Drip Drip Drip is the sound of a faucet that can no longer access a sufficient water supply. It is also the poetic sound of trying droplet by droplet to wake up America and people around the world to how growth is a Ponzi scheme from which we must divest because it is a losing game on a limited planet. The “I told you so” is self-evident because so many of us have been harping on this message for a long, long time.
Prairie Dogs are keystone species. A keystone species means that are a species on which so many others depend. Prairie dogs tunnel underground creating homes for many animals, including one of my favorites, the burrowing owl. Keystone species provide something biologically essential for many other species and are responsible for their existence. Just like a corner of a foundation holds a building together, they are the thread that hold the whole ecosystem together. Without them, there would an unstoppable flow of consequences throughout the food chain.
A classic keystone specie is the American Beaver which creates habitat for a wide range of species from dragonflies to wolves with its ability to create dams and redirect rivers. Honeybees as well as native bees ensure the continued reproduction and survival not only of the plants they pollinate but also of the other insects and animals up the food chain that depend on their existence.
Honeybees are a keystone species directly connected to us. If you like fruit like apples and cranberries, if you like melons, or squash and broccoli, take your hat off to this member of the Hymenoptera order of insects imported from Europe. In fact, over 100,000 species of plants would disappear from the earth if honeybees were to become extinct.
We are currently celebrating National Pollinator week, June 19th-25th, a week dedicated to all of those insects who we were raised to hate and spray, but do a great service in the way they make flowers bloom and allow fruits to make their way to our plates. Native bees are in even deeper trouble, because they are not bred for use in crops. They too are needed to pollinate wild plants, but even though native bees are indispensable to the health of the natural world they are declining globally. Recent research has found that more than 40% of insect species are declining at rates faster than mammals, birds and reptiles. But if you are over 50 or so, you don’t need to read the research, you can remember the days when your windshields were streaked with dead insects after a ride in the country. Now there are no more trips to the car wash needed after a country drive, for their numbers are far fewer than in the good ole days of insect-streaked windshields.
Humans are far from being a keystone species. Certainly, domesticated animals have increased because of us as they depend on us to breed them and use them as pets or food. But wild species trend downward as we trend upward. When it comes to wildlife we are an ‘eliminator’ species, for we eliminate other wild species as we expand our presence and sprawl over the landscape. This of course will mean that we will eventually we eliminate ourselves. Conservation efforts have certainly helped bring back some iconic species and saved some critical habitat, but on a global scale we are pushing up against limits indicated by the rapid decline in insects as well as other species.
When we follow the growth model of trying to support more and more people on our land, we destroy the habitat of the very species we need. When we push limits with our destructive behavior of converting open land and farmland into subdivisions, we put cement where plants used to be. This blocks the ability of aquifers to recharge because rain just runs off the new highways and driveways into neighboring streams and rivers. When we sprawl over the landscape, we are preventing the water cycle from doing its thing
Following the bulldozers and the cement mixers are the chemical cocktails dumped on those subdivisions to be sure they are aesthetically pleasing to buyers and sellers. Rows and rows of insect-destroying sod are laid which then must be watered and monitored so as not to allow for any natural plants to exist.
It is astonishing that our public discourse allows for the pointing of fingers at climate change and agricultural production, but all goes silent when the culprit behind it all is brought up. The great lie of omission is that behind it all is our population growth. Behind all of this conversion of natural landscape to human infrastructure and its paucity of wildlife is that our numbers continue to grow fueling the way we are sprawling over the landscape. ( See From Sea to Sprawling Sea, www.sprawlusa.com)
We cannot continue to lie to people while trying to save pollinators or any other specie. To avoid the drip, drip, drip of I told you so, we need to have the courage to look at the numbers of insects going down and make the connection that it is because our numbers are going up.
In the name of the pollinators we are losing, we must stop ignoring the most important driver of scarcity, our homegrown driver of population growth. We are running out of water and insects in the US due to both population growth and climate change, but only climate change gets mentioned, and we don’t do much about that either. The good news is that now that we are sitting at the already unsustainable number of 335 million, we do not have to worry so much about what used to drive it, high birthrates and low death rates.
What we do need to pay attention to and pay attention fast is our proclivity for encouraging mass immigration which is includes both those who come here with and without legal paperwork. It is theoretically an easier problem to solve. Making all immigration legal would alleviate only those burdened with the task of policing those without proper documentation, but it will do nothing for the pollinators looking for nectar.
Now the drivers of mass immigration are complicated. They are historical, political and sociological. Some look only at the need for workers and see increased immigration as a solution. Others see a way to save money by paying lower wages and still others see some of the desperation and immediately want to reach out and help. Still others believe that we are being hysterically xenophobic by saying we are full, as has been our pattern throughout history.
But when you take several steps back you can more easily see that to preserve the American landscape, to honor life-giving keystone species and protect our water supply, we must get off the growth train. There are limits to growth and National Pollination Week will not ultimately be successful unless it carries this critical message: we are in overshoot. We are overpopulated relative to our limited resources as indicated by the continuing loss of keystone species. People have been criticized for saying not in my backyard (NIMBY) when it comes to growth. They are called out for being selfish or xenophobic. What we need to say is that there is no more room in anyone’s backyard in the US for ecological reasons. It doesn’t make for an easy acronym, but it is truer to the reality of life in America in 2023.
I hope that the organizers of this important week will be unafraid to connect the dots of out of control growth to the elimination of pollinators, but I doubt it, which makes me wonder how much they really care about pollinators. What I do know is that there is no glory in saying I told you so.