of birds which feed on those insects. Site for his books: http://www.bringingnaturehome.net/
I think, compared to twenty years ago, the main factor is the higher color temperature of modern lighting systems. There are numerous studies on cold light attracting insects significantly more than the traditional incandescent light sources.
Whenever I see someone claim a given problem is due to a combination of factors, I get a bit suspicious. First, this seems like a way to say "I don't really know the actual cause." Second, in the real world in situations like these, there is almost always one overwhelming factor that accounts for >60% of total influence. I really do wonder what that is because I like insects!
> in the real world in situations like these, there is almost always one overwhelming factor that accounts for >60% of total influence
That may be true when you're optimising a program, but is very much not true in ecology. The parent comment is generally correct with its list of drivers of biodiversity loss (compare the IPBES global summary: https://ipbes.net/global-assessment).
A key feature of ecology is its extreme complexity and the myriad factors at play in any given situation. Of course, there will be individual situations in which one factor is indeed dominant. Those cases actually often end up as textbook examples precisely because they are so rare, like the snowshoe hare/lynx Lotka-Volterra cycles. In most situations, researchers have to resort to some pretty advanced statistics to try and figure out what the most important factors are. There are almost always several, and getting any one factor to explain 60% of the variance is very rare. (That's why principle component analyses -PCAs- are so popular in ecological research papers.)
I studied ecology for a while, and have published a paper in the field. It works exactly the same way as any complex system. If you can't pinpoint a single factor, you're probably failing somewhere. To blame everything on "it's a complex system" is usually a cop out from lack of knowledge, whether the system is genuinely complex or not.
It's heartbreaking and happens at least once a year, that someone near conventional agriculture/horticulture is posting a desperate for advice in every forum they know about because some asshole upwind let a cloud of 'cide drift over their horticultural masterclass of a lot, and everything is shriveling.
Recompense can be hard to get. Maybe we need an ACLU meets EFF for biodiversity.
Let's ignore for a moment any agenda to ban monocultures, and look at not just the kind but the density. Pollinator species would be doing better if the monocultures weren't so seemless. We need a mosaic of habitat and to reduce the distances between the ones we have. But it's an uphill battle to maintain them in the face of drift and runoff (really I think we shouldn't be cultivating hilltops, that would be a start, and simply dodges the runoff problem)
This is good; we've badly underestimated the cost of excess light pollution.
Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it, rather than all over the place. Light pollution is bad, and street lights are very power hungry, with the old sodium lights consuming up to 0.25kWh per hour.
I think the impact of light and sound pollution is vastly underestimated. Sound and light pollution not only causes hidden environmental issues but also does damage to human health.
Suffering sound and light pollution is a hidden additional burden placed on lower economic status people.
Poor people experience health inequities due to increased exposure to light and sound, but more pressingly air pollution. [0]
The status of enjoying quiet is even clear in the middle class. You can even see the emerging divide on transit in who has noise cancelling headphones and who does not.
> Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it,
Focusing light where needed is good. Using LEDs, as we do now, has downsides though. LED lighting in cities is making astronomy and astrophotography and even animal life worse in some cases.[1]
Traditional sodium vapour lights pollute around a wavelength of 589 nm.[2] That's the yellow/orange sky you used to see in the sky around cities. In theory, if you filtered out that wavelength 10 years ago, you'd be able to eliminate a lot of light pollution. But today, with more LED lighting, the pollution tends toward white/blue. This is "nicer" in some objective and subjective ways. e.g. colour accuracy. But it's a bitch to filter out, without also removing all the white and broad spectrum we want to see in the features of the night sky.
Animals are also sensitive to white and blue light emitted by modern LEDs, and the NatGeo link and others go into why this can be a bad thing, compared to "old fashioned" lighting methods, inefficient as they are.
We made LED lighting white because we wanted it. We can make yellow LED lighting as well. This should be suggested to city councils, if changing the wavelength would be beneficial to insects with no downsides.
The basic light emitted by LEDs is generally quite cold (high color temperature). We can manufacture LEDs just in a few basic colors, where the blue ones are the most efficient. We haven't managed yet to produce something at scale like the light typically emitted by incandescent light bulbs. RGB light doesn't help here, since this is still emitting high temperature components, which are only mixed with lower energized ones. One way around this is using LEDs indirectly by energizing other light emitting materials, like phosphor, much like it is done in LED filaments, which, of course, comes at a cost. Simple filters don't help, since LEDs emit light only in a rather narrow spectrum (which is also, why they are more efficient compared to other light sources).
The problem with cold light is that it is apparently attracting insects much more than broad spectrum incandescent light sources, even more than any potential breeding partners, which in turn affects mating.
What cost? Looking back maybe 15 years all the experiments with CCFL and LEDs were more costly than the filaments i have now. They last longer, use less, AND make light which is pleasing and usable to me. Wheee! Almost candles!
edit: Last longer as in have already outlasted anything I had before them, the filaments I mean. Also not really more expensive to buy. And their energy usage is ridiculously low.
I'm not versed much in these filaments but from what I know, and your link, these are just phosphor-covered LEDs, right?
What is it about your current bulbs or the filament design that makes you not classify them as LEDs? The power use looks the same and the listed CRI of >=80 doesn't inspire confidence.
I didn't say that, or did I? Anyways, indeed they are chains of tiny LEDs in series, and the substrate they are embedded in is treated somehow. As I understand it, that gives the embedded LEDs a "Nachleuchtzeit"/ after glow like in the CRTs of old TVs and computer screns, which can vary, as it did with that old screen stuff too. Then there is the spatial thing, as they are spread out in the filament, you can actually look at them without being "blinded". It's more like the light radiates from a volume, softer, not from one sharp point. Not that it would matter that much, who has naked bulbs? As a result of all that there is no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics), no perceivable flickering at my power frequency of 50Hz. I think I'm sensitive to that, because the line/destination signs on public transportion
do flicker for me when I and they both stand, not only when in motion.
Ah yes, the CRI. What can I say? I now have them everywhere, except the cellar. I prefer warm white, which they are. I can't see 'wrong' colors with them. Crosschecked that with a cassette of about 40 Faber-Castell color pencils right now, during my local morning twilight. Full spectrum.
Because "retro-fit" they fit in my old sockets. They just hit a sweet spot for me. I dim, or 'tune' them by using one to three circuits, the switches and my rooms are wired to allow for that.
Cold means high blue content. Blue light is the one that most disrupts insects, nocturnal animals, your night vision, your own sleep cycle, and contributes the most to obscuring the stars.
That part is not actually true. Any light will obscure the stars; if you want to compare different colors, it's the middle of the spectrum that contributes most, but the difference is small.
As an amateur astronomer, the LED lights are a big problem because their light pollution is hard to filter out. Sodium is easy, it's nearly monochromatic, so a simple filter will remove most of it. Mercury is not super-hard, the spectrum is not very broad and it's pretty uneven. But LEDs have a broad, even spectrum, which is impossible to filter out.
Here's a quite good video about the pros and cons of LED vs high/low-pressure sodium street lamps: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40 . It goes into lamp efficiency, how our eyes see differently at night, response time under different sorts of light, color temperature, circadian rhythm disruption, and light pollution.
It's a good video, but it's also a case study in being 'almost right'. The almost-correct interpretations cascade and result in a faulty conclusion: that blue-white LED streetlights are better than orange-white streetlights. Various comments object to the faulty conclusion ([1], for example).
At the end he at least addresses his ignorance:
> [18:39] You may have noticed that I didn't talk about the blue light from LEDs, and how this is supposedly ruining our eyes. That's because the "science" behind this is questionable, at best.
> [18:55] [discussion of chart with percentage blue light of various light sources]
> [19:04] [...] but considering that our eyes can withstand the intensity of sunlight, which is far far greater than any normal artificial light source, and also has a lot of blue light, and ultraviolet, which definitely is harmful, I think the 'blue light' thing is just fear-mongering. If someone can point to some verified, peer-reviewed research supporting this, and not a dodgy website, I'll consider changing my stance. In any case, the high flexibility of LED technology means it can be tuned in pretty much any way we like.
The research on the harm of blue light is out there -- For example, one of the comments links to "Effects of blue light on the circadian system and eye physiology" [0]. (only partially read at this point - I don't know if this paper gets into the mechanism of damage done by blue light, as I understand it...)
The sun hangs high in the sky and casts light on everything. We never need to look at the sun directly, we use the sun's light indirectly, after it bounces off of things. The atmosphere scatters the sun's blue light before it gets to us [2]. Artificial lights hanging on poles emitting photons we can't avoid having beamed directly into our eyes... Blue photons have relatively higher energy levels, and different physiological effects, than orange photons... [note to self: expand on this.]
