The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Silent Collapse: What the Disappearance of Insects Means for Humanity and the Earth with Oliver Milman

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Insects, bugs, creepy-crawlies – these small animals are often considered a nuisance (or worse) by humanity, bringing up an ongoing desire to kill or mitigate these "pests" that plague our backyards, homes, and gardens. But we're beginning to see that, despite our cultural misconceptions, insects are actually at the foundation of our biosphere, food supply, and nearly every life process on Earth. This makes recent reports of rapidly declining insect populations all the more troubling – but can we recognize the vital importance of insects and reverse the harm we've done before it's too late? On this episode, Nate is joined by environmental journalist, Oliver Milman, to discuss the alarming decline in insect populations in the past few decades and the far-reaching consequences this has for ecosystem stability, human well-being, and the overall health of the biosphere. From pollination and nutrient cycles to being the base of food webs for countless other animals, the loss of insects has cascading effects beyond what we could imagine. Oliver outlines the human activity that is driving the worst of these trends, including how accelerating global heating is amplifying these ecological pressures.  How would a major collapse of insect populations immediately disrupt our everyday lives — and are we already starting to see those impacts? How do various sectors of human activity, from industrial agriculture to urban development, influence insect health? And ultimately, would supporting thriving insect populations require us to fundamentally rethink our relationship with the creatures with which we share the biosphere?  (Conversation recorded on June 25th, 2025)    About Oliver Milman: Oliver Milman is a British journalist and the environment correspondent at The Guardian. His first book, The Insect Crisis, is a devastating account of how a silent collapse in worldwide insect populations is threatening everything from the birds in our skies to the food on our plates. It was published by Atlantic in 2022 and shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

One in four bumblebee species in North America are now vulnerable to extinction. The monobustlite migration to California is about 1% of what it was in the 1980s. You speak to entomologists and they're a ref, they kind of go on these scientific field trips and they come back with nothing. They see nothing and it's kind of devastating to them. So we're losing a lot of beauty as well as utility in the world, I would say. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins.

On this show we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Joining me today is journalist Oliver Millman to give an update on the state of global insect populations and what their declining numbers mean for humanity and the stability of the biosphere. Oliver is an environmental correspondent at The Guardian and recently wrote his first book, The Insect Crisis, which tells the story of the silent collapse of worldwide insect

populations and how this is threatening everything from the birds in our skies to the food on our plates. In this episode, he outlines the dire consequences for all of life over the coming decades, including humans, if insect biomass continues to decline at its current rate of 1 to 2% per year. Action at the macro level is the only way we will truly be able to change this trend, but he and I discuss some of the ways that individuals and communities can support insect populations in local ecosystems as well. Long-time listeners will know that this topic is extremely important to me and not widely discussed in environmental media. Yet even as someone who has long cared for the natural world,

the more I learn about the role of biodiversity and biocomplexity in stabilizing Earth's natural functions, the more I see how drastically we overlook critical conversations like these about insects. With that, please welcome Oliver Millman. Oliver Millman, welcome to the show. Good to be with you, Nate. I have invited you because you are an environmental journalist and one of the few science journalists who has encapsulated the situation with the global insect crisis into a book, which was called the insect crisis. And for most people looking at what's going on in the world, insects probably aren't their biggest priority, despite their role in pollination, food webs, nutrient, cycling,

whatever, but they are disappearing rapidly. And your book is an excellent one-stop resource cataloging this decline and the rippling effects it has for the broader biosphere in human systems. So let's start with the basics, Oliver. What is the state of insect populations right now and has anything shifted to your knowledge since your book came out in 2022? Yeah. So, I mean, the picture is still not complete.

I mean, there are about 2 billion insects for every human in the world. So if you think about those kind of numbers, that's kind of astonishing when you think about any kind of census of insects. It's not like counting people. It's a very different kind of challenge. So the numbers we're talking about are enormous. Obviously, we're talking about very small creatures that are found most densely in least populated parts of the world, the tropics and so on. So getting exact numbers is never probably really going to happen. But even with that caveat, the snapshots we have are extremely alarming.

So over the last few years, there have been a number of studies coming out of Europe, the US, Australia, some other places to Costa Rica that have shown enormous drops in insect numbers of a rates of, you know, three quarters to 90 percent. over the last few decades. The US, for example, has lost a fifth of its butterflies since the year 2000, which is quite incredible. And overall, when you're looking at this in a kind of globalized context, there's been estimates of kind of 1 to 2% a year of insects are going by biomass. And biomass is a term used to kind of measure the entirety of insect life. If you scrunch it up into a big ball and weighed it, that would be its kind of biomass. We're losing about 1 to 2% of that a year, maybe a little bit more.

So it's quite a kind of frightening sort of decline. Obviously, that's kind of unsustainable in the long term without huge ramifications. So 2 billion insects for every human, that obviously, even as tiny as they are, that means they massively outweigh humans. If you had 2 billion insects compared to me or you, that would be a lot bigger than us, yes? Yeah, that's right. I think about three quarters of all known animal species in the world are insects. So their numbers are kind of truly astronomical. I mean, one of my favorite facts is that we think about flies.

We don't really think about diversity of flies, for example. We just think they're annoying and they fly around. There's a species of assassin fly, which is a kind of a type of fly that spears its proboscis into the brains of its victims and sucks out their brains. There's about 7,000 species just of that type of fly, very small subset of flies. That's more than the entire number of species of mammals in the world. So that's me and you.

You know, it's, yeah, cows, dogs, bears. Like, all the mammals in the world are less in number than that. One particular small section of the fly world. So when you think about it in those terms, the numbers are kind of mind-boggling. And because they are so large, I think that has held obscure the crisis in the numbers, because we always think that insects are around to an annoying degree to us sometimes. We don't tend to think about them as being rare. We don't think about them as being in the say category as orangutans or tigers or polar bears.

