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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

I don't know of any studies to prove it is true, but I suspect that the US Midwest (in particular) has had a similar decline. Anecdotally I can say that there are certainly far fewer insects here than there were in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, and also that there seem to be far fewer birds.

I wonder if we'll stop dumping this stuff into the environment before it's too late. It would require a whole new way of thinking about the industrial scale agriculture we have developed over the last 50 years, so I'm a little pessimistic.

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There's an article related to this titled "Where have all the insects gone?" which discusses the "windshield phenomenon" where far fewer bugs are winding up on the windshields of vehicles.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insec...

We can't even convince everyone to do something about climate change. What are the chances we can get people worried about beetles?

This exactly. In fact we've ( the US) gone the other way, electing a President and Party that openly denies climate change.

They deny science, but also fact-based decision making and inconvenient facts.

This should be expected when your population is still predominately religious. Religions condition people to believe fiction as fact.

>Religions condition people to believe fiction as fact.

I would say "set up the minds of people to accept fiction as fact more smoothly". Or something like that, less categorical.

That's blatantly false. US common adherance to science in terms of progress has varied throughtout its history, while general religious belief has almost perpetually declined for two centuries. They do not appear to be very strongly linked in the US; that's due to its secular foundation. The US has been the world's leader in scientific output since the Civil War, there hasn't been a close #2.

Under your theory, the US should be radically more scientifically oriented now than it was a century ago, as religious beliefs have plunged substantially over that time.

Or for another example, the Chinese culture is extremely mystical. And saying extremely, is an understatement. Just their beliefs around luck alone are as mystically out there as any hard-core Christian notions I've ever run across in the US.

And yet those mystical beliefs supposedly do not deter the Chinese from the pursuit of science.

A near majority of people in Western European nations believe in ghosts or the equivalent. In fact, less Americans (42%) believe in ghosts versus people in the UK (52%) [1]. How do you believe in ghosts without believing in some kind of convoluted afterlife theory? How can scientifically oriented people believe such things?

Canadian monthly church attendance rates were as high as recently as 1988, as the US is today. Did that mean Canadians were crippled scientifically until the last 10-15 years? I doubt it.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/why-do-pe...

I'm afraid I believe that culture that values expertise and scientific decision-making is just that - culture, embedded in people's minds and functioning in a very similar way to religion as a default mindset. Most people who are cheerleaders for science believe scientific "facts" without evidence too. They are not looking at the source data and verifying p-values, discounting cherry-picked studies, etc.

Actual critical thinking takes a lot of effort and most people don't continually question their assumptions. I don't think it's possible to bake that into education. Thus we need to inculcate a decent set of assumptions via educational indoctrination. And this, on its surface, is indistinguishable from religious indoctrination, even if it has the best of intentions.

The fragmentation of national narratives certainly has a part to play as well. Increasing divergence in shared narratives reduces political will for the right kind of indoctrination, while the divergent narratives fight culture wars against one another for control of their kids' minds.

He is the most hated candidate and least liked president in modern history.

He lost the popular vote.

Republican dominance is a product of voter suppression and gerrymandering.

I agree we're not doing a good job of protecting the environment, but Trump's election doesn't indicate that people's willingness to do so is waning.

I've only ever seen evidence that people care more about climate change as time goes on and the economy recovers.

If you want to lay blame at a single aspect of American government as you have, I think it's more fair to blame a two party system and cultural emphasis on wedge issues (abortion, gun control, gay rights, etc).

I didn't lay blame. You seem to have misread my comment or conflated it with GP. I was just saying that Trump's election doesn't demonstrate a decline in environmentalism among the electorate.

No there are not fewer birds. Ornithologists routinely census areas for species and counts. They notice when species decline in an area. They notice when new species arrive in an area. There have been zero reports of birds in general declining.

EDIT: Here's a reference [1]. Note that it specifically calls out species in general decline: the Northern Bobwhite, American Kestrel, and the Loggerhead Shrike.

[1] http://www.audubon.org/news/the-118th-annual-audubon-christm...