My transcription of the video's faulty conclusion (italics added):
> To conclude: although the High Pressure Sodium light is very efficient, its primary output color is misaligned with our nighttime visibility. Only about 1/4 of its light is actually effective at stimulating the cells in our eyes. Although the cool color temperatures of many LED replacements is harsh and aesthetically displeasing, studies have shown that it is not only more efficient, but also makes driving at night safer. There is, however, the potential for greater circadian rhythm disruption and larger amounts of skyglow, using these bluer light sources.
> Still, it seems clear that the High Pressure Sodium is on its way out. Advancements in LED technology are happening at a breakneck pace. Just 10 years ago, they weren't seen as viable, but today even the least efficient of LED replacements ends up emitting the efficiency of High Pressure Sodium once scotopic light output is considered.
> As it stands in 2018, we are faced with the choice of efficiency over aesthetics. I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy roadways lit with relatively-warm 3000K LEDS, and these also wouldn't disrupt sleep much. But you can save a lot more energy, and potentially have safer roadways, with 5700K lighting.
> Either way, it seems clear that LED technology will very soon overtake the tried-and-true High Pressure Sodium lamp, just as the High Pressure Sodium itself replaced the mercury-vapor lamp. And in 40 or 50 years, who knows what technology might light our roadways.
This is one of those areas where I actually am in favor of some pretty tight regulation; photons spraying about leads to a tragedy of the commons rather quickly.
Drive around -- billboards are lit up at night. Headlights might as well be pointed into the sky and are blinding. Stores are scarcely less well-lit when they are closed than during operating hours. I can go for a walk at night and read a paperback the whole way. Porchlights are left on all night, for no good reason.
Sometimes, on a my regular trips to visit a friend, we go out at around one in the morning to a road far from other towns and I can actually see the faint haze of the Milky Way, but in the suburbs, I am lucky to pick out thirty stars and/or planets. I don't even think that all of this constant light makes us any "safer."
Funny thing is that we mostly turn on the lights to keep burglars at bay. I don't have the link but there was some article pointing out that burglars also don't really like dark places. Like using flashlight inside of dark building can easier give out break in. Burglars are also people so they kind of scared of what might be in the dark, like you might miss something on the floor and break your leg or arm and then you would be stuck at the place you broke in.
While it's difficult to get hard numbers, the estimations for the decline in insect populations range from 70% to 90% since the 1980 (for some areas).
Given that insects are one of the corner stones of our ecosystem, we can congratulate ourselves that we are very successful in destroying our own life support systems through predatory exploitation and sheer carelessness.
Wow. I have to say that I have never considered the case where insects needed to be saved. It seems to me that as lifeforms go, they have been the most durable form of multi-cellular life on the planet.
That said, that there are negative systemic effects on the planet's ecosystems that are directly related to the massive production and use of herbicides and pesticides is not as surprising.
Light though? Even after reading that article and looking through scholar.google to find papers that associate lighting with insect decline, I'm not convinced the use of lighting at night has a material impact. The ratio of unlit/lit habitat seems wildly in favor of unlit.
And yes, I understand that unlit areas are often agricultural, and those areas contain the most insecticide/herbicides. It still appears to me that the root cause is the use of those products in farms and not that cities are poor replacement habitats.
The sound pollution might have the adverse effect of causing some plants to lose this ability to preserve energy for reproduction, indirectly impacting insects via the food chain.
Currently, due to the massive use of chemicals in the countryside, cities start to be havens for insects. There is a lot of beehives in London for example (too much actually according to a beekeeper I talked with). Until we manage to massively shift the way we do agriculture it might make sense to make it as safe as possible for insects in urban areas.
Just to be clear, I'm a fan of cutting down light pollution for legitimate reasons (energy conservation, astronomical observation, and wildlife protection) but I twitch at reasons that are either exaggerated or misleading. I felt that throwing in lights along with the pesticide limitations was not a well motivated argument.
My experience has shown that when people are skeptical of your argument they are less likely to comply voluntarily and so the good that you hoped to do is lost and you have damaged your credibility with the people you need to support these ideas.
A small example of this in action was back in 2010 when Google decided they were going to stop stocking bottled water in the fridges around campus because the "energy waste and plastic disposal problem." The only problem was that Google regularly achieved over 95% capture of recyclable trash out of their bins and the energy saved was on the order of maybe half a dozen employees not commuting from San Francisco.
The real reason they wanted to do this was of course cost. They could replace bottled water with filtered dispensers and that would save them a few pennies per employee per month. I had a good conversation with some folks in charge that they could have said, "We're giving every employee an insulated water bottle in your choice of size and color (12, 20, 32, or 40 oz) that you can keep at the office and use to get water from our fancy new dispensers. This will save us money, AND its better for the environment." That would have been honest and gotten a good reception I believe with the rank and file. But dressing up the reason in a cover story that everyone easily poking holes in simply lowered morale and confidence in management.
I'm also completely in favor of reducing lights or even banning LED light bulbs, which in my opinion are also harmful to humans. Let's raise fuel prices by 100% and go back to incandescent!
But you correctly hint at the actual reason for German politics:
Nothing that hurts the economy like banning pesticides or cars will be done. So a scapegoat is needed, in this case the lights.
> The ratio of unlit/lit habitat seems wildly in favor of unlit.
Depends on where. Germany has a very different structure due to its population density than most parts of the US, for example, with comparably less unlit habitat.
So that may be a less important issue in some places but having enough suitable space for themselves in the US doesn't help insects in Germany.
It very well could be less of a problem than roundup, but at the same time it's good for everyone I think, that we turn off the lights at night. If only to see the stars.
I think in general all our life quality will improve if we significantly reduce light polution. Not to mention the energy savings. Sometimes I forget how beautiful the night sky is just because I'm usually so blind to it.
> The windshield phenomenon is the observation that recently fewer dead insects accumulate on the windshields of people's cars. It has been attributed to a global decline in insect populations caused by human activity.
> The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars up to 70 years old.
I just finished a two-week road trip from Berlin to the Black Forest and back (with other stops in both directions). The windshield was gunked up by the end—more than I expected, but nothing like what I remember from my childhood.
Same here. About two years ago we traveled through Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and had quite some insect gunk on the wind shields. When I told my parents, they said "we used to have that after an hour of driving" (and presumably they went slower than we do today, not having access to fast cars in their youths).
Cars are actually more aerodynamically shaped nowadays. But riding a motorcycle will give you the same result today as 20 years ago. To which I must say: yes, the insects seem to be back in larger numbers this year. At least in Germany.
But not everywhere: the less farm land, the more insects. Like, from literally none on farm land to "I have to completely clean my helmet because of all that yellow goo" in larger forests.
I haven't read the complete study but it appears that they only measured the impacts on the license plate? If so, this doesn't seem like good methodology because the license plate is only a very small part of the vehicle and position can vary wildly between brands and models. The license plate can be the most forward facing part but also be in a little cutout of the front fender.
It’s a great example of Scientisim and not Science. Of course the result confirms the popular narrative, so it will be cited without question. But the dead-obvious observation would be that by definition aerodynamic things tend to impact less, it’s literally what they’re designed to do.
I did a one week roadtrip from California to Colorado this summer and had to clean my windshield at every gas station due to splattered bugs. It’s my first real roadtrip so I don’t have any basis for comparison.
Well as I have posted before, my neighborhood went full LED last year with street lights and so every night is like a full moon. This has become widespread not just in subdivisions but everywhere as people see LED lighting as free.
The low cost can definitely drive the wrong design. But if a redo is being done, it's an opportunity to turn down power levels, use better shielding, etc. Modern LED lights can provide the same visual acuity at both less power as well as less lux, and with less light spillover.
This seems like a great idea, and could also be a nice boon for those of us who like to see the stars. Light pollution is a personal frustration for me as I’ve always enjoyed stargazing but am rarely able to drive far enough out to see very much.
I used to point this out to hipster trendies who illuminate their trees at night. Don't they consider nocturnal life that are dependent on solar cycles for proper circadian rhythms? Seems disruptive. I got the impression the trees were a bit miffed.
Having light polution in your habitat during night cycles can make certain plants mutate or make them hermaphrodite while growing indoors. The light from a socket distributor might be enough.
This is such a great idea. I hope the insecticide regulations go far to restrict some of the worst offenders. Insects, arachnids, and all of our invertebrate, carapace flaunting friends are essential to our health and survival.