It's just not, they kind of inhabit a completely different world in our minds. I have a bunch of follow-ups to what you just said, but one thing that just came to mind is, perceived scarcity correlates with what we value and appreciate. So megafauna are fewer, but we see them and we know how scarce they are, but yet we're losing insects, which are incredibly important for the ecosystem functioning of the earth at 1 to 2 percent per year in biomass. So they're critically important. I mean, if we get down to the last 10 percent of them, the marginal impact of decline

is extreme. Yeah, that's right. And I think one of our, you know, great qualities as humans is our empathy and our ability to connect to other things that we feel are like us and important to us. I mean, it doesn't feel like there's much empathy and compassion going on in the world right now. But I think it is a very kind of human trait that we can tap into. And because of that, we do relate to certain other species more than we do to others. others. So insects, one entomologist

said to me, they're kind of like aliens on earth. I mean, they look kind of otherworldly. They have these incredible abilities that are kind of unlike anything that we can do. I mean, they're so mysterious to us in many ways. And so therefore, they seem slightly distant to us, whereas, you know, a cuddly kind of mammal with big doe eyes is kind of ideal to kind of trigger our kind of sympathy and empathy. What you're describing is neotony, which is big eyes and floppy ears, and it's an evolutionary carryover of caring for

our young. And if we see a baby fawn or a puppy or something, our heart goes out. When we see a baby assassin fly, we don't get the same reaction. So, you know, what does this say about our evolution, our evolutionary relationship with insects? I mean, I don't think we ever loved insects 10,000, 100,000 years ago. They were everywhere. And maybe there was a respect, but there was also a fear because they could bite us or carry disease or whatever. Yeah, that's right. I mean, our relationship with them has obviously been a troubled one. If you think about the largest, one of the largest killers in the world, it's kind of malaria carried by mosquitoes. I mean, I've met through the process of writing his book, maybe the only people in the world who will defend mosquitoes and love mosquitoes.

And they kind of point out, you know, mosquitoes are just trying to do their thing, feed their young with, with blood. these diseases that have hijacked them for their own purposes. But yeah, I mean, we've had this kind of troubled relationship with insects, and I think that's divorced us from their importance and given us a very distorted view of what is important, the animals that are important to us from a purely selfish view, and this is a very kind of human-centric view, because obviously everything has an intrinsic value to it.

isn't just of our use. But, you know, if the last southern white rhino were to die, and there's only a couple left, that would be an horrendous tragedy. It would be a crime because we would have committed that crime. But in terms of our day-to-day lives, it would have zero impact. If we were to lose just a small section of certain pollinators, we would be plunged into, you know, an existential crisis of starvation. So there's a complete mismatch, I suppose, between what we value and what is actually valuable to us. So I want to get into the existential impact on insect decline.

But let me ask one more meta question. You mentioned the 7,000 species of assassin flies. When you were researching your book and you came up with examples like that, did you have kind of a newfound appreciation for the web of life and evolution? and the majesty that brought us to this moment? Yeah, certainly. I mean, I've been an environmental journalist for quite some time now. And in that role, you're always kind of drawn to the, you know, charismatic, flashy things.

You want to be kind of paddling down the Amazon or going to the Arctic or, you know, diving at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, looking at these kind of wonders of nature and looking at the big kind of charismatic megafauna that inhabit these kind of environments. But yeah, the more I spoke to scientists, the more I read on this. I mean, they truly are, as E.O. Wilson said, the biologists, the little things that run the world, they are the things that keep life ticking over on Earth that we would be completely lost without. You know, we tend to think, as the quote goes, that we're the pilots of this, the world. We're not. We're the people at the back of the plane drinking and martini. it's the insects, the ones piloting this plane. And we should really remember that. And I think it was a kind of salutary lesson in writing this book about their importance.

I don't think we ever learned that to begin with, which is why I want you to unpack what you've found in your book. I don't think that's a thing that we've forgotten. I just think that there was always kind of an ecologically empty planet of humans and the technosphere. and now it's full and it's having diluterious impacts on ecosystems and other species. And we're learning how important insects are to the whole thing. So let's dive into that. I think it's safe to say that most people don't exactly love insects. And most of us probably assume that even with the declines that you mentioned,

one to two percent a year, there's still way more than enough insects around. So should the average person care about the insect declines that you researched? And if so, why? Yeah, I mean, we should care for a number of reasons. We should care for ourselves and for everything around us, really. I mean, animal pollination of which insects are a major components of. I mean, that's responsible about a third of all the food we eat, you know, pretty much all the fresh vegetables.

fruit and so on, all the things that you need in terms of nutrition. It comes from insects. I mean, even the stuff that we like to eat as treats kind of comes from insects. I mean, I learned through the book that there's this tiny species of midge that fly into the cacao plant that pollinate cacao and give us chocolate, essentially. The tiny midge dies out, we have no more chocolates. If the alfalfa are given to cows that then produce dairy or give us ice cream, if they die out, we don't get that either. We don't get the spices that go into curries.

We don't get, you know, apples, watermelons, all kinds of other things that we like to eat. So there's a huge array of food that is at risk if we lose insects. But that's not the only thing. It's the one that keeps scientists up at night because it's the most obvious impact. But insects have just this incredible ecological role in terms of turning nutrients through soils, keeping our grasslands and forests, healthy, obviously pollinating plants and flowers that give us such vibrancy around us, ensuring those ecosystems keep going. Decomposing, a lot of the really unglamorous work, decomposing waste.

One entomologist said to me, if it wasn't for insects, we'd be covered in a world full of excrement with your dead uncle Jeremy floating on past. Because there'll be lots of dead bodies, there'd be lots of human waste, and we'd have to be dealing with that rather than insects. So, I mean, it's the stuff we love to see and enjoy and eat, but it's also the really disgusting stuff we don't want to think. about. It's kind of both ends of the spectrum. But it's also their food for other species in the ecosystem, yes?

Yeah, that's right. So a lot of people say, what's the point on mosquitoes? Let's get rid of them. I mean, mosquitoes are a really great food source for lots of amphibians and birds. Obviously, lots of species of birds, a really good proportion of insect eating birds. and we were already seeing big declines in insect-eating bird numbers. Yeah. Being documented in Europe, in France and Germany in particular, huge numbers of breeding pairs of have been lost millions in the last few years in Canada. Even in the heart of the Amazon rainforests,

when there's seemingly no other human intrusion into what's happening there. You're seeing a declines in insect-eating birds, and that's a really good fingerprint of evidence that they're just aren't enough insects. around for them to eat. Well, if we're losing them at one to two percent in biomass per year, then obviously that has implications for the things that eat them. So let me just briefly ask you about that. We're losing insect biomass, one to two percent at least per year. So that doesn't mean that insects are dying because insects die all the time. They have very short lifespans. So that means that the total amount alive at any one time is declining one to two percent versus last year.

And then next year will be one, two percent less, et cetera, which if you graph that 30 years from now, there's like nothing left or 40 years. That's right. And obviously, that's a kind of broad estimate. So in some places they'll be doing a bit better, some places they'll be doing worse. Insects obviously got a huge ability to reproduce. So if you actually look at a graph of insect populations over just year to year, it kind of zigs up and down because they can reproduce in huge numbers and then they crash and they kind of come back. So getting a kind of signal from the noise in terms of what's happening longer term with trends has been tricky and also being hampered by the fact that scientists, because we just assume insects will be around forever and in such huge numbers, never really counted them. I mean, if you're an entomologist, your primary role up until fairly recently was going out and discovering cool new species and documenting their behavior and working out how they interact with the environment around them and the ecological services they bring.

