What a gift to have someone as experienced as Dave Goulson, award-winning entomologist, conservationist, and biology professor write this important book on how to become aware of the world of insects all around us. I am now intrigued by how important insects are to all of nature, including ourselves. As a boy growing up in Shropshire, England, Goulson brought some caterpillars home from the school playground. When they transformed into cinnabar moths, his path opened out before him: “This seemed like magic to me—and still does. I was hooked” (p. 1).
Goulson is a bumblebee specialist, but he writes about far more—ants, honeybees, wild bees, beetles, birds, butterflies, cicadas, cockroaches, earwigs, flies, foxes, frogs, spiders, wolves, woodlice, even dinosaurs. And more.
Insects are the pollinators of flowering plants, sometimes specialists for one or more flowering species of plant and sometimes generalists. And their numbers have been diminishing by very high percentages recently, so much so that some crop farmers are utilizing robot pollinators experimentally. Do you remember having to clean insects off your car windshield after driving when you were young? I remember that, but I don’t have to do that anymore. No insects.
Even though only a small percentage of insect species have been researched and taxonomically named, many scientific methods of quantifying them show that their numbers are dropping drastically. What has been so destructive for insects? The answer is mostly human activities such as farming to increase crop yields: the usage of insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides (farmers consider wildflowers to be weeds), genetic modification of crops, and monoculture farming. Our changing human lifestyles also challenge insects through the light pollution of our cities; electromagnetic radiation from cell phones, tablets, laptops, televisions; and a fetish for tidiness in gardens and parks that leaves nowhere for insects to overwinter.
I am deeply interested in whatever is speeding us toward climate change. Goulson writes about that in detail, in particulara futuristic chapter—chapter 16, "A View from the Future”—which could be compulsory reading for anyone considering solutions to prevent our frightening future.
Goulson’s last chapter, “Actions for Everyone,” proposes many ideas for UK gardeners, but some of these ideas also translate well for other locations, such as British Columbia. For example, “Grow flowers that are particularly rich in nectar and pollen to encourage pollinators such as bees, butterflies and hoverflies” (p. 289).
All in all, I recommend you read Silent Earth if you grow flowers, vegetables, fruit (both culinary and botanical), shrubs, and/or trees. You will soon want to know more about the insects in your neighbourhood, the pests and the friends. As soon as you can name an insect, you will start to care for it; the creatures in the Bombini tribe, for instance.
Review by VMG Nina S.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson
Copyright © 2021 Dave Goulson.
Published by HarperCollins in the US ($28.99) and Canada ($35.99).