Amen. I would kill for this. I keep my own outside lights off, so there's a bit less blindy light pollution on my end of the street. It's the same reason I never report the nearby street lights when they go out.
Ahem... I seem to recall that the masts of most streetlights are rather thin. Which meant that one could kick them a few times in ways that make the mast swing. Which could be rather large and abrupt swings at the top, which led to "Wackelkontakt"/ loss of contact, and thus darkness. It was even reversible!
Your own personal kick switch for public street lights!
The way that ("Lampen austreten") works is because the vibration causes the plasma to "disembark" from the electrodes, which opens the electrical circuit, which prevents further power flow into the lamp, which lets the plasma cool down quickly. There's a thermal cutoff switch in the lamp that prevents it from re-igniting on a hot lamp, so the entire lamp needs to cool down before it turns back on.
That could be the case, but at the time I felt it was of more mechanical nature. Because in my case they didn't turn back on, not for days, until kicked back into working order.
Nice. I've got a red but it's probably too low power. My green and blue are 1W & 3W but they're too low a wavelength. High powered reds are relatively cheap. I'll look into it.
That's a good way to get in trouble, and rightfully so. We're not having streetlights because we want to kill insects, we have them for safety reasons. You do not want to travel in absolute darkness in a city with cars around.
Trying to interfere with that because you're too lazy to buy a black-out curtain is a terrible idea.
What if I'd like to be able to see some stars from my bed?
Furthermore, not every light, sign makes sense at the place it is. They are mostly stamped out at regular intervals "because we say so".
I'll take "what?" - with "what?" being my headlights only point straight ahead. They don't curve with the road or illuminate the sides of the roads where kids/animals can dart out. I live in a neighborhood with lots of kids and pets. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S038611121...
In Germany you can generally call the city office and complain and they will put some metal there to block the light from falling into your house. It might be an option in other locations as well.
They often do, and those are quite handy, but fully closing off your bedroom windows can be bad since you won't wake up with the light and sleeping with an open window is not possible.
(Plus, the major temperature control move in summer Germany is to open everything possible at night and close it during the day. If you have mostly cool nights and good insulation that is sufficient.)
Where did you find a house in the US without blinds? I honestly don't think I've ever seen one without some sort of window covering. The solid exterior blinds that I slightly prefer are much less common in the US, but both still block light adequately in my experience.
Glad to see they're on to this. However, I gather that this is still a "Referentenentwurf" - i.e. a first draft written up by the ministry staff. This still needs to be approved by the cabinet before even going into parliamentary proceedings. So it's hard to say just how much will actually come of this.
One summer night I stopped at this petrol station in a woodland area - the neon panels had many inches of dead insect in them. Tens of thousands of specimen, just like that.
We have one street like this here in Grenoble. I was so freaked out the first time I walked there, since the lights dimmed up gradually, so it took me a couple of times to be sure I'm not imagining things. :P
Motor cyclists and bicyclists tell the same. I as a bicyclist do too. Because apart from the sting of the wind in the eyes it was necessary to drive with sports glasses/lenses/some visor because otherwise you'd be almost certainly hit by insects in the face or eye. That isn't the case anymore. There simply are less of them in the air.
I am wondering, is there any benefit to having insects in cities specifically? I would understand if this was a law specifically for rural enviroment but what is the benefit for this in the city?
Also, other than bees, which insects specifically benefit humans?
Light pollution seems to be a good thing to suppress in general (a bonus for astrological sight-seeing). Could one factor be that constant light negatively affects insect (and plant) circadian rhythms?
I think you meant "astronomical" sight-seeing? ;-)
Yes, constant light does have a strong effect on animal circadian rhythms, but for insects, the problem is rather that they exhaust themselves from flying around the light source too long.
> What is expected to be the last new coal plant to come online in Germany entered commercial operation on May 30, more than a decade after it was first planned.
> The 1,100-MW Datteln 4 power plant, owned by Uniper and located in Datteln in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, opened despite the German government’s stated plan to end coal-fired power generation in the country.
This reminds me of my local cities new flashy sport arena.
The sport arena has flood lights to make a UFO landing look good. Cant see anything of the night sky with these on. It is also using a lot of power.
I remember star nights walking outside as a kid seeing the Milky way Galaxy full of stars.
As for ordinary street lights, the purpose of street lights are for crime prevention, but there is motion sensors. Do we really need to have the lights on with no one on a street?
Stop mowing your lawn (perhaps back yard) and you'll see a ton of insects (huge grasshoppers, big spiders, ants, etc) by the end of summer. mowing lawns hurts insects also
Talking about dimming lights: Life tip: At night after dinner, turn off all the lights of your house. Use only weak led lights. You'll sleep much better, feel better and save on energy bills.
This is awesome , I wish more countries did the same. Also good news for stargazers, you see more stars at night when city lights are dim or use protection to avoid light pollution.
this is great. also, why must every stinking device have a light letting you know the device is on or sleeping or whatever. so annoying. monitors, printers, cable modems, routers, everything has freaking, annoying blinking lights. i have to use dark tape to cover it all.
The machine never slows down to protect weaker species. Such plan may be an attempt to lower power demand at night and make the demand curve more closely match Germany's wind/solar supply curve. It's an effort to lower costs and lower demand for power they'd have to buy from coal/natural gas.
> There are plenty of other, more specific ways to do that, no? The problem with light traps is they are indiscriminate.
Well you do usually want to kill as many as possible. Bringing up mosquitoes because it's one of the most common. I cannot go out and sit down in my garden if I have insects flying around. Unless they keep an appropriate distance as to not be intimidating.
> Not to mention that if you apply some repellent
If you mean the skin applied kind it's totally unsatisfactory.
There are chemical sprays/diffusers that work very well, but even though they are marketed as "repellent" they absolutely do kill mosquitoes and many others. That's what I usually use.
> Well you do usually want to kill as many as possible.
Indiscriminate across species - those traps kill everything, not just mosquitoes. I'm sorry that you find insects intimidating but killing everything is not the answer to that and in the long run, unless you don't care about having food, ultimately counterproductive.
> If you mean the skin applied kind it's totally unsatisfactory.
Why? I've spent a lot of time in tropical countries and found it very effective. Even just a running fan keeps most mozzies away as they aren't generally strong fliers.
The overarching issue is that we need to coexist with our many-legged brethren, however inconvenient it may be.
I have an extremely hard time believing average citizens are having such a huge effect. This German law seems to have been spurred by some study saying that over the last few decades the flying insect population has dropped by a big percentage in Germany. Yet cannot find any information as to any adverse effect it had on anything. Nor is it obvious what exactly caused this drop.
The logic here seems to be "insect populations are dropping so let's forbid some things that are killing insects".
> Why? I've spent a lot of time in tropical countries and found it very effective. Even just a running fan keeps most mozzies away as they aren't generally strong fliers.
They'll still fly around you. Sure when traveling somewhere that's the only solution.
Chemical diffusers work best for me. I rarely go outside, just deploy it as needed and it takes care of the problem pretty fast.
But say someone has a restaurant/whatever with an outside area. In addition to periodic chemical treatments, you might want to have a bunch of light traps in your arsenal.
And the article does talk about limiting use of insecticides too but isn't too clear on that.
> The logic here seems to be "insect populations are dropping so let's forbid some things that are killing insects".
And the counterargument is - let's keep killing them anyway? Why is that more logical?
It's the same logic as - fly/drive/heat less, to reduce carbon release; eat less meat to reduce land usage and methane release; etc.
It seems to me that maybe the primary reason we're doing so much damage to our planet is a combination of
a) for most people, personal convenience > planetary health, and
b) as you say: "I have an extremely hard time believing average citizens are having such a huge effect"
The latter is especially pernicious - we are so successful as a species because, working together, we can achieve tremendous changes that aren't possible alone. But that potential for collective action can also have severely negative effects as well. Even a mountain can be leveled eventually if you keep chipping away at it. As an example of collective action, take a trip to Borneo and drive the 100km route from Tawau to Semporna - palm plantations literally as far as the eye can see in every direction, the whole route; it used to be rain forest. Individuals working together (whether deliberately or unknowingly) have a lot more power than they think.
Am I making sense? I'm not sure what's difficult to grasp about all this.
How would you stop them entering cities? It's not like an insect flies towards a city from a rural area then thinks "oh, no, shouldn't go there, I'll get zapped". If anything, we attract a lot of insect life with an abundance of light and free food. And then put out traps to kill them.
> Since you seem to know about that, which bugs should one avoid killing?