You weren't really thinking to kind of count them. And it's only in recent years that scientists have been setting out traps to kind of catch these insects, to count them, to see what the population numbers are. and when they've been doing that, they've been finding these incredible, incredible declines. So I had Thomas Crowler on the podcast a couple months ago, and he talked about the critical importance of the web of life and diversity in nature. So I wonder if it's just the biomass, like the sheer absolute number of insects versus the number of species and diversity of species and intercourse. and interrelationship between the species that's also important and maybe not discussed. Did you look into that at all? Yeah, a bit.

I mean, I think there's certainly kind of an aspect of certain species being hit hardest by this and being replaced by things that we consider to be inferior or less useful to us from a kind of selfish human perspective because not all insects will do poorly. a world of, of, with, you know, climate change and pesticide use and habitat loss and all the other kind of pressures that are on insects now. So, you know, most, certain mosquitoes, mosquitoes, the range of mosquitoes that carry malaria is kind of inching away from the equator by about three miles a year. And they're rising in elevation to cockroaches that are adapted. There's two species of cock, main species of cockroaches that are adapted to human life,

the American and the German species of cockroach, they'll do pretty well in this world. It's the bees and the butterflies and things that we really value. They're the ones that are suffering. You know, one in four bumblebee species in North America are now vulnerable to extinction. I mean, the monobustfly migration to California is about 1% of what it was in the 1980s. I mean, we can see even our own lifetimes in our own short span of view that we have on this world, that we're seeing few and fewer of these things. You speak to entomologists and they're kind of bereft.

They kind of go on these scientific field trips and they come back with nothing. They see nothing. And it's kind of devastating to them. So we're losing a lot of beauty as well as utility in the world, I would say. I should point out that during our sound check, we were, cracking jokes you and I just met and I know this story. I've been following it because I was a big fan of E.O. Wilson, you obviously have become quite fluent in this. So we've kind of already grieved for the gut punch that some of our viewers might be experiencing hearing this. But I do

think very few people really are aware of this situation, given climate and all the other things that people discuss. So, I mean, you're an environmental journalist. Did your own opinion or relationship with insects change during and after you wrote the book? Yeah, I think so. I think I gained a new appreciation for how important they are. Also just kind of how wildly diverse they are, the incredible things they can do. I mean, they are amazing creatures in their own right.

I mean, we kind of tend to view them as pests or, or, or kind of we've we've harnessed them in some limited respects when you think about honeybees and how we are now increasingly rely upon them for pollination. Honeybees are now trucked across the US for various crops. So we've we've harnessed some of them and see the rest of them as kind of useless. But in fact, they are amazing. I mean, they really are. The abilities that they have and their tenacity as well, the fact that they've been around,

for kind of 400 million years. They were around before dinosaurs. They've survived kind of five mass extinctions. Somehow navigating that to be still, essentially we're living on an insect's world. I mean, we're not, we've been around in a blink of an eye compared to these guys. And, you know, we should have a certain degree of humility about that. Because, you know, even in this crisis, if you were a betting man,

I think you would probably think that, we would maybe die out before they do because they will survive in some form or another, just not maybe the form that is conducive for human survival. Since the book came out, the insect crisis three years ago, what kind of reactions have you seen and have you seen people's attitude shift at all in the last few years? Yeah, I think so. I think it's been slow going. It's been a bit of a slog.

I mean, I think it's the timing hasn't really helped. if you think about the last five years, I was writing this in the midst of the COVID pandemic. So obviously, mines were elsewhere then. It's not like matters have really improved since then. Well, mines are going to be elsewhere for the foreseeable future, unfortunately. They are. Yeah. There's always, we seem to be lurching for one other huge crisis to another.

And meanwhile, we lose insects one to two percent a year. Yeah. Yeah, it's this kind of ticking time bomb underneath us. And if you think about the kind of the lack of action on climate change, for example, which is much more documented, far more mainstream in our lives, far more understood, you can see that even with that, even with that, we've kind of lagged in our response to it. So it's kind of corraling action for insects seems like a bit of a stretch. But despite that, you are seeing kind of more awareness of that. the kind of good grass roots action around people who want to take action locally in their own

backyards with others in their community to help insects. If you love marlop butterflies, you can plant milkweed, you can plant native plants and so on in your yard for all kinds of insects. And we're seeing more and more of that. People become a bit more aware of their surroundings and how they directly affect insects. And on a more governmental level, I think there's still a kind of lack of policy, but you're seeing, you're seeing action from entities such as European Union, countries such as Germany, a bit less so in the US. But certainly there's kind of action on thinking about what kind of chemicals we're using, how we're using our farmland, how we're using our habitats, that kind of thing. And insects might not be the kind of number one reason for doing that.

But certainly there's, I think, an awareness and a reckoning that we need to be treating the world a little bit better, a little bit more sustainably if we're going to be able to, you know, host even more people, even more humans in the world going forward. Because at the moment, we're kind of reaching a kind of crunch point where we're losing pollinators and the soils that produce our food or while we have more people. So something has to give at some point. I think there is an understanding of that. Give me a rough overview of the categories of the primary driver that we either know for sure or we're reasonably confident for the loss of insects. And have these categories changed in the recent decade? Yeah, sure.

So, I mean, there are a number. You could probably have three main buckets. One of them would be habitat loss. So we've deforested a large portion of the earth. We've got rid of the kind of grasslands and kind of wildflower meadows that look to us to be unproductive, but obviously a huge trove of insect life. The second major thing we've done is spray a large portion of our land with chemicals, pesticides. So people tend to think about, you know, urbanisation as being the big impact on the environment. And you know, you go out into space and you see that cities and highways are actually quite a small fraction of the world.

It's farmland. I mean, we've farmed, you know, over half of the world's surface area that is free of ice. I mean, we've kind of turned it into pasture for cows and crop plant. And much of that is completely strafed by chemicals that kill off insects. And the third thing, of course, is climate change. ratched up the temperatures. We've knocked the seasons off kilter. So insects obviously rely on this kind of clockwork of arrivals of springtime signals to go out and breed, to eat, to pollinate. And we've completely messed up that timetable. So you're seeing impacts from

all of these things, as well as other impacts such as light pollution. If you're a firefly, for example, you need dark skies and there's just fewer and fewer dark skies now for you to to flash and find a mate. So they're all kinds of things, but I'd say those are the main three. But it's not just light pollution is disrupting you finding a mate. It also disrupts your flight patterns and you run into things and end up sleeping where you shouldn't and things like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's completely, it completely goes against the hardwired expectations that you would have as an insect over 400 million years that there is day and there is night. And, you know, that not just

affects fireflies, it affects moths famously. The LED lights that we have are kind of even worse for them because they exist in a different color-color spectrum that insects don't deal well with. So, yeah, it's having all kinds of impacts. Did you discover that any insect, what would it be families or, you know, broadcasts? categories of insects are particularly sensitive to climate? Yeah, so bumblebees, for example, I mean, they're wearing a big winter coat, aren't they all year round? Some are obviously adapted, are found in kind of hotter climates and others.

