Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects
msn.com
msn.com
If I had to wager money, I'd say it was a blight introduced by another insect. Around the same year I saw an invasion of Asian lady bugs, the firefly memories stop. There were literally millions and millions of those Asian lady bugs released or hatched one year.
Speaking of the lady bug explosion, this year they are incredibly rare [2]. Not sure why, but they went from being a massive nuisance to being a very rare sight (of any variety).
Humans are absolutely having a calamitous effect on insect life in a variety of dimensions, however on the flip side it does seem like insect populations massively fluctuate for entirely natural reasons. A bit of an early summer, or more rain in April, etc, and one insect type explodes and another wanes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly#Conservation
"Firefly populations are declining worldwide, for a variety of reasons.[25] Fireflies, like many other organisms, are directly affected by land-use change (e.g. loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems.[26] Pesticides and weed-killers have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline.[27]"
"Finally, since fireflies depend on their own light to reproduce [28] they are also very sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.[28][29] Multiple recent studies investigate deeply the effects of artificial night lighting on fireflies.[30][31]"
[25]: https://www.firefly.org/
If there is any increase due to the lock down, my speculation would be, that it is related to less cars on the streets.
However I was replying to someone who stated that they live in a rural area so lighting isn't the cause. I also live in a rural area, albeit on the edge of a very large city (e.g. there is the large light bubble on the horizon, actually from several large cities in each direction), and fireflies are absolutely rampant, and have been for years. My comments makes zero claims about the worldwide population of fireflies, or about how many fireflies there are in your or anyone else's backyard. In mine there are loads.
However it is a reality that localized ebbs and flows happen. Nature is prone to waxing and waning. The reproductive potential of many insects is so enormous that one year can be a dearth and the next overwhelming. Small seasonal weather variations, of the completely ordinary and natural kind, can dramatically impact the mix.
To go back to the ladybugs, specifically the Asian ladybugs, last year they were everywhere. Every corner would have a bunch of them. They'd get in the house and then smash into the ceiling near every pot light leaving discolorations (blood or something). This year I've seen barely a dozen or so all season. It's just a complete 180.
Aside - I swear I am not intending to be combative, but the citations make me recall a prior comment-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899565
The Wikipedia page you link cites the second link you gave as its source to demonstrate the worldwide decline in fireflies. That citation cites nothing as its source but fond recollections of youth.
To me, it sounds like your area experienced an intentional release of the Asian Lady bug last year. TBD if they kill off all your fireflies, obviously that's pure speculation on my part.
As far as firefly decline, I don't live on the edge of a city or town. I'm actually quite rural. There are two places I've seen the decline. My home and my family's cabin 2 states away, both very rural. There has been no significant habitat change in either area, both having forest and established farms, very little development over my lifetime.
This is not an effect I noticed gradually or recently. It was about 15+ years ago now. Fireflies basically just disappeared, all at once. The colors of the remaining fireflies in both locations are also different. They were previously a yellow-green glow, and have been replaced by a more white-bluish glow.
Anyway, I don't know what caused their decline, but it's very apparent, and light pollution has nothing to do with it in my area.
They are widely believed to be a major factor in the current decline of insects.
Spot on, this is usually the real explanation for the typical 'I saw none'/'oh but I saw a bunch'/'I saw more than ever' rethoric applied to one single year or even multiple years of observations. Thinking of it, goes for basically all slowish trends related to nature. Unless you're approaching it scientifically, i.e. actual systematic counting which is hard btw, it's oh so easy to be fooled. That being said, see other post: yes fireflies are in decline (just like many other insects unfortunately) and light pollution is a factor.
"Doom!" is a very seductive narrative that we fall to regarding virtually every change in our environment. Sometimes reasonably, as with AGW, but other times just taking natural variations and screaming end times...then just going quiet when they recover again as we move to the next cause.
Observational and experimental studies provide evidence hat ALAN adversely affects firefly populations. Several studies have shown negative correlations between high levels of ALAN and firefly abundance.