I'm not trying to hold myself up as an expert but on the other hand a lot of this stuff seems pretty obvious... Anything non-invasive? Anything not causing a serious public health risk? OK, mosquitoes are an obvious target here and I hate them with a passion but that doesn't mean we should kill everything just to get to them. Try reframing the question - which birds should you avoid killing? Which big cats are OK to shoot? Honest question - what is it about insects that feels like it's OK to wipe them out? Is it because they're so numerous? That simple extends the amount of time it's taking us to destroy them all, but we seem to be making good progress there.
I do not know but this is besides the point. I still do not see why we should protect the insects that are in the city as they do not bring us any benefit.
> Anything non-invasive? Anything not causing a serious public health risk?
Let me rephrase it, which bugs should one avoid killing because they benefit us directly or indirectly? Only bees come to my mind at this moment.
> which birds should you avoid killing?
The ones that benefit humans directly or indirectly.
> Which big cats are OK to shoot?
Big cats tend to not come to the cities so they do not really pose any danger to humans.
> Is it because they're so numerous?
In general they are gross, numerous, invasive, and they carry diseases.
I've been trying to encourage you to think about this holistically because then you might understand where I'm coming from. How about this: look at the front wall of your house - which bricks is it safe to remove? Which of those directly or indirectly benefit the wall? Maybe those over a doorway or window are obviously important, can't lose those, but what about the others? How many can you safely remove before it no longer fulfills its function? How about if it's a giant game of Jenga? Or a massive construction of scaffolding that's been built and rebuilt again and again over thousands of years and overall is holding up a giant roof but with no clear plan how? Which parts of that are safe to remove?
The bees are an easy win - they do a lot of pollination work, but there are other insects that do that too. But is that all that's important? How about the oxygen you breathe or the nitrogen in the soil that nourishes the plants you eat or the rain that waters them? All these things depend on multiple complex cycles involving things like forests, the health of which depend on many other interconnected webs of life at all levels from mammal to microbe. It's Chesterton's Fence on a grand scale - if you don't know what it does, you really shouldn't remove it until you do know what it does. We're still working that out in many, many cases.
A lot of insects provide food for other animals - kill the insects, and we also kill all the things that feed on them. And there are certainly numerous other natural cycles and systems than those I outlined above (did you know that ocean microbes can seed cloud formation? https://news.agu.org/press-release/bacteria-feeding-on-arcti...) - these are just the ones that come to my mind as someone with an amateur interest in these things; I am, as I said, no expert.
> In general they are gross, numerous, invasive, and they carry diseases.
I understand why you might feel that way but, aside from the first (which is your opinion): the second, as we're discussing, is increasingly not the case; the third is generally only true where humans have transported a species to where it shouldn't be; and the fourth is really only true in very few cases - things like cockroaches and house flies, but even these fulfill important roles breaking down organic matter that would otherwise litter the surface of the planet, and thus returning nutrients into the soil, keeping it fertile. Cockroaches etc. are only a disease risk when they intersect with us, find a huge source of waste, and multiply excessively - and in those cases of course we have to deal with them.
> I still do not see why we should protect the insects that are in the city as they do not bring us any benefit.
An obvious reason that comes to mind is that cities as a black hole for insects act to decrease the overall population by simple diffusion.
The best thing we can do on a personal level is to stop using broadleaf weedkillers like Scott's Weed and Feed and other herbicides like glyphosate (Roundup).
I've been doing handyman work at my boss's house during COVID-19 and he has clover growing in his yard. He has a fair number of bees, certainly more than on my end of town which is all chemlawns.
It's arguably ok to use a little weed killer by hand on dandelions if you must (better to spray 2-3 courses of vinegar instead). But killing all clover, morning glories, and other broadleaf flowers in lawns has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas. Herbicides and pesticides in agriculture wiped out the rest.
Edit: fixed the first sentence to distinguish between broadleaf herbicides and glyphosate (which kills everything).
I never going the obsession with pristine lawns without clover, daisies, moss and such. I actually think it looks quite nice with some variation.
My wife is militant about this, insisting that our lawn is sprayed with horrible chemicals at least once a year to kill off the clover, daisies and moss.
Seems such a pointless thing to do, and very obviously not good for wildlife.
A friend of mine worked at an agronomist's, and at one point a customer walked in looking to buy a bag of clover for his garden. My friend gave him the wrong bag by mistake, and the customer came back a few months later to tell the agronomist that he now had to park his car over the new spinach plants EVERYWHERE.
Clover lawns use to be common but went out of fashion. I saw an episode of This Old House where they visited a grass farm and we're shown a new clover breed they were developing for lawns.
I assume it has to do with the US house price laws that mandate one takes care of the lawn, or risk incurring in fines or losing the house (quoting an US friend not sure about the details)
There are no such laws. What some neighborhoods do have are homeowners associations which, in practice, function as micro governments, and can mandate such things. About 25% of all homes in the US have an HOA, and those will all vary in what maintenance they require. Some are expensive and strict, some are optional and just there to take care of a sign and lighting at the front entrances.
In addition to HOAs, some municipalities have ordinances for keeping yards tidy (e.g. cutting the lawn) but usually much less restrictive. In historical districts and houses deemed landmarks they have ordinances closer to and sometimes stricter than HOAs.
You can't lose your house. Maybe an HOA can fine you if you don't mow your weeds.
Recovering a lawn that is overrun with weeds is very expensive, time consuming, and hard work under the hot sun. A well maintained lawn only needs a few maintenance applications of weed killer every season, or can even be handled by hand. If you want flowers for the insects (I'm all for it) plant flowers. But just "let it go wild" never ends well.
Also, when it is time to sell your house a buyer is going to look at a wild lawn and just see a money/time sink.
My wife seems to think all boxes with pictures of lawns on are the same.
About three years in a row now she's tried to get lawn seed and poured a load of cheap weed and feed on instead. Completely going overboard on the quantities for good measure. At this point I'm amazed we have anything left to grow.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but you can't put down seed and weed & feed in the same season - you'll kill your seedlings. It actually says this on the bags of weed & feed.
As a non-American I have never understood why a people that values personal liberties are sometimes happy to be dictated to by housing authorities. I get it with apartment buildings with shared walls and communal property, but I just don't get why you would with suburban homes.
The roads in a gated community are "communal property" in about the same sense as hallways are in an apartment building. I suppose you could care if someone is driving an oversized load through the community and so wearing down the roads; or if they're parking a car on the road that's leaking oil.
There's also noise and odor/smoke pollution. An HOA is pretty much the only mechanism to ensure that a group of people who don't smoke marijuana can band together to live in marijuana-smoke-free air. (Yes, some people smoke enough potent skunkweed for the stink to carry multiple houses away. No, the police don't care.)
Most of the things HOAs care about are indeed idiotic, though. IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins. The point of the HOA is to control/constrain the externalities you have on other houses/communal properties. If you put a garden gnome on your lawn, there's no externality.
> IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins.
Actually, the HOA’s right to dictate ends with whatever you agreed to by contract when you bought the property. And the HOA can enforce that contract in court, to the point of foreclosing on your home if necessary.
So, yeah, when you buy a house in an HOA, read those covenants before you sign. They are usually at the bottom of the 90 page stack of papers when you close.
There are two types of HOAs, right? There's the type where the property is itself "part of" the HOA from the start (because the HOA is built into the legal structure of the development); and then there's the kind where the HOA is just a contract you enter into independently from buying the property–and which, at least in theory, you don't need to enter into.
HOAs created out of regular separately-developed SFH dwellings are the latter kind, and what I was referring to in my previous comment. (I kind of forgot that the baked-into-the-property kind existed for a moment. Oops!) In the voluntarist kind of HOA, it really is up for debate where the HOA's right to tell you what to do ends, because ultimately the HOA's power in such a voluntarist contract derives from the other members' willingness to shun you, annoy you, or at most refuse to give you access to communal resources like tennis courts, for failure to comply.
So in an HOA is it more like a leasehold or a freehold? From my understanding if it is legitimately a freehold I don't see why they'd have any legal right to do shit to you if you told them to do one. It is very confusing. Why does some external force other than law enforcement have any legal right to tell you what to do on your own property?
I've personally never lived in an HOA (and would refuse to move into one), but the best ones, from what I've heard of through friends and family, are those that are hands-off, namely:
1) Optional -- This puts the onus on the HOA to actually serve its residents, because if enough people dislike it enough to leave (after, say, a few elected residents go on a power trip), it will collapse.