Wait, what do the bumblebees do where I live in northern Minnesota in the winter? Yeah, they kind of hunker down. They kind of go into a kind of dormant state. Okay. So, yeah, obviously there are different bumblebees in different parts of the world, but they're adapted to those parts of the world. So you start moving the temperature up even a few degrees and they're in trouble. And it can happen to habitat too. So as part of the book, I went to central Mexico to see where the monarch butterflies migrate to over winter.

And they roost in this, it's called roosting like their chickens, but they roost in these particular types of fir trees. that are found in the kind of mountainous central Mexico area and they come down from the US, Canada to do that. Because of climate change, the habitual range of these fir trees is moving up and up the mountain to the point that they're being pushed off the top of the mountains. They can't exist there anymore. So no more fur trees means no more monarch butterfly migration.

No more monarch butterfly migration means much very huge declines in number of monarch butterflies we have. So you see this kind of knock-on effect of habitat as well as the ability to forage for food, the sheer temperature itself. There's all kinds of impacts that climate change has on insects. And researchers recently have been saying this is now the number one thing. It used to be habitat loss. It's now climate change. Climate change is the big beast in this world now.

So let me ask you this, Oliver. clearly climate change is a global phenomenon and you live in London, I'm in Minnesota, and if we drive a car, those emissions go into the global commons of the atmosphere. So climate change is going to affect the whole world, but in various degrees. But insects could a certain area, say the state of Minnesota or Wisconsin or the United Kingdom, could they do something specifically to support the rebuilding of the insect biomass with habitat loss and with removal of insecticides and pesticides? And would that significantly offset some of the negative impacts of climate? For instance, or said differently, can we have local and regional responses to this crisis, even though it is a

global crisis. Yeah, I think we can, and I think it's important to emphasize that because there's a sense to avoid just a sense of hopelessness about this, the idea that we're nihilistically kind of wandering into this disaster, I think we need to realize that there are things we can do. I think climate change is obviously a big problem to tackle that requires kind of global cooperation, which we need to do for a number of reasons, including this one. But yeah, there's certainly lots of things that government, you know, states, cities, even individuals can do to help insect populations. And yeah, there's certainly a lot that is being done around connecting habitats together

so that insects aren't left in these kind of marooned, isolated pockets where they can't breed and proliferate. There's certainly action taking place on which pesticides can be used. Neoniquinoids are some of the most. harmful class of pesticides and they've been largely banned in Europe now, which is good. I mean, these are incredibly pervasive insecticides that in the US are kind of used all over the place. They seep into soils, into water. They've been found in, you know, cabbage and baby food. They've been found in birds. They get everywhere. And they're very effective at essentially

turning off the brains of insects. So there are things that, can be done to ameliorate this. But I think one of the worrying aspects of this is that some of the major declines have been found in places that you would call pristine. So two of the biggest studies to come out in recent years. One was from nature reserves in Germany where they found about three quarters of insects by biomass had disappeared since the late 1980s. And the other one was in the rainforests of Puerto Rico, which is the only rainforests

on US territory. And there was a study by an entomologist from upstate New York who went there in the 1970s found that there were just insects everywhere and these traps. He set up these sticky plates just covered in them, just insects all over the place. He went back a couple of years ago and he could barely find any. It was, you know, like they'd just been kidnapped or something. And this is in a pristine area of rainforests. No human habitation there.

There's no farming nearby. So it wasn't habitat loss or pesticides that caused that? No. No, he could only conclude it was kind of climate change that was the big impact, which is kind of scary because, you know, we can only do so much, can't we? With habitat protection, we need to get on top of the climate problem. And, I mean, that's true for a number of reasons. And insects are just one of them. So I've heard of those two, I've read those two reports, the Puerto Rico and the Germany one.

In contrast, are there any species of insects whose numbers are growing or thriving in today's environment? You mentioned cockroaches before. Any other evidence or stories? Yeah, cockroaches are doing quite well. Mosquitoes, certain mosquitoes are doing well. Certainly their, hapsal area is increasing. Ticks, I mean, ticks are arachnids. in the spider family, so they're not insects. They have eight legs rather than six. But, you know, when people think about things they're doing well, ticks are up there too. So ticks and mosquitoes are pathogen-carrying insects, and they're increasing their numbers, which means that they're going to increase their impact on humans? That's right. Yeah,

I've just been writing a story recently about how there's a spread of a particular tick called the lone star tick in the United States that's moving from the kind of southeast, up north, up as far as Maine, and it carries a number of diseases, one of them being this particularly bizarre condition where it makes people who are bitten by it allergic to meat. Yeah, I've heard of that. Yeah, so, I mean, there's all kinds of weird and wonderful things that are happening out there as we alter the world. I mean, it's kind of one of these incredible consequences, isn't it, when we started

Industrial Revolution and started burning fossil fuels to power our lives and spread electricity and fly around the world. No, no one was thinking about bumblebees then. No, no one was thinking about bumblebees. No one was thinking about anybody who become allergic to meat or their homes going underwater or all of these other things. This is the thing with this podcast and these ideas is their second and third and nth order effects that we don't think about. And I suspect that there will be huge second and third order

effects from insects. When certain insects vanish or ecologically vanish from a population standpoint, there are big changes that happen as a result of that. How much of your research looked at those sorts of questions? Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we're already seeing this as well. There's been research looking at how crop yields are going to decline. The world will be facing more than a million extra deaths a year because of the lacking nutrition from foods that are not being pollinated because of heart disease and other conditions you'll get from that. We're already seeing in the United States and Canada crop yields for things like apples, cherries

and blueberries are already dropping. So we're already seeing declines in the amount of food that can be generated because of a decline in. in pollination. So this isn't now a kind of theoretical thing. So let's talk about pollination. First of all, for some viewers of this program, even myself, my initial reaction when you said that, and you've mentioned it a couple times, is can't AI or drones take over pollination like some black mirror episode? Yeah, I mean, that's, it's tempting, isn't it? Because we we like to think about technology as being a kind of solution for everything and then we can just flick a switch and make this problem go away. Unfortunately, I mean, bees have been around for about 130 million years.

So they're very good at what they do. They've had a long time to get very, very good at what they do. And there's lots of them. So even though we're trying to kill off, doing our best to kill off the things that are keeping us alive, there are still lots of them. And they're very good what they do. And so therefore replacing them in any way is. is next to impossible. If you speak to any entomologists,

they're pretty clear on that. There are programs that are happening, Harvard University, University in the Netherlands, where they're building robotic bees that can mimic the flight of bees. They're very impressive, if you look at these demonstrations,

these robotic bees. They're also, like you mentioned before, drones, there's been trialed in upstate New York with an Apple orchard. They had a kind of helicopter-type drone to try and try and do that. And, you know, we can to a certain extent do that. But the volume of pollination required is so much that you can't replicate bees on that kind of scale. No.

I mean, first of all, the energy and complexity required for that would be astronomical. And secondly, boy, we're just losing the humanity. and the web of life and the life ethic that has existed on this planet, if we replace pollination with little AI drones and things. I mean, that's a qualitative opinion of mine. But it is hard for me to imagine that in all the places and all the ecosystem functions, that technology could even replace 1% of that. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's this huge kind of, I mean, there's the kind of practical question. question, isn't there? But there's also a kind of moral question and a question of aesthetics of what we want from our world and what we want in our surroundings. And, you know, when you go to places that have been reinvigorated with wildflowers and allowed nature back in and you kind of realize what it used to be like and how we've forgotten in many ways what the world was like with abundant insects is kind of like a light, it feels alive. It's not deadened. It's not, um, sterile. It's it's a it's a kind of it's a very vibrant humming beautiful place and I think I don't want to live in a world with robots and no animals and no nature and no beauty and color. I want to live in a world with with all of those things and I think we we are enriched as humans and our planet is enriched with them around. Do you think that you and I are

weird in that regard because I share your sentiment 100%. Are we the minority or are we actually the majority? I think on a certain level we are the majority. I think people like the idea of nature and being in nature. I think though as humans we like to control things. We like things to be ordered and tidy. We like to cut our lawns very closely. We don't like too much messy kind of vegetation and plants around us. Those horrible creepy crawlies we don't want around us either, so we use chemicals to get rid of them. We kind of like, we like things in its place. I think maybe I think a lot of people like nature and abstract, a national park. They maybe, maybe not so keen on nature being right up in their face. So it's fear and control versus humility and the web of life?

I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think we, I mean, you hear these stories all the time for people who work in national parks about how people go to national parks and complain that they've, you know, the steps weren't quite even or there were animals there or there weren't animals there. Like we kind of, I think a lot of us treat the world like it's a kind of stage that is there to perform for us rather than us being part of a kind of slightly chaotic but wonderful wave of life that's we're just part of. We're not separate from.

We're not a bubble that's separate from nature. We're part of nature, and I think it's good to kind of bear that in mind. So you're a journalist. You spent a lot of time researching your book. And by the way, as an aside, I hope that what you and others like you do will continue in the future because I would hate for AI to write a sterile version of your book where you didn't get to go see the monarch trees in Mexico and some of the other things you're. witnessed. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a live issue in journalism, as it is in other industries, is, is, is, is, is, is a role, whether it's going to be a tool

that we can use, or is it going to be something that completely replaces this also. Yeah. That is it, that is a kind of a live, a live topic. Because the humanity in you comes out in your writing and in your comments on, on this conversation. Oh, that's, that's very kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, I think there, there has to be the humanity. in there. I mean, there is, you could collate all the studies that are done on this. There is lots of information now. More and more work is coming out on

insect declines and their importance to us far more so than when I started this kind of in 2020. There wasn't as much research around. So you can collate that in a very cold way, but it's important to explain why it's important, why all of this is important,

why is it matter to us? What, you know, what do we lose when we lose insects beyond a certain percentage of our crops. I mean, we lose, we lose art. We lose, you know,

we lose so much. Why do we lose art? Because nature inspires art. Oh, okay. It provides art. You know, animals are the subjects of art.

I feel that our natural surrounds are the things that inspire us and give us creativity. You know, there's been lots of work being done to show that people who look at nature, are surrounded by nature, healthy nature, it's better for their mental health, it's better for

their physical health, it's better for their creativity, they can think more freely, think more positively about things. I mean, I feel that we lose so much when we degrade nature and we push it to the margins. And yeah. So we later in this conversation are going to talk about solutions and responses, but let's hit the darkest part of our conversation right now. If things don't turn around, we continue to grow, we continue to extract and use more energy. The global economy grows. The global South picks up and reaches higher consumption levels. Business as usual continues for coming decades, which for other reasons I don't think is likely,

but let's just assume that's the case. Please spell out for us what the worst case scenarios might be from the perspective of the insect kingdom and the things that you've researched. Well, we'll continue to see big declines. We won't see all insects disappear because as we discussed earlier, there are some winners as well as losers in this.

But the things we will lose will be critically important for our own survival on this planet. I mean, if I spoke to a number of entomologists about what would happen if all insects disappeared and they kind of say, well, we'd starve to death within a few months. I mean, it would be, it would be a very grim. I think that's obvious. Very grim situation. I mean, but not even before that point, we've seen around the world stresses, social stresses, political and even military stresses around resources, right, whether we're thinking about oil, water, land, the kind of things that we feel we need in order to survive. And I think if you start

getting pressures on the food system, pressures on crops where they can grow, how they can be grown, I think you're going to start seeing those kind of geopolitical stresses, social frictions long before we just completely run out of food. So we'll see more conflict. We'll see parts of the world, particularly in a developing world where there's, you know, small-scale farmers who are producing mainly for themselves and their families, they're going to be completely pushed out and suffer the worst. Because of loss of pollinators. Because of loss of pollinators, yeah.

And then the poorest in society will lose out because the price of fruits and vegetables and other foods rely on pollination will go up. So you'll see, you know, chocolate and raspberries and strawberries and all kinds of things become luxury, like extreme luxury foods that only the wealthy can afford. I mean, that's something that you could easily see happening. What percent of our food, either in dollar value or in calories or in weight or anything that you know, what percent of the total amount of food directly or indirectly comes from pollinating? The value of food is being estimated about half a trillion dollars a year. And it's about a third of the world's food crops rely on pollination. So if you think about apples, cranberries, almonds, broccoli, blueberries, cherries.

There are things that are wind pollinated, so, you know, rice, wheat, things like that. So, you know, you still have some of these staples, oats and so on. But a lot of the brightly colored fruits and vegetables you'd lose without insects. And those are the key things when you think about nutrition. So therefore, you start losing those. You start getting those estimates of more than a million extra deaths a year because of lack of nutrition. So you're actually explicitly suggesting that insect, the insect crisis is a national security. issue. I say that because I had an ecologist talking about national security a few weeks ago,

Rod Schoonover. But what you're saying is if foodstuffs become either unavailable or unaffordable, this has geopolitical and security and migration and inequality and poverty implications. For sure. Yeah. I mean, we're already seeing conflicts now where water is a key aspect. certain fuels. I mean, you know, you could easily see that happening with food to the land that's farmable, the land that's available to be farmed, the availability of pollinators. I mean, even now, the current moment, the U.S. produces the amount of food it does by essentially artificially keeping up honeybee numbers.