The citation for the statement "Firefly populations are declining worldwide, for a variety of reasons" is a link to firefly.org. That is a small, Texas group that appreciates Fireflies, which is nice. But it is home to no studies, no research, no analysis. Nor does it (that group, or the wiki page that was cited to apparently refute my personal anecdote...) cite the publication you mention. So I'm not really sure what we're discussing here.
I'm not disagreeing that there is a decline for a multitude of reasons, or that light is probably bad, but if someone says "my yard has no fireflies the apocalypse is upon us" it probably isn't credible.
This is incredibly obvious to be in my neighborhood. My landlord (very regretfully) has a company spray insecticide in our yard. There are no bugs, not a single bug sound.
The area I live in has many nature conscious people so about 1/10th of the yards are gardens, wildflowers, etc rather than grass. Just walking by them you hear a tremendous symphony of bugs! Then it almost entirely goes away in the next yard that is just grass.
In a local park there is about 1/4 acre that is only mown every couple of years as a "pollinator friendly" prairie-ish area, and the number of fireflies in just that section is astonishing. There are just hundreds and hundreds, it's beautiful.
Thinking about the increasing suburbanization of the US makes me sad. We subsidize this lifestyle so heavily here that it doesn't make sense to live anywhere else, but the land use is just awful.
It's not even wildlife and plants. I'm in southwest Ohio and the closest reasonably dark sky spot is almost 2 hours away. My S/O and I have been to some dark sky viewings hosted by a local observatory about 45 minutes away. I have really good night vision and can just barely see the milky way. My S/O /thought/ she could see it, but only realized the magnitude when we went to this national forest 2 hours away. It made me sad that she hadn't been able to see some of the wildness of our world.
I truly hope the "suburban dream" that has been pushed for so many decades starts dying off, so at least some of the wild areas in the US remain intact. There's already so little in the midwest.
When digging for some conduit, my toddlers kept wanting to find worms in the dirt and waited in excitement as I dug about a yard of dirt.
No bugs, no worms.
whoa!
Georgia has lots of them. Or at least we did last year. I haven't gotten out much in the COVID-19 world.
A year without fireflies.
I understand fireflies are sensitive to light pollution. I can't imagine Chicago's any different from other major cities. COVID has people staying home a lot more but that has nothing to do with street lighting. I wonder what's going on.
I do think that living organisms are extraordinarily adaptable if the changes are gradual and bounded. Most of us have this idea that an ecosystem is this delicate and fragile thing, but nature actually has a lot of robustness and redundancies built-in (which are inefficient but increase chances of group survival).
I'm not sure why it was a good season for them. Like you say, traffic, lighting, pesticide sprays on farms, all really the same despite COVID. Reduced air traffic I don't think would have an affect? Even after I sprayed my vineyard with insecticide to deal with japanese beetles they were fine, and continued to prosper in and around there.
It may just be that we've had an unusually hot dry year, I assume where you have as well. Maybe that's advantageous for them somehow?
One of my favorite memories of cycling through the midwest in the early 90's was watching the redwing blackbird population slowly recover.
Most individual people won’t feel the change that’s happened over their lifetime unless they’re wondering why it doesn’t snow any more or how they ever managed without air conditioning; it shows up in higher costs for national-scale-multi-year weather damage or crop and fishing productivity.
And of course, this is a global rather than local effect, so some places have more change than others. My first trip to the USA was the 2014/15 winter when there was simultaneously record cold on the Atlantic coast and record warm on the Pacific coast.
I wonder if this is cyclical behavior. We had a year like that last year down in NJ. This year it was back to maybe only a week. I live in the west part of the state surrounded by parkland. Rainfall was the only thing that was dramatically different this year. Last year was extremely wet spring and early summer (when they appeared) followed by an extremely dry end of summer into fall. This year we've had average rain in almost every month. The rain evidence isn't anecdotal, I have a state rainfall gauge a couple miles down the road from me with records going back at least a few decades.
We also had the sub-Brood XIII cicadas launch out in the western suburbs which was insane. They came early and they came out in huge numbers.
And at any rate, specialization only works if the problems stay relatively stable, or temporary. If we aren't stopped/don't stop ourselves we will keep inventing new insults every ten years and nothing can adapt to anywhere near that rate of change.