2) Give access to neighborhood amenities (e.g. a pool or clubhouse)
3) Provide neighborhood services (e.g. snow removal or tree trimming, extra trash collection)
4) Are NOT in the business of mandating minutiae such as grass length, paint color, approving remodel plans, handing out fines, etc
5) Are NOT part of a private developer's subdivision (usually goes hand in hand with point 4) so much as a collection of residents which formed organically
Basically, I like the idea of HOAs if they're more similar to Los Angeles's Neighborhood Councils than LAPD: Home Edition (although, for so many other reasons, I think LA's Neighborhood Councils are unrepresentative and ineffective at serving the wider community's best interest so much as they benefit exclusively the homeowner's interest). Otherwise, I strongly believe they cause more harm than good -- not to mention they can easily be weaponized against a minority homeowner moving into a majority-white community.
Unfortunately, it seems like HOAs as described above are in the vanishing minority.
My dad has a property that's it's in a homeowner's association. Mostly it's just because there's a private road to a bunch of houses that needs to be maintained. That's pretty much the main thing that the HOA is concerned with. Time could come when there's some option for bringing broadband in too.
This. We bought a house in an HOA and I definitely had a moment where I was like, "Wait a minute, some guy bought this land, subdivided it, and created this HOA out of thin air and now here we are, 40 years later, living under that HOA he made up. None of the original owners even live here anymore!"
Americans only seem to value freedom from government interference in their lives. There's far more control from schools, universities, workplaces, and HOAs. Many rights like freedom of speech are curtailed in schools and workspaces, for example.
You are talking as if somehow non-Americans have access to more liberties across non-government entities in their lives. If anything, Americans treasure and enjoy the most freedoms across the widest gamut of institutions vs. non Americans.
I don't think that's true. Coming from Germany I feel that in the average US citizen living as an employee has less rights and freedoms than the average German citizen. In principle you can live a very free lifestyle in the US but you either have to have lots of money or check out from the lifestyle most people live.
That's true. If you want freedoms and rights in America, you're either not a part of the 'normal' American way of working and likely not making much money, or you're wealthy. Workplaces are authoritarian and remove a lot of rights when you walk in the door or sign into your computer, even doing surveillance on work devices that are further than simply asset tracking & data protection.
Home owner associations or your average American Beauty style dystopia is much rarer outside the US because people haven't voluntarily locked themselves into suburbia.
In Europe the middle class generally moves into cities and not out of them where you're for the most part left to your own devices rather than being bullied around by activist neighbours or your church parish or what have you.
I mean just take a look at fiction, from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick, this sort of provincial clampdown on people is quite uniquely American. Between boyscouts and girlscouts and the cheerleading team there's not that much freedom left.
I noticed this most in my encounters with American college students abroad. They're like oversized children. It's quite striking how managed American life is. From school until the evening to clubs and on-campus living, into the nuclear family and then retirement in Florida.
> from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick
And then there is The Addams Family. The 2019 film addresses their conflict with American suburbia quite well. In the end, the neighborhood accepts them. Sometimes art does not imitate life.
Germans for example have an expectation of privacy at the workplace. It's not allowed to monitor a German employee's web browsing on a work computer. In the US the employer can monitor them all they want.
Property rights are more "first class" than privacy rights; in the US, the idea that a company is not allowed to monitor the use of company equipment by employees is absurd- to the extent that many institutions are regulated to require it (i.e. monitoring for data exfiltration, etc).
Of course, most companies' monitoring is pretty shallow and reasonable, but there are exceptions, and I certainly wouldn't choose to work for one of the exceptions.
That makes sense. Property ownership seems to be one of the most important values in the US. Which leads to property owners having the freedom to restrict the freedoms of other people. You can see that in companies where employees are assumed to basically have no rights while working. Same in the west here where property owners fence off large areas of land and nobody can pass through. In Germany there usually is some kind of path where people can pass through. This can make hiking in CA quite difficult because you often run into a fence.
Though there are historical reasons for allowing land owners to restrict unauthorized access, realize too that property extends to anything that can be owned, not just land.
If a company has a commercial kitchen, it seems reasonable to be to prohibit employees from running their own food delivery startup out of the kitchen... If you get access to a company car (I.e. travelling salesman), the company should reasonably expect to be able to take action against you if you use ot to go drag racing, or for a personal vacation.
Likewise, the notion that an employee should expect to have free reign over a company computer and company internet access is just strange to me.
The use and access of those logs is strictly regulated, and yes, it is enforced.
Given that Germany has a much healthier employee representation than the US, it's much more difficult for management to slide in surveillance under the radar. (It's also rather painful if they get caught)
I wonder if those German workplace freedoms stem from a different legal system of culpability.
In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. If the employer can show that the employee actively sidestepped the employer’s controls, the employer can make a good case against liability.
I wonder if anything like that can happen in Germany. If not, then employee privacy on employer-owned devices makes sense.
Usually, the locale employee organization ("Betriebsrat") will negotiate a contract with the employer ("Betriebsvereinbarung") where the usage of company equipment for private use is regulated. Haven't read one in years, but would assume, that this case is handled there, and gives the employer the right to check logs etc in case of criminal/legal inquiries.
“In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. “
I always find this reasoning strange and inconsistent . Companies give company cars to employees which could injure people. Or I could stab somebody with an employer provided knife.
It's likely an effect of data privacy being established as one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the German constitution and further strengthened by specific laws like the German data privacy law, which is a lot older than GDPR.
Interestingly data privacy (more precisely the "Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung") is not named explicitly in the constitution, but has been "created" by the German constitutional court in 1983 in the context of a law suite against the German census of 1983 [1].
Historically I would argue all of this is the result of the experience 1933-1945 and also the (what was known at that time) experience in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic.
It's enforced to the point where the access control system to the building, even if it tracks entry and exit timestamps, cannot be used for e.g. time keeping or to monitor employee attendance. German companies will have to have a separate time keeping system, even if the access control system uses the exact same (RFID) cards for identification.
People in other countries are sometimes less burdened by interference from non-governmental organizations. Countries with strong unions offer workers freedom from the worst of workplace strictures - think the right to assemble or to speak out against your employer or blow a whistle without being fired. Most countries don't have HOAs and far fewer rules around how you can build and maintain your own house. You can paint your house bright pink in most places in India and no one will stop you.
The American body politic's focus on rights as the defining feature of the social contract isn't shared everywhere else. For example, in many countries, the focus is on the material benefits the government can provide for you ("development"). And because of that, there's less reflexive distrust in government as an institution able to benefit your life, in principle. Parts of the American citizenry absolve themselves of the expectation that government can, even in principle, improve your life.
America is living in the long 18th century - Enlightenment liberalism worked out over three centuries.
most likely the reason some Americans are fine with a HOA is because they do give up some liberties/freedoms for the other benefits that come with a HOA. Such as amenities, security, upkeep of surroundings, and other benefits from the pooling of resources (ie hoa fees). You also have essentially an arbitrator to deal with disputes between neighbors (mainly over appearances). (and generally when homes are constructed together/all at once and on a single large plot of land; their final costs are much less thus you can purchase homes for cheaper). In the case of subdivisions like this, Not all come with an HOA but that is generally the case.
I'm on the fence, so to speak. have lived in subs with and without HOA, and mostly haven't noticed much of a difference. we did get a curt letter once about a trashcan "visible from the street" but they didn't followup when I asked for more info. Depending on what street you're on, it might be visible against the back of the house, but it wasn't visible from the front street, which is all I'd assume we'd care about.
One of the values I've found is that it does provide a way to collectively prevent certain eyesores. I don't really want to have someone with 5 cars in the street on in their driveway for extended periods of time. Having a BBQ party? Sure - have 15 cars there for a few hours. Want to collect cars and work on them and leave cars 'in repair' out the street for weeks at a time? I'd rather you didn't, and would rather there be some agreed upon process to resolve those disputes.
I do understand some HOAs have people that get power hungry - grass being a 1/4" too tall, etc. That's generally bullshit, and I think there's probably other things going on in those cases where the HOA issue is the public face of some other private neighbor disputes going on.
Oh, we did have a letter once or twice about "your lawn is not kept properly". We have a lawn service and they got delayed, then it rained heavy for 3 days, and they were backed up again, and... we had really long grass. It was cut the moment someone could cut it at that point. Nature happens. If the worst that came out of that was a $50 fine or something... meh.
A lot of HOA's send letters about things they don't have authority over, and people comply anyway. If you push back or ask for clarification, they just drop it so they aren't exposed as lacking authority.
HOAs provide some value, in some cases mowing, upkeep, and snow removal. I'd never live in a place with HOA dues/restrictions but for older folks who aren't as physically capable it can be really nice.
They provide some value but they also attract control freaks who want to shape everything in the way they want. Most people don't want to engage in HOA so the people who do (and often are control freaks) have a lot of power.
Of course! No one is forced to buy into an HOA. For some Americans though I think it's less about giving up their freedoms and more about controlling their neighbors :)
My HOA has 100 home owners (large town home complex), that type of buying power puts us all in a really good negotiating position.
Not to mention they save me all the time I'd spend on arranging various home services, from window washing to roof cleaning to pest removal to repaving driveways. Having an HOA means I worry about what is inside my walls and nothing else.
Ours definitely does, what I pay for HOA dues is nothing compared to what I'd be paying if they didn't cover my cable, internet + HBO. They bundle it up for every resident. I've seen what others pay for cable, my HOA dues basically are in the ballpark of a pretty basic internet + cable plan (in Florida) now imagine paying double, cause that's what it'd be like if they didn't bundle it. I'm pretty sure our HOA pays like $30 - $50 per house or something for plans that normally cost $100+ so it's definitely severely discounted.
An HOA is typically formed by people who live in the neighborhood to allow a housing development to represent itself as a single larger entity instead of several smaller ones.
Like any human collaboration they can be awesome or terrible. A good HOA can manage resources for ammenities like pools and sports courts, they can help homeowners settle disputes over things like fencing and street parking. Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.
At the end of the day HOAs do get a lot of heat because they often enforce community guidelines on things like mowing your lawn and not painting your garage door to be the nazi flag. Like anything, this is a tradeoff - you may want to run a ham antenna in your backyard and be told you're not allowed.
This isn't, at all, how most HOAs come to be in the US. Not even close.
Most HOA's are formed when a developer plats a subdivision. They attach the Covenants and other deed restrictions at the property at that time. They do it so they can maintain control over properties they have already sold until they have sold every property in the development. They want to maintain that control so they can cultivate the image for the neighborhood that maximizes their ability to profit from it.
This notion that HOA's get created for altruistic reasons is almost universally false, and should go away. Yes, some HOA's survive in a way that isn't toxic, but even that is really in the eyes of the beholder.
> Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.
Sounds like a good use-case for sortition. Require that people "submit to the potential for being drafted for HOA service" as part of the purchase agreement of the houses built in the development. Then at least the HOA will mostly be composed of harried people who don't want to do the job and want to get it over with as quickly as possible; rather than busybodies with idle hands.
I wonder the same about zoning, can’t still wrap my head around it actually. Your neighbor dictating what you can or can’t do with your property is communism.
I don’t understand. You are ok with a coal plant or wind farm or slaughterhouse being built in a residential neighborhood? That doesn’t happen right now because of zoning.
This sounds bad in theory but in practice I am not sure why developers would purchase an expensive city land to build a coal plant there. But okay, let's have residential/industrial zoning. I am not okay with any restrictions inside the residential zone though. If someone wants to build an apartment tower on their single-family house lot, that should be allowed.
Adam Ruins Everything also had an entire episode smearing the charity Toms Shoes. He goes an entire rant about how Tom's doesn't need to donate shoes because people in Africa can buy them if they need them - but he entirely leaves out that Toms donates custom made shoes for a specific medical condition (podoconiosis) that makes most shoes uncomfortable to wear.
There's nothing wrong with being skeptical or critical. There is everything wrong with selectively being critical and misrepresenting the situation.
Adam Ruins Everything is inherently contrarian, to the point he doesn't have a show unless he's pouring some poison on something. This influences his "hot takes" to the point I doubt any of them are honest, and I wouldn't put it past him to make shit up.
"Critics of HOAs have attacked them as a “tool for exclusion” that can encourage racial segregation. There’s no available data on the race of the owners of each particular house, so Clarke and Freedman couldn’t test this accusation directly. But they did compare the racial demographics of neighborhoods with or without HOAs, and found that neighborhoods with HOAs tended to be richer and less racially diverse."
Unnamed critics state things "can" do things, while the following sentence shows there is no evidence. Then there is a follow up statement that the racial demographics show that HOAs tend to be richer (A major point of HOAs is to improve and maintain neighborhood values), and less diverse. The second part on its face might seem upsetting but, you'll find largely suburban communities ARE overall less diverse. It would maybe be relevant if they found and stated "HOAs in the same zip codes as non-HOA neighbrhoods of equal value are less diverse", that might show some racial differences, but then not even necessarily bias.
In short, bloomberg is a rag and should be used to pickup your favorite pets droppings with.
Without commenting on the quality of the Bloomberg piece, exclusion is quite literally the reason that HOAs were created. The original, explicit, and completely legal purpose of an HOA was to exclude specific races and creeds and we cannot dispute that.
Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written directly into the deed.
Wasn't that long ago, and many of the people who wrote those bylaws are still alive...
> Having established the HOA, the developers have expanded their scope, giving them authority to regulate changes to residences, landscaping and maintenance requirements, color of houses, etc., a variety of other requirements and amenities that the developers believe will make their project more desirable to the market.
The last paragraph in that history section made me laugh, because now HOA's are mainly for developers to ensure they can sell their homes and then after the fact when they're no longer relevant you're left trying to satisfy an HOA and they always say its to keep property values up and what have you.
> Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written directly into the deed.
Restrictive covenants have been a dead letter for decades, and they predate modern HOAs by definition.
Maybe Bloomberg should hire you rather than write this drivel. It's not my burden to provide evidence for something I am pointing the logical failures and wild claims of a rag magazine. Thank you for the link though it's informative
Bloomberg is at least conventional media, though, and even right-leaning media, at that. It's a bit different from a comedian making bombastic, click-baity videos for the internet.
What makes you think Bloomberg is right-leaning? My understanding is that WSJ has been right-leaning in NY finance journalism and Bloomberg has been left-leaning, historically.
I'm renting a place where the lawn was moderately overrun with dandelions. They kill of the grass, and the ground becomes uneven. You can't run through your yard without the fear of twisting your ankle. Not to mention they continue to spread like wildfire into your neighbors' lawns.
And wild blackberry vines come up straight from hell.
You can achieve a very homogeneous lawn without herbicides. Plenty of water, some aeration, some fertilizer, iron against moss, weekly lawn mowing and occasionally use a daisy grubber. Eventually the lawn will displace most weeds.
If one does not want their lawn to look like a piece of nature, they could as well remove the pesky plants and put some artificial grass, as used on football fields. Both pristine-looking and honest.
My experiences are one part appearances and the other part moving to a new area. Where my wife and I grew up neither of our families did any regular fertilizer or anything just occasional weeding and lawns would be thick and green. Now we live in another part of the country and the soil is terrible. So it’s hard to have a lawn take hold, without constant irrigation. We live on a well so I’m not interested also that’s a pretty big waste of water. I don’t mind the clover we have but the crabgrass is out of control.
What is even worse are the people in deserts and desert-like areas who insist on Kentucky bluegrass and other non-native plants. The water waste is repulsive.
My neighbors recently installed AstroTurf in their backyard because of this.
Old lawns (1950s) had clover by design. Even the lawn seed had clover seed already in it. Clover produces nitrogen which grass consumes, so it is a nice synergy. Clover eventually fell out of style because kids stepping on bees isn't desirable, and fertilizer and herbicides made an all grass lawn feasible.
My backyard this year is an experiment in doing my best to encourage something that takes care of itself and is more supportive of local fauna. I laid down clover and what the local university's agriculture dept recommends for native-friendly grass seed. I've used no weed killer back there. I'm growing some ornamental grasses and flowers native to the area for decoration.
I feel like it's been nice. I think the clover is pretty, and I feel like we have many more butterflies this year than any of the previous years. The grass has been thriving. Dandelions don't seem to enjoy growing with clover very much, so there's less of them this year, although goosefoots seem more than happy to coexist with clover.
The clover has held up well to dogs, too, which has been a nice bonus.
I think I'd like to add some creeping thyme next year.
Nice.
We haven’t done as well as you with planting but took a different rack. A crowd near me was letting you rent beehives. They managed them and we got a lot of honey. This made a striking difference to trees and plants in our garden and our neighbours. I was cutting unripe fruit off trees to stop their branches snapping.
I would say in Germany that balance is a little different. Herbicides and pesticides in lawns and gardens aren't so widely used as in the US (agriculture of course different story). At the same time, light pollution by streetlights is a lot worse because streetlights are in every street and overall the streets are more brightly lit. In the US its comparably fewer streetlights (and people often leave on their porch lights to light the street).