Did you not read the article? It says there are less birds.

Not a decline in variety. The birds are going away.

There's hard data from a study over 27 years in Germany on the decline of insects, references below:

> sabertoothed

In some nature protected areas in Germany, researchers [1] have reported a 75% decline in flying insects over 27 years. Study is from Oct 2017. This is alarming.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.....

North American birds are absolutely in decline. From this article [1], the overall population has decreased by about 1.5 billion birds since 1970. For some groups of species, for instance, aerial insectivores [2], things are much worse. For instance, the population of bank and barn swallows, chimney swifts and common nighthawks has decreased by 70% over the past twenty years alone.

The Christmas Bird Survey is done after most birds have migrated and so captures data on the relative abundance of resident birds, which as a group, are doing better than birds in North America overall.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi... [2] http://www.bsc-eoc.org/download/BWCwi08.pdf

There are many insectivorous bird species. We've become more efficient at killing insects, and thus depressing their populations. Agreed?

What are the insectivorous birds eating if their populations aren't declining?

I wonder if many people today remember Silent Spring:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

The main point of the book was that the use of pesticides (specifically, at the time, DDT) had an impact on the entire ecosystem, not just the agricultural pests they were targeting. If I remember correctly, spring was "silent" because you couldn't hear the animal sounds anymore -including birds' song.

Silent Spring is interesting because most people miss the nuance of that book — a nuance that was critical to enacting smart pesticide policy — a smart policy that didn’t not include “total” bans. Here’s a doctor elaborating:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-million...

DDT was never banned internationally for use in malaria control. The idea that it was is a falsehood spread by lobbyists. Maybe you meant to post a different link, but the one that you did post is a terrible and misleading article. This article goes into some of what actually happened and the disinformation campaign:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/rehabilitatingcar...

Hiked four days across a national park in the US a couple of years ago and was astounded at the lack of wildlife. Two snakes and a couple dozen small lizards, but almost no birds, no squirrels/chipmunks/whatever, no deer, etc. The lack of birds in particular amazed me, and I noticed the same hiking in Europe.

In Australian backyards, let alone the bush, the birdlife is varied and can be very noisy (magpies, lorikeets, cockatoos). At dawn in many areas of the bush here, the birds are hilariously loud - good luck sleeping in if you're camping!

> Anecdotally I can say that there are certainly far fewer insects here than there were in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, and also that there seem to be far fewer birds.

Could some of that be due to you paying more attention to insects and birds when you were growing up? Kids tend to spend more time outdoors than adults, especially more unstructured time, and so might be expected to have more time to notice things like insects and birds, and more time to indulge curiosity about them.

I can assure you that the attention windshields have paid to bugs hasn't changed.

The need to clean same, has.

There could be other factors.

Anecdotally, I remember in the 90s my parents having an old and very box shaped Volvo. Driving through light snow one day my mother was struggling to clear the windscreen, we were on our way to pick up a hire car which ended up being a brand new Mercedes. The angle and shape of the windscreen was entirely different and the snow just followed the airflow up and over.

That said, we have front registration plates in the UK which are probably less subject to aero improvements and ISTR the same phenomenon being observed there.

Well, the trend has been going on for a while. May we not forget the passenger pigeon?

Naturalists in the 1800's would wipe out entire species getting specimens. I don't know if humans are all that great at tending the Earth's biomass.

I just read a good article about the passenger pigeon [1]. It was originally published in Audubon, but I read it in a book called "The Best American Science and Nature Writing - 2015".

[1] http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger-...

> Naturalists in the 1800's would wipe out entire species getting specimens.

This is the first time I hear this. Do you have examples?

Here is an article about collecting rare species:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/1...

People forget all those beautiful paintings from the Audoban Society were made by killing the bird, stuffing it, and then painting the stuffed bird.

The example I'd like to share is more from naturalists that would explore tropical islands in the Pacific, but that's not right at hand at the moment, as the examples were in one of those dusty books a friend had one time. But bird populations in decline in tropical islands is a big problem, especially because of the evolutionary niche they have:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-hawaii-n...

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