You're also forgetting the Carboniferous period. It took 50 million years for anything to puzzle out how to benefit from surplus lignin. In 50 million years are we going to be around? In 50 million years is anyone going to remember that Alpha Centauri is a system humans used to live in (before we used it up)?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient
Even accounting for this, there is sufficient evidence for a significant drop in insect populations. While it's hard to have exact numbers, the estimations in decline of population range from 70% to 90% since the 1980.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.5236
By 2015, the bugs has drastically diminished enough for me to remark upon it before coming across any studies. The confounding factor here though is that the county I was in had a lot of development in it over that time. My routes stayed mostly the same (meaning both ‘where I drove’ and ‘how many buildings were along them’) but I can’t discount the expansion of the surrounding sprawl as a big factor.
Even after I moved to a neighboring more-rural county though, with a longer commute to the same workplace, I did not really see an increase.
Yet, the vast majority of scientists who study ecosystems disagree: https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/ipbes_7_10_add.1_en_1....
The lot is between the river and our local garden district. I suspect I'm part of a migration route between them (I figured I was too far from the river for dragonflies, but I see at least 2 a day) It's changing my plans for the space a bit.
As for me, I've never cleaned my windshield in my life. The rain washes off the little bits of dust. There's nothing else to clean.
Our insect loss is much more likely due to climate change than light pollution though due to our sparse population between the cities.
I have a few memories of extensive fire fly experiences back in the day. But when I really think about it, I don’t remember all the days and years without a dramatic memory. And the ones I have may be distorted.
I think I worded it poorly.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I had a similar thought a few years back and researched it only to find that the fire fly population where I lived hadn’t really changed. I just happened to be keying on a memory that had a large amount of them and not taking into consideration that wasn’t the standard case. That their yearly population is dependent on certain weather conditions during specific months. And that some years they have a bumper crop and others not so much, but on average look about the same. That doesn’t mean it’s the same story where they live of course.
Probably worded it poorly though.
Driving on a highway for 10h without any bugs on it - common sight in Europe nowadays. 10years ago, I would need to handwash it after 3h on the highway. Anecdotes can be a very powerful tool for critical thinking.
Our brains do this. We key on certain experiences and memory favors the extreme. Over time our memory does distort. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But that we should be careful with anecdotal memories to make generalized pr specific statements about today’s reality.
As for “history repeating itself” - does it? Or do historians who write history repeat themselves? Historians write about long sequences of events that seem inevitable and if only such and such action were taken then a disaster or triumph would have been avoided or accomplished. But the recording of select historical events is more a persons narrative - a story - rather than the actual past.
What are the motivations of the historian writing about the past? What have they negated? What have they chosen to focus on? What of their memories or the subjects they used to inform their history? Which people do you choose to understand what they “said or saw”?
Light pollution has the potential to get even worse with LED lighting which is no longer filterable like sodium lighting was.
Death Valley in California has pristine night skies. I cannot even begin to describe how different it is. Think - fine diamond dust on black velvet. There are stars everywhere you look. Amazing.
The most preserved one is surely around the Pic du Midi in French pyrenees. It is actually an Dark Sky Reserve since 2013.
And according to this map¹, North of Scotland seems a good spot too, among others.
1 : https://avex-asso.org/dossiers/pl/europe-2016/ (in French, but the colors are pretty self-explanatory)
So it’s not actually dark where you are and walking, it’s just dark where no one is.
Nighttime Light Pollution May Be Cause of Insect Population Decline
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nighttime_Light_Pollution...
"An analysis of the effects of artificial light at night on insects shows that there is strong evidence to suggest a link between nighttime light pollution and declines in insect populations."
That may be true when you're optimising a program, but is very much not true in ecology. The parent comment is generally correct with its list of drivers of biodiversity loss (compare the IPBES global summary: https://ipbes.net/global-assessment).
A key feature of ecology is its extreme complexity and the myriad factors at play in any given situation. Of course, there will be individual situations in which one factor is indeed dominant. Those cases actually often end up as textbook examples precisely because they are so rare, like the snowshoe hare/lynx Lotka-Volterra cycles. In most situations, researchers have to resort to some pretty advanced statistics to try and figure out what the most important factors are. There are almost always several, and getting any one factor to explain 60% of the variance is very rare. (That's why principle component analyses -PCAs- are so popular in ecological research papers.)