Clover is great for lawn health as it fixes (adds) nitrogen to the soil.
Before the widespread use of herbicides having some clover in the lawn was viewed as a good thing because of this. Lawn seeds even included a bit of clover.
When herbicides came out that killed clover as a side effect then we saw people saying (marketing) that clover is bad.
I don't use any chemicals in my yard mainly because I don't want to expose my dogs to that stuff. The result is a yard similar to your boss's. When the clover flowers we get plenty of bees, and there are other tiny flying insects, which attracts birds. Never really gave much mind to birds, but it's really nice going out and seeing cardinals on a daily basis. We've even had multiple robin nests around the house, which is fun to see their hatching cycle.
>But killing all clover, morning glories, and other broadleaf flowers in lawns has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas. Herbicides and pesticides in agriculture wiped out the rest.
Is that the case for sure?
I thought the state of the bee population wasn't quite that well understood...
I have no doubt that various herbicides hurt, but I'm not sure that just that science means their current population is entirely due to such use.
There are numerous studies, but since bee populations declined so drastically in the last 20 years, it's looking like the increase in glyphosate for GMO crops is one of the main culprits, or at least strongly correlated with the deaths:
Admittedly, my sample size is only 1 as far as clover. I'd recommend anyone reading this to go to a clover honey farm near where you live, to see for yourself.
Part of the problem is that so many of us live in cities now that we have no personal experience about the issue, which leaves us more vulnerable to misinformation/propaganda from big agribusiness corporations, their lobbyists and the politicians beholden to them.
For who? The home owner or big-ag? There is no replacement that doesn't entail more work, hense the massive resistance to change. Entitlement. Who cares about the bees if I have to change my behavior.
For the home owner, you can use alternatives like vinegar, or even better, manual removal of dandilions, etc. Entire towns have gone spray-free, but that requires a team of dedicated people out there in the parks removing.
For big-ag, they don't have a replacement. They are way too dependent.
It's like asking what is the replacement for petrolium. A whole lot of pain and much extra work.
You may already know this, but for anyone who doesn't: fire is not an option. The oils in poison ivy can become an aerosol, and get into your lungs. Don't use a flame weeder, or a burn barrel.
I think that's going to be part of my plan, but my housemate is extremely sensitive/allergic, so if I can avoid getting near the plant that would be awesome.
Do you have a way to get a lot of newspaper or large format cardboard? If the former, look up Morag Gamble, the latter, sheet mulching. Weed barriers will buy you a few years and then need to be dug up. Cardboard or paper biodegrade in a year (an extra thick layer of wood chips extends the effective period), so nothing to dig up and no microplastics.
Weeds are opportunists. They tend to grow where other things don't want to. Better soil will invite other things in besides weeds.
I live in the high desert of central Oregon and finally got sick and tired of trying to maintain a lawn in the desert. I removed the lawn then planted a ton of zone 4/5 draught tolerant native plants, most of which flower. There are bees everywhere now. And drip irrigation so much less water used. Feels great!
my parents have been avoiding using stuff like glyphosate for years.
They would describe it better than I can, but they can get away with e.g. just having plants that are repulsive to aphids (and plants that attracts insects that eat them).
They sometimes do have to use stuff like bordeaux mix but very rarely (if ever) use glyphosate.
Their garden is pretty amazing as a result. There are tons of birds (they have bird feeders) and insects. Bats in the summer as well.
Definitely how I see my garden if I ever get a house (I have been living in large cities all my adult life).
Other comment would be the agriculture use of chemicals dwarfs residential (and also land mass too). Need to figure out agriculture use of chemicals before we worry about residential use (although its easier to 'see' the results)
>has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas
Why do you want bees in residential areas ? I think that it's illegal to keep bees in some proximity to residential areas around here (my grandparents used to keep bees).
A more accurate framing of the question would be "Should we wantonly destroy massive ecosystems covering vast fractions of available land area for the sake of socially constructed vanity?"
I'm allergic to bee stings and I'd prefer not to have my neck swell up to the point where I can't breathe because I accidentally sat on or pinched an insect. And I don't want random insects biting me or my children, spreading disieses, etc.
Residential areas are called that because they are built to accommodate humans, I don't see anything particularly problematic about not having bees there.
And I do realise they pollinate a lot of plants - again residential area - I don't have anything against bees on farms or in nature.
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus" -- Agent Smith (The Matrix)
This so called equilibrium is created in nature by starvation or death by predators. Let's all go back to starvation and killing ourselves, for equilibrium.
Sure, if there is one thing history has taught us it's that humans will not be contained. Humans break free, expand to new territories and crash through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh… well, there it is.
Exactly, we are getting overconfident in our ability to control the planet and its resources. I believe we are privileged to share this planet with other beings. Instead we treat animals like some kind of inanimate resource.
You missed their point. The link shows that reindeer also multiplied far past their carrying point. Agent smith is wrong, plenty of mammals will overshoot given the opportunity.
> In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The Coast Guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer.
I wonder how many centuries it might take for the US to start to care about insects or the environment like some European countries do with the recent regress in policies overall that isn't about ONLY increasing overall GDP in the US.
And I say this even not considering Trump, which is a big menace. But democrat candidates in the US also don't care about the environment, not showing much promise. So do the Americans in general with their huge SUVs and completely unhealthy lifestyles(for them and the environment). I wonder how much this shitshow can go on.
I often hear Europeans make sweeping judgements about the US that reflect a lack of understanding of the country and continent. In part I think this is because most visitors from abroad only travel to NYC, SF, or LA, which are great cities, but not representative of the majority of the country.
Incredible as this may sound, around half of the US land area is completely uninhabited. Fully 1/3 of the land is owned by the federal government, and most of this is managed with environmental considerations at the forefront. The only part of the US that is even vaguely like European population density is the northeast corridor from Boston to DC, which represents a small percentage of the country.
People in the US care a lot about the environment, but the issue has been politicized of course and pits different factions against each other. We also have a housing crisis, and it’s very difficult to get humans to worry about saving anything else when they can’t get a roof over their head.
The US has myriad environmental problems and needs to do better, but it also has a very different situation on the ground compared to Europe, and thus requires different approaches in some areas.
You can't compare landmass versus landmass but only the behaviour of people in different places. It makes no difference if you live in a big city in China or in the middle of nowhere in the US on how big a polluter you are when driving your car. The same car is the same car everywhere. It is the same earth we are all on and we share the same air so how much uninhabited land there are is completely irrelevant. Borders doesn't contain pollution. So yes, driving a big SUV is most definitely a sign of not caring about pollution and not "but X is different than Y". Even those who "need a big 4x4" mostly don't. A small 4x4 is often way better in terrain while polluting less.
Have you been to US? I visited some states and I'm now living in Massachusetts for a little more than three years. I've never seen so much green in my life like see here in the US. It's beautiful. The article doesn't mention security measurements that will be taken in order to keep security levels where it is.
Exactly, Pennsylvania 100 years ago was completely stripped of trees, today has 17 millions acres of forests (almost 60% of the land is covered with forests!)
The GP is referencing the Holocaust since the story is about Germany. Though I don't know what that has to do with this article or the comment he is replying to.
> Some European countries, only very recently cared more about insects than people
Is not a "us or them" dichotomy. The only possible alternatives are insects-win/humans-win or insects-lose/humans-lose. We can't have agriculture without insects.
Fun fact: they started to care (only), because it's going to affect people. The drop in insect populations has become concerning. Without them, no crops, no fruits, no agriculture, which isn't that great a prospect for humans.
The states of California and Alaska each individually have more wild forest lands than the entire European continent.
The US created the concept of state-protected wilderness reserves and national parks.
The US was the driving force behind the Kyoto Protocol, and the originating nation of solar power, wind power, and nuclear power.
California leads the world in automobile fuel economy targets, and the US as a whole has cleaner-burning fuel than the EU, which for bizarre reasons settled on diesel as their standard even though it's far worse for the air than gasoline.
Europe's pretty far behind in caring about the environment.
The forest was declared a hunting reserve in 1541 to protect bison. In 1557, the forest charter was issued, under which a special board was established to examine forest usage. In 1639, King Vladislaus IV issued the "Białowieża royal forest decree" (Ordynacja Puszczy J.K. Mości leśnictwa Białowieskiego). The document freed all peasants living in the forest in exchange for their service as osocznicy, or royal foresters. They were also freed of taxes in exchange for taking care of the forest. The forest was divided onto 12 triangular areas (straże) with a centre in Białowieża.
If Europe is far behind, it's by some other measure than what is actually considered the most pressing environmental concerns of today.
The average American use about three times the fossil fuels the average Swede does, and if the statistics are correct, the ratio has been increasing for decades.
Germany is one of the European countries with the highest fossil fuel usage, at about half the US consumption per capita.
The European average seems to about half the US average.
As for Sweden, we've got strict rules for almost any kind of emission, and diesel cars have never been very common here.
California is great, Kyoto was great, but actual environment track record over the entire United States is far from great. Unfortunately.
If US has led as much in action as in words, I'd be happy to name you the best.
We're only 10 million in Sweden, and it's outright depressing to think how little it matters even if we reduce emissions to zero. It's still the right thing to aim at, and I hope we continue on this track, but it would be much easier if big economies like the US were more heavily invested.
It is of course very lucrative to try to convince others to use more expensive energy sources, and yourself use a cheaper one. Which is one perspective of the US involvement in Kyoto that is hard to entirely dismiss because of the somewhat lackluster results overall. The changeover to more gas instead of coal is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that US oil consumption alone is more than most EU countries use in combined oil, coal, and gas.
I'm all for big wild forest lands, I probably spent the first decades of my life more in forests than outside them, but that has barely anything to do with being environmentally conscious. It has little bearing on acting in the best interests of the environment, and all people who depends on it. It doesn't matter how much you care for the forest lands if excess carbon dioxide cause entire biomes to disappear, which is a significant concern today.
> the US as a whole has cleaner-burning fuel than the EU, which for bizarre reasons settled on diesel as their standard even though it's far worse for the air than gasoline.
Careful here: the US optimises for low NOx for health reasons while the EU optimises for low CO2 for environmental reasons.
See for example https://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-reall... (the first website I've found that doesn't look like an all car manufacturers propaganda site) which claims "In use, on average, this equates to around 200g CO₂/km for petrol and 120g CO₂/km for diesel."
They even refer to the Kyoto protocol as a reason for the push for Diesel and also point out the issues with optimizing for CO2 only. But still it's not as simple as "Diesels pollute, the EU must be mad".
> The states of California and Alaska each individually have more wild forest lands than the entire European continent.
I really don't want to get into a Europe vs US argument, but this statement strikes me as odd. Sweden and California are roughly similar in size, and Sweden is nearly 70% covered by forest. For California to have more forest than Europe as a whole, not only does California need to be covered in forest to a larger extent than Sweden (this may be true, I don't know), but Sweden needs to hold more than 70% of the total amount of forest in Europe - something that seems exceptionally unlikely at best.
If we decimate the insect population there won't be any nans or corner stores. If a street light is the only thing keeping your nan safe then maybe your area has bigger safety issues to address.
Regardless, for any issue there is usually middle ground to be found and snark comments like yours do nothing to help find or support it.
Posts like this are really disappointing to me. I come to hacker news to read about technology and startups. If I wanted to read about general news topics (bees, insects, glyphosate, general monsanto hate, etc...) I would frequent google news, CNN, or reddit.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Forgive the snark, but if you don't think using technology to make the world a better place is an appropriate topic for HN, you could consider getting your news from techcrunch.
As you can see, you'll always have someone replying with the guidelines and act as if we all come here to have the opinion of software people on topics they don't master at all.
There are loads of foxes and bats in big cities in Germany already. There are tons of insects as well.
Humans are already not allowed to build anywhere because of environmental regulations (unless you are a corrupt politician) and to keep the rents high.
Germany is getting more and more ridiculous. People must use energy saving bulbs to increase the profit for Philips, but one can legally burn 100l of fuel per day in a car.
Noise laws are lagging behind but insects need to be protected.
> Drop according to whom? The people whose jobs depend on the alleged drop?
Speaking as an ecologist here, colleagues of mine were authors on one of the recent studies on insect decline in Germany (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1684-3). Believe me, we'd rather study other things than how fast nature is disappearing.
Also, foxes and rats have nothing to do with insect levels.
Foxes and rats have very much to do with the fact that the government is telling us that species are disappearing and need protection while there was literally a fox trying to enter my house via an open door pretty much in the city.
This has never happened 20 years ago, so someone is lying.
It is a massive credibility problem created by ideologues who will deny the foxes until there are 5 in every apartment.
There are probably over 10 million species of plants and animals in the world. Of course some of these are going to be better at coping with humans and their cities than others. As you correctly observe, foxes happen to be some of the best at adapting to city life. If you want more examples, just take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_wildlife
However, these exceptions change nothing whatsoever about the fact that in general, species very much are in decline and many are about to, or have already disappeared. Indeed, when we look at cities around the world, only 20% of bird species and 5% of plant species actually live in such an environment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027400/). Outside cities, the picture is not much better. Some species, like the crested lark in Europe, have suffered over 95% population drops. Others, like the passenger pigeon, have gone entirely extinct. I‘m citing bird examples here because we tend to have the best data for them (we have numerous birdwatching records reaching back 300 years), but I could cite others. In the last decades, an increasing number of observations suggest that by now, even insects are beginning to decline. And if you want to know what it‘s like when they‘re dead, just ask the Chinese labourers who are already having to pollinate apple blossoms by hand, because all the bees are gone...
But I am sure that if there are 5 foxes per person in Germany, there will be a new "Referentenentwurf" and everyone will ask how this could possibly have happened.
If you cannot see how this hurts credibility, you have to get out of your ecological bubble. Why should people believe numbers on insects if numbers for other animals are clearly wrong?
You need to differentiate between endangered species and protected species, and between biodiversity conservation ("Naturschutz") and animal rights ("Tierschutz").
It is, however, a protected species in Germany (Anhang 1 BArtSchV), though at the lower protection level ("besonders geschützt", not "streng geschützt"). Note, however, that there are multiple reasons to give a species legal protection. These include a need for conservation (not the case here), but also ethical implications (higher animals like birds and mammals generally enjoy higher protection levels than insects or plants) and cultural reasons (in this case, the fox is a huntable species, which means that it falls under the Jagdgesetz).
In short: yes, the fox is protected, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's also endangered.
If findings are true that insects are more attracted to cold light than traditional incandescent light sources, then it's small wonder you still find significant numbers of insects where all the cold light is emitted, even if they are killed on contact with those light sources or trapped by them (which is a significant problem with mating). Same should be true for any species which follows insects as a source of food.
I'm a heretic who uses incandescent light bulbs (but no car). No shortage of insects in my room. All in the middle of a city.
How do those insects mate in the city if light prevents them from doing so?
I wonder why we are still alive. According to the Club of Rome we should have been extinct by now. But these things are a nice diversion from the real problems and a good income stream for the pundits.
The cynic in me views this as yet another attempt at fethishizing nature by people who choose to live in sterile urban environments. The problem with this type of fetishization is that it eventually combines with class privilege to produce narrow public policy that seldom promotes the public good.
Furthermore, those that live in less-urbanized less-sterile locales are painfully aware that nature and her army of insects always has the upper hand.
Inherent in your statement is the idea that privileged people choose to live in urban environments, which is probably false half the time. I choose to live closer to work in an apartment to minimize my costs and travel time. I would love a backyard.
Europe is quite densely populated in some areas, and insect populations in these areas have dropped to a fraction of past numbers in some areas, over only a few decades. It's quite reasonable to try to do something about it, as we're actually dependent on insects, to a likely significant but somewhat unknown extent.
That there are insects in some places doesn't mean the issues with insect, and general biodiversity loss suddenly disappears.
Bugs are everywhere, but there are species disappearing every at a rate much much higher than they should disappear for natural reasons.
There certainly are cases where fetishization can be part of it environmental policy, but usually it's then about something you can brag about, not about the impact light has on the sex life of bugs.
Even with the possible fetishization of nature, most people still don't care enough to be willing to lower their standard of living, even quite superficially. Generally, I would say cynicism regarding environmental policy is often misplaced, as even terribly inefficient policy makes the existence of the larger issue apparent, and opens the door to better and more informed policy the next time around.
Look at almost any are of legislation, the first plodding steps into a new area is often hilariously misplaced, or terribly expressed with the 20/20 of hindsight. Regardless, they were necessary steps. In some areas, biodiversity arguably one of them, the first plodding steps are taken just now. It's progress, if small.
Ironically this would create a better surveillance net. With a high light in the background you obtain black silhouettes. With low or none light in the background UV cameras are perfectly able to take photos in pitch black, and a low level of light gave you faces of the suspects instead.
So perhaps, maybe, "speculation in action", this is not only useful or exclusively about insects