They have to battle huge amounts of disease. define artificially. Well, we manage honeybees ourselves, right? We have beekeepers that artificially keep their numbers up higher than they would be and propagate them to the levels needed to pollinate the amount of crop we need them to. So these honey bees are taken on a tour around the country all year to pollinate, and they lose huge numbers of bees to disease because there's lack of, like, vegetation for them to forage because of, you know, weather conditions because of, yeah,

pesticide use and all kinds of things. And they have to kind of keep trying to find ways to keep those losses down or keep getting more bees. So we already very reliant on honeybees. A lot of work is done, like an endless kind of amount of work is done to try and stem their losses so that we don't have shortures of food. So, you know, any kind of single disease that wipes out a huge number of honeybees, for example, would be disastrous.

That's that one species. And do honeybees only produce honey? So honey bees are the only bees. I mean, there are many types of bee, but honeybees are the ones we tend to think about, aren't they? Because they're the ones who produce honey. Bumblebees do produce honey, but apparently it's absolutely disgusting. To eat.

But it's, honey is the product, but the real product is the service, which is they're going to all different kinds of flowers and pollinating. Yeah, that's right. The real service they provide, I mean, it used to be if you're a beekeeper that you make your money through honey. But now it's selling pollination services to farmers. So the biggest event of that type is the almond pollination that happens in California, Central Valley, California, start of each year. And essentially, about 90% of all the managed honeybee. hides in America, I put onto trucks and taken the Central Valley to pollinate almonds. And it's about 80% of the world's almonds are created in this one area of California.

And it's an incredible thing to see all these honeybees. And the pollination services have become so valuable as the honeybee numbers have become stressed. And the demands for more almonds have grown that it's lucrative for, it can be lucrative for, for beekeepers, but it's also spawned all these other industries, bee brokers who connect the beekeepers to the ormond growers, the farmers. And then there are thieves. I've written previously about how they are bee bandits now in California, people who go around and steal honeybee hives to sell them on because they're so valuable now.

So there's a dedicated bee detective in the Central Valley of California who goes around solving bee crimes. So, yeah. What a species. And I'm not talking about bees. Yeah, I know. I know. The things we do.

But this is the world we're in now. And so any loss of that, that system collapses for any reason. I mean, we're in enormous trouble. So I don't know the answer to this, which is why I'm going to ask you. I read something a few months ago that 5G or some signals might disrupt a honey. bees and other flight patterns. Is that a urban myth or is there some truth to that? I spoken just to a couple of entomologists about that and they said there's no evidence that is a major problem, but I think it's one that will be researched more. I don't think it's been

research fully yet. Yeah, there's like 20 people in the world that are tasked with cataloging all the things. Maybe not 20, but you know my point is this is not something that's right in the heart of our industrial metabolism questions of research, but it should be. So thank you for your book. So what are some countries or organizations trying to do to mitigate or substitute for the effect of these large insect losses, ongoing insect losses? There have been some initiatives in Germany. Germany's decided to kind of overhaul its farming practices to be more kind of insect and nature-friendly, you use less pesticides, have farmland that's broken up a bit. One of the big problems with monocultural farming is that you have these huge fields.

There's no vegetation at the edges for insects. So they're trying to do something about that. You had kind of urban efforts as well to kind of bring back green spaces, plant native plants, reinvigorate certain areas that interconnect. of wildflower meadows. You see that in Detroit. You've seen that in the Netherlands. You've seen that all kinds of places in New York City, where I am now. There's a kind of a program for green roofs where you put vegetation on certain roofs, which is great because you can give a kind of oasis for insects in urban areas. Okay. So this is a real dumb question. But New York City as a percentage of the

area of New York State is tiny. So ultimately, I mean, this is going to sound extreme, but who cares? If there's no insects in New York City, but there's tons of insects in New York State, that's okay, right? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right in that you've touched on the problem is farmland, and it's got to the point that you speak to some entomologists and they say, well, we're finding more diversity of insects in cities than we are in the countryside. What? Why would that be? Because people have backyards in the cities with a variety of plants,

the insects can feed upon. And the countryside is all monoculture. The countryside is all monoculture. It's soybeans. It's wheat. It's, you know, corn. Corn. Corn is a huge one. So, yeah, you have these huge monocultures that have very little refuge for insects, even at the margins.

So you're seeing them being wiped out in places where you think they should be abundant. I mean, obviously that's not the case in, you know, natural parks or protected wildernesses. You still have insects there, but you see a lot of diversity in cities because, you know, counterintuitively, they actually have more of what insects need. So this brings up a question. I forget the details. There are seven fisheries in the world's oceans and six of them are severe. to extremely overfished, but there was some research showing that if you left a fishery alone, that in seven years it would largely recover to a stable level, leaving aside climate change

and acidification for the moment. Is there a corollary with insects? Like, do we have success examples where if the habitat loss and the pesticides are removed, that there's a quick rebound and a thriving? Yeah, we do. I mean, There have been some examples of this in the UK in terms of nature reserves where they've seen some improvements. One entomologist said to me it's a bit like, it's a bit like there's a log in the water and we're putting a foot on the log. And that's what's kind of happening to insect populations right now. If we remove our foot, the log will kind of bounce back up. And that's because insects, as we discussed before, have huge reproductive abilities.

they are adaptive to a point. They've survived these mass extinctions because they are, you know, very nimble and they can adapt to a certain extent. So I think we can find a path that they can survive on. But it's going to take a lot of work for us to be able to reverse some of these declines. So let's talk about that work. Either locally, regionally, nationally or globally, are there any policies or initiatives that are specifically trying to reverse the decline in insect populations? Yes, so there's the bans on these neonicotoid pesticides in European Union.

Is it only Europe or is it anywhere else in like Asia or elsewhere that's trying to do that? It's kind of mainly Europe that's kind of taking the lead on this. Unfortunately, there's kind of was moves in the U.S. for these pesticides to be banned in national parks, but Donald Trump rolled that back. Now we're just banning national parks. Right, yeah, exactly, yeah. allowing plastics and all sorts. It's great. But how, by the way, sorry to interrupt, but how soon will we see possible results from the banning of neonicotinoids in Europe?

And wouldn't that be a clarion call for the rest of the world's countries? Yeah, it should be pretty soon. I think the kind of work is underway at the moment to try and kind of ascertain that because it takes a while to kind of work out what the baseline is and what any kind of improvement could be. But certainly that should be visible fairly soon. and hopefully other countries can jump on board with that. You're seeing certainly some action around light pollution. Some countries and cities are looking to act on light pollution because they realize that it could actually save money as well as help insects out. So there's some work going on on that.

There's this kind of citizen effort around no-mo-may. I don't know if you've heard about that. Where this idea... Oh, no-mo-may. Yeah, I have heard about that. So that's something that's taken hold in some places in the US now where people just leave their lawn alone for the month of May or longer if they like, just to allow the grass to grow, to allow insect life back in, just to let life kind of loose a bit in their garden rather than manicure it. Is that largely for show or do you think that legitimately has an impact? Yeah, it does have an impact.

I mean, obviously on the global scale, you're not cutting your lawn is not going to reverse the insect crisis. But, I mean, you know, collective action is what is going to take for us to do this. And yeah, people can do their own part. And especially it helps people understand that they're not hopeless in this, that they can do something better. I would think that if there was a city with 10,000 people and a few people didn't mow. their lawns, there would be a tiny impact. But if hundreds of people in that city didn't mow their lawns, then there's just an aggregate supporting ecological substrate to have higher insect hatches and then the next year more and all that. Do you have any insights in that?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's one of those things that's a cultural change as much than I think because we're so used to front yards looking a certain way. You know, there's a kind of public shaming of those, especially people who live in HR, in the US about, you know, what you're meant to have in your front yard. But if there's a kind of cultural change about letting nature back into our lives a bit, not overly managing things, and I think that can really have a snowballing effect because more and more people can see that, see the benefits of it,

and jump on board. One entomologist said to me, we need more of an inaction plan rather than action land. If we just let things slide a bit, let things get a little bit untidy and scruffy, insects would really thrive in that situation. So do you have any other suggestions for individuals who, like you and I, appreciate insects as part of the web of life that are creatures that co-evolved with us over millions of years and before us for hundreds of millions of years? Other than mow lawn, what are other suggestions for individuals to get involved in supporting or reversing the decline in global insect biomass?

Sure. I mean, there's lots of things you can do. I mean, if you have a yard, don't rig the leaves as much. I follow this kind of three by three by three system where you pick three native plants species for each growing season, spring, summer and fall and plant them so that the Insects have food and habitat throughout the year. What is the raking leaves thing? What does that do?

So lots of leaf litter is used by insects as kind of habitat as food, refuge from predators and so on. So by kind of having a completely clean and, you know, scrubbed lawn with nothing but short grass, you kind of removing a lot that kind of habitat, the insects kind of rely on. I mean, insects like the things that we consider to be. untidy leaves everywhere, rotting logs, things like that. So if we kind of get over our aversion to that a little bit, that would actually be helpful. Let me ask you this, Oliver. Did you, and after you wrote this book, I think you had a big spread in the New York Times, if I recall. Did you ever go and speak to like kindergartners or grade schoolers about this? I didn't personally know. I've spoken to my own kids about this who are at that, at that

age and I've spoken to entomologists who've said there is that kind of cultural aversion to insects whereby they will speak to kindergartners about insects and the kids love them. They think they're cool. Once they get to kind of high school, they think they're disgusting. So at some point, we've kind of taught kids that insects are terrible. So there's obviously a, I don't know if there's a natural revulsion to that. I think there's a natural fear of being bitten or, or, or, something. There is a natural fear. This isn't like, well, you should Google cats and cucumbers if you

put a cucumber behind a cat and it turns around. It like evolutionarily thinks it's a snake or something. Right. And I think spiders, which are not insects because they have eight legs, they might care. Black Widow could kill you or something like that. But now the story is changed and we have to, in any case with the leaf litter and the mowing the lawns and the three planting of native plants, the very first step is to widen our lens and appreciate the importance of insects writ large to a viable planetary future. That's the first step. Yeah, it entirely is. I think there's lots of positives you can look at too with insects. I mean, we can focus a lot on the negatives of them, but I mean, if you just think about their incredible abilities, how cool they look. I mean,

there's some beautiful photography of insects now that people can look up. I mean, if you get close-ups of insects, they actually look really amazing. And scary. They look really scary. And scary, yeah. But I mean, if you're a little kid, cool and scary is often quite interesting. I don't think I've shared this story on camera before, but 20 years ago, I'll make it very brief. I used to work on Wall Street, and when I was managing money for my clients, I was afraid of losing money for my clients, like emotionally afraid. And I hired this neurolinguistic programmer to get over my fear. And he said, let's take something small that you're afraid of. And I said spiders.

So what he had me do is little by little get less afraid of spiders to the point where I could touch one and like pet it. And it sits then. it's worked. I've overcome my fear, not completely, but mostly of spiders, just from shifting my relationship and my behaviors with them. But I think we do need a cultural value shift, not only of insects, but the entire web of life. Yeah, I think you're right. And we had to kind of avoid this kind of negative feedback spiral whereby nature becomes more remote to us as it receives from life because we're wiping it out and so therefore it becomes more distant in our in our minds in our what what we expect and what we value and I think we have to avoid that by by you know embracing nature

having it around us rather than pushing it pushing it to one side so getting back to the what people can do I'm just hypothesizing that if you live in a town and you're the only one who's doing the no-mo, may, and these other things, it's a statement, but it's a little lonely and boring. And I'm just wondering if you could get five or seven friends together and say, here's what we're going to do in Topeka, Kansas, or wherever, on behalf of making a better ecosystem for insect thriving, even if we can't impact climate change and what's coming, we can do this. And therefore, it becomes a social thing. Have you encountered anything like that or not?

Yeah, there are lots of local groups, and there's obviously it's much easier now to organize with Facebook and other platforms. You can actually find a community wherever you are, I think, that is concerned about this kind of thing, wants something to do. I mean, there's certainly groups I've spoken to that have members who are just generally concerned about the environment.

They're generally concerned about the loss of species, about climate change, and they see insects or the renewal of habitats to bring more insects back as a kind of something they can do. Because they can't cut US emissions in half themselves, but they can do something about the insects in their local community in a kind of small way. So I feel it's a kind of a pathway, I think, for some people to feel they're doing something, if not everything. So in your book, you include quite a few stories of insects that you thought were super cool or had interesting abilities.

Can you share a couple of those of the favorites before I move into the closing questions? Yeah, for sure. I mean, bees are incredible. Honeybees, they've been found to understand the concept of zero. They can add up subtract numbers. they've What? How would,

how? Yes. Well, they, the researchers have put things in front of, uh, honeybees and seeing that they can grut them together and, and understand, um,

addition and subtraction. They can also detect land mines, uh, bumble bees. They've, uh, they gave them kind of rewards and made them be able to play soccer in order to get rewards.

Um, they, uh, they'll give up sleep to care for, therefore they're hives young bumblebees. They can, researchers, sometimes think they can remember

good and bad experiences. And we're hell-bent on going to Mars. Right, exactly. So it kind of hints are kind of a form of consciousness that, you know, it's obviously not like our consciousness, but the idea that they're just these brainless things buzzing around,

I think we need to challenge that idea. Cockroaches are kind of wonderfully disgusting. They can survive for two weeks after having their heads chopped off. Which is impressive. I mean, whatever you think about them, that's impressive.