It's heartbreaking and happens at least once a year, that someone near conventional agriculture/horticulture is posting a desperate for advice in every forum they know about because some asshole upwind let a cloud of 'cide drift over their horticultural masterclass of a lot, and everything is shriveling.
Recompense can be hard to get. Maybe we need an ACLU meets EFF for biodiversity.
Let's ignore for a moment any agenda to ban monocultures, and look at not just the kind but the density. Pollinator species would be doing better if the monocultures weren't so seemless. We need a mosaic of habitat and to reduce the distances between the ones we have. But it's an uphill battle to maintain them in the face of drift and runoff (really I think we shouldn't be cultivating hilltops, that would be a start, and simply dodges the runoff problem)
Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it, rather than all over the place. Light pollution is bad, and street lights are very power hungry, with the old sodium lights consuming up to 0.25kWh per hour.
The problem with cold light is that it is apparently attracting insects much more than broad spectrum incandescent light sources, even more than any potential breeding partners, which in turn affects mating.
edit: Last longer as in have already outlasted anything I had before them, the filaments I mean. Also not really more expensive to buy. And their energy usage is ridiculously low.
What is it about your current bulbs or the filament design that makes you not classify them as LEDs? The power use looks the same and the listed CRI of >=80 doesn't inspire confidence.
Ah yes, the CRI. What can I say? I now have them everywhere, except the cellar. I prefer warm white, which they are. I can't see 'wrong' colors with them. Crosschecked that with a cassette of about 40 Faber-Castell color pencils right now, during my local morning twilight. Full spectrum.
Because "retro-fit" they fit in my old sockets. They just hit a sweet spot for me. I dim, or 'tune' them by using one to three circuits, the switches and my rooms are wired to allow for that.
Old, but not obsolete ;-)
That part is not actually true. Any light will obscure the stars; if you want to compare different colors, it's the middle of the spectrum that contributes most, but the difference is small.
As an amateur astronomer, the LED lights are a big problem because their light pollution is hard to filter out. Sodium is easy, it's nearly monochromatic, so a simple filter will remove most of it. Mercury is not super-hard, the spectrum is not very broad and it's pretty uneven. But LEDs have a broad, even spectrum, which is impossible to filter out.
Suffering sound and light pollution is a hidden additional burden placed on lower economic status people.
Poor people experience health inequities due to increased exposure to light and sound, but more pressingly air pollution. [0]
The status of enjoying quiet is even clear in the middle class. You can even see the emerging divide on transit in who has noise cancelling headphones and who does not.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsal...
At the end he at least addresses his ignorance:
> [18:39] You may have noticed that I didn't talk about the blue light from LEDs, and how this is supposedly ruining our eyes. That's because the "science" behind this is questionable, at best.
> [18:55] [discussion of chart with percentage blue light of various light sources]
> [19:04] [...] but considering that our eyes can withstand the intensity of sunlight, which is far far greater than any normal artificial light source, and also has a lot of blue light, and ultraviolet, which definitely is harmful, I think the 'blue light' thing is just fear-mongering. If someone can point to some verified, peer-reviewed research supporting this, and not a dodgy website, I'll consider changing my stance. In any case, the high flexibility of LED technology means it can be tuned in pretty much any way we like.
The research on the harm of blue light is out there -- For example, one of the comments links to "Effects of blue light on the circadian system and eye physiology" [0]. (only partially read at this point - I don't know if this paper gets into the mechanism of damage done by blue light, as I understand it...)
The sun hangs high in the sky and casts light on everything. We never need to look at the sun directly, we use the sun's light indirectly, after it bounces off of things. The atmosphere scatters the sun's blue light before it gets to us [2]. Artificial lights hanging on poles emitting photons we can't avoid having beamed directly into our eyes... Blue photons have relatively higher energy levels, and different physiological effects, than orange photons... [note to self: expand on this.]