Yeah, they're pretty amazing. Yeah, incredible. So cool. What other stories? Oh, goodness. I mean, a dragonfly, they did this test where they saw how dragonflies

could stay upright in the same position, flying position, in winds that would take down a helicopter. So they're able to do things that are machinery can't, essentially, even though we try to replicate them with robots. I mean, the best Blackhawk helicopter is not as adept at flying as a dragonfly. And I think that's another good thing to remember. I'm sure the militaries have tested and based,

some of their flying machines based on insects. For sure, yeah. I think they look at the insect world all the time for kind of ways to improve their own technology. So I don't know how often you watch the podcast. I know that you know Nick Haddad was on the show before, but I ask my guests some closing questions. Do you have any personal advice to listeners, not on insects per se, but at this time of global change and anxiety and and what's happening to our environment and everything. Do you do you have any personal advice? Yeah. I mean, it's hard, isn't it? I mean, I probably shouldn't say this as a journalist,

but I have turned notifications, news notifications off my phone when I was away and actually helped my anxiety levels a lot. I mean, having being informed is one thing. I think we need to be informed, but being bombarded into a state of kind of helplessness, I think, is unhelpful, going outside and enjoying nature, being connected, being part of a community, seeing people face to face run through a screen or just remotely is just, you know, messages on a social media site. I mean, I think that's really important. This kind of local connection can really kind of make the world feel a better place. And so, you know, there's a loneliness epidemic and that's kind of quite obvious if you look at all

the things happening in the world. And I think taking that time just to connect with those around you, check in and they're okay, I think it's really important, particularly now. How do you personally navigate the knowledge that you have of not only insects, but the slow unraveling and shrinking of the natural world? And then you go out in the UK or in the US with your kids and your kids and your, family to enjoy nature, but knowing what's happening. How do you process that?

I ask personally because I struggle with that myself. I do struggle with it. I think having young kids actually does help you bring you back to something else because their needs are very immediate. So often in my work, I'm thinking about big time scales, big issues, you know, global events, long time frames, that kind of thing. And immediately, when I finish work, I'm confronted by immediately. problem of a Lego set that needs to be put together or, you know, some kind of very immediate

crisis. Living in the moment, I think, is good in certain aspects for this. Again, we don't, we want to be aware of what's happening around the world and where things are heading. But enjoying the moment, I mean, I think I let for a long time myself, particularly during the pandemic, just days passed by without finding much joy in them or finding, enjoying the moment, always thinking about, oh, okay, things will be better in a month, things will be better next year. Things will, you know, if only this was solved, then this will be better. And you can spend your life doing that because in our lifetimes things won't be perfect, we'll be better in a, even better in a significant way.

But you can make things better in a little way or a way that's meaningful to you. So to find those moments, I think, is important and to find the joy in the world is important, too. You have young kids. Do they, are they aware of and care about insects more than the average young kid? My son doesn't know. He's terrified of beetles and ants. My daughter is a much more outdoorsy girl. She loves insects and all animals, yeah. But there's certainly an appreciation for the natural world. an understanding of what we're doing to it and a desire that, you know, why do people throw trash around? Why do we do this?

Why do we use cars so much? I mean, they question things that a lot of adults wouldn't question. So, yeah, that's always refreshing to me. What do you care most about in the world, Oliver? I mean, it's a really trite response with my kids, I guess, my wife, my family. That's what I care about most in the world. but I suppose I care about this planet. I mean, I mean, it's, again, it sounds kind of trite,

but I've always been slightly unmoved by space, space exploration, this desire to colonize Mars. We live on the best planet that we know of that may have ever existed. And it's so cool. There's so many wonderful places in this planet that we should cherish and we should take better care of. And I think hopefully we kind of don't let ideas of moving to Mars overwhelm that. If you had a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision on what to do with it,

what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? I think in terms of the planet, I mean, the destruction of nature, no matter what happens with AI or anything else, is the primary threat. I mean, we're losing species, extinction rates are up to about a thousand times above what they were. Pre-industrial revolution. We're heating up the planet at a crazy rate. We're losing rainforests. We're losing soils. the things we grow our food in.

I mean, we're trashing the home in which we live, and that can only go on for so long before we suffer really serious consequences. So, yeah, I'd just stop us trashing our own home. What would be the direct request there to stop us trashing our own home? Oh, what would be the direct request? Move to clean forms of energy, cycle more. walk more, drive less if we're driving, electric cars, stop over fishing, stop deforestation, vary our diets a bit so we're not chopping down the world's forests for cattle.

You know, stop dumping plastic everywhere, maybe use less plastic in general. I mean, there's all kinds of things that we can do to be a bit kinder to the work. So what are you working on now, another book or writing articles, or are you still on this topic? or what is something you're real curious about? Yeah, I mean, it's endlessly fascinating because the beat covers everything from, you know, Tesla cars to bumblebees to, you know, pollution in the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf America, whatever you like to call it.

So, yeah, there's always something to do. No book, no other book is kind of forthcoming. It's a huge ask. It's a huge consuming thing. And I like kind of flitting between. other topics at the moment. So yeah, that's what I'm kind of focused on on the moment. If you were to come back on this show six months from now or a year from now,

what is one topic that is relevant to human and planetary futures that you are particularly nerdy or passionate about that you would be willing to take a deep dive on? Oh, that's a great question. I'm really interested in the moment the de-extinction movement. So there's, I covered recently, the efforts to bring back the American chestnut tree, which was kind of mostly wiped out by a blight. And these efforts by these tech bro-funded companies to resurrect woolly mammoths,

dire wolves, the do-do and so on. But they're not really dire wolves. No, they're grey wolves with, you know, a few genes edited and shaggy grey-wills. So, yeah, that whole world really interests me because it's a kind of, are we serious about protecting biodiversity, ecological functions of that saving species, protecting species, or do we see the world as a kind of theme park, a kind of zoo, where we want certain things here and there, and that's cool to get a picture of. And that's a really interesting question to me about how we see the world and how important

we see nature. Do you have any closing thoughts or words of wisdom for our viewers on the top of the topic of the insect crisis, which was your most recent book. Yeah, I would ask people to go out and maybe look at insects a little bit differently, to maybe not be, to notice the bee resting on the flower, to appreciate the butterfly going past, be kind of enthralled by a beetle thinking, even though it looks like a little black thing, there's 300,000 species of them, and how amazing that is.

and what it took for the world to get to that point and what they do for us. Maybe just look at the world a little bit differently. Let things grow a bit and see what comes in. Thank you, Oliver Millman, for your research, your writing and your humanity. I appreciated this and to be continued, my friend. Thanks so much, Nate. Really good to be with you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification,

please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Battlutz, Brady Hyen and Lizzie Siriani.