The preceding video was about High Pressure Sodium lights, which I thought was good too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1dMlVwUsrA
My transcription of the video's faulty conclusion (italics added):
> To conclude: although the High Pressure Sodium light is very efficient, its primary output color is misaligned with our nighttime visibility. Only about 1/4 of its light is actually effective at stimulating the cells in our eyes. Although the cool color temperatures of many LED replacements is harsh and aesthetically displeasing, studies have shown that it is not only more efficient, but also makes driving at night safer. There is, however, the potential for greater circadian rhythm disruption and larger amounts of skyglow, using these bluer light sources.
> Still, it seems clear that the High Pressure Sodium is on its way out. Advancements in LED technology are happening at a breakneck pace. Just 10 years ago, they weren't seen as viable, but today even the least efficient of LED replacements ends up emitting the efficiency of High Pressure Sodium once scotopic light output is considered.
> As it stands in 2018, we are faced with the choice of efficiency over aesthetics. I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy roadways lit with relatively-warm 3000K LEDS, and these also wouldn't disrupt sleep much. But you can save a lot more energy, and potentially have safer roadways, with 5700K lighting.
> Either way, it seems clear that LED technology will very soon overtake the tried-and-true High Pressure Sodium lamp, just as the High Pressure Sodium itself replaced the mercury-vapor lamp. And in 40 or 50 years, who knows what technology might light our roadways.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734149/pdf/mv-... - "The radically different power spectrums can look similar when viewed directly by the eye, irrespective of how much blue emission is present."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40&lc=Ugx6MYdsMY6I_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering#Cause_of_t...
edit: this page has a discussion of drop-sag lights vs. proper fully-shielded lights: http://www.skykeepers.org/good-bad-lights-cv.html
But there is a somewhat interesting paper on North Korean entomology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3554493/
Focusing light where needed is good. Using LEDs, as we do now, has downsides though. LED lighting in cities is making astronomy and astrophotography and even animal life worse in some cases.[1]
Traditional sodium vapour lights pollute around a wavelength of 589 nm.[2] That's the yellow/orange sky you used to see in the sky around cities. In theory, if you filtered out that wavelength 10 years ago, you'd be able to eliminate a lot of light pollution. But today, with more LED lighting, the pollution tends toward white/blue. This is "nicer" in some objective and subjective ways. e.g. colour accuracy. But it's a bitch to filter out, without also removing all the white and broad spectrum we want to see in the features of the night sky.
Animals are also sensitive to white and blue light emitted by modern LEDs, and the NatGeo link and others go into why this can be a bad thing, compared to "old fashioned" lighting methods, inefficient as they are.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/11/light-pollut...
[2] https://www.peterzelinka.com/blog/2019/8/light-pollution-fil...
Potential small (safety?) downside: red light illumination does greatly reduce colour discrimination at night versus white light.
Drive around -- billboards are lit up at night. Headlights might as well be pointed into the sky and are blinding. Stores are scarcely less well-lit when they are closed than during operating hours. I can go for a walk at night and read a paperback the whole way. Porchlights are left on all night, for no good reason.
Sometimes, on a my regular trips to visit a friend, we go out at around one in the morning to a road far from other towns and I can actually see the faint haze of the Milky Way, but in the suburbs, I am lucky to pick out thirty stars and/or planets. I don't even think that all of this constant light makes us any "safer."
Given that insects are one of the corner stones of our ecosystem, we can congratulate ourselves that we are very successful in destroying our own life support systems through predatory exploitation and sheer carelessness.
Well done.
That said, that there are negative systemic effects on the planet's ecosystems that are directly related to the massive production and use of herbicides and pesticides is not as surprising.
Light though? Even after reading that article and looking through scholar.google to find papers that associate lighting with insect decline, I'm not convinced the use of lighting at night has a material impact. The ratio of unlit/lit habitat seems wildly in favor of unlit.
And yes, I understand that unlit areas are often agricultural, and those areas contain the most insecticide/herbicides. It still appears to me that the root cause is the use of those products in farms and not that cities are poor replacement habitats.
The sound pollution might have the adverse effect of causing some plants to lose this ability to preserve energy for reproduction, indirectly impacting insects via the food chain.
Currently, due to the massive use of chemicals in the countryside, cities start to be havens for insects. There is a lot of beehives in London for example (too much actually according to a beekeeper I talked with). Until we manage to massively shift the way we do agriculture it might make sense to make it as safe as possible for insects in urban areas.
My experience has shown that when people are skeptical of your argument they are less likely to comply voluntarily and so the good that you hoped to do is lost and you have damaged your credibility with the people you need to support these ideas.
A small example of this in action was back in 2010 when Google decided they were going to stop stocking bottled water in the fridges around campus because the "energy waste and plastic disposal problem." The only problem was that Google regularly achieved over 95% capture of recyclable trash out of their bins and the energy saved was on the order of maybe half a dozen employees not commuting from San Francisco.
The real reason they wanted to do this was of course cost. They could replace bottled water with filtered dispensers and that would save them a few pennies per employee per month. I had a good conversation with some folks in charge that they could have said, "We're giving every employee an insulated water bottle in your choice of size and color (12, 20, 32, or 40 oz) that you can keep at the office and use to get water from our fancy new dispensers. This will save us money, AND its better for the environment." That would have been honest and gotten a good reception I believe with the rank and file. But dressing up the reason in a cover story that everyone easily poking holes in simply lowered morale and confidence in management.
But you correctly hint at the actual reason for German politics:
Nothing that hurts the economy like banning pesticides or cars will be done. So a scapegoat is needed, in this case the lights.
Depends on where. Germany has a very different structure due to its population density than most parts of the US, for example, with comparably less unlit habitat.
So that may be a less important issue in some places but having enough suitable space for themselves in the US doesn't help insects in Germany.
+1
But not everywhere: the less farm land, the more insects. Like, from literally none on farm land to "I have to completely clean my helmet because of all that yellow goo" in larger forests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon#United_K...
> The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars up to 70 years old.
Perhaps they were a bit oversold.
Because LED’s got so inexpensive, instead of saving money, the savings was used to increase the town luminosity.
Now, because we moved away from sodium lights, the amount of daytime-like blue light being emitted during the night has skyrocketed.
Wups
I hope my country will follow suit...
The best outdoor light is less.
Your own personal kick switch for public street lights!
Trying to interfere with that because you're too lazy to buy a black-out curtain is a terrible idea.
"My comfort should trump everyone's safety"? Still no.
/me shakes head and thinks "Here is your sign! Hold it!"
I had a big orange street lamp hanging right in front of my bedroom for years.
I cannot explain why many regions that are fairly up North don't have solid outdoor blinds or shutters.
(Plus, the major temperature control move in summer Germany is to open everything possible at night and close it during the day. If you have mostly cool nights and good insulation that is sufficient.)
This is wrong. They should stick to ~2500K bulbs.
https://artificiallightatnight.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/0/5/37... https://www.darksky.org/croatian-light-pollution-law/ https://english.radio.cz/lower-house-passes-dark-sky-law-805...
Also, other than bees, which insects specifically benefit humans?
Yes, constant light does have a strong effect on animal circadian rhythms, but for insects, the problem is rather that they exhaust themselves from flying around the light source too long.
Basically most of the plants that were shut down simply didn't get their runtime extended again and would've been shut down in a few years anyway.
And the utility companies owning them get billions in compensation and don't have o pay for waste disposal of all the irradiated parts either...
Facts that nuclear proponents always conveniently ignore...
> What is expected to be the last new coal plant to come online in Germany entered commercial operation on May 30, more than a decade after it was first planned.
> The 1,100-MW Datteln 4 power plant, owned by Uniper and located in Datteln in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, opened despite the German government’s stated plan to end coal-fired power generation in the country.
I remember star nights walking outside as a kid seeing the Milky way Galaxy full of stars.
As for ordinary street lights, the purpose of street lights are for crime prevention, but there is motion sensors. Do we really need to have the lights on with no one on a street?
Thoughts?
Starvation levels have dramatically declined over the last century.
Now, we need to fix the problem we induced in our goal to feed the world.
The only known solution is vertical farming.
That surely plays a role, too. Light pollution of street lights in Germany, however, kills an estimated 1 billion insects _per night_.
And then there's cars on the Autobahn, of course. They kill an estimated 100 billion insects per German summer.
I'm not a big fan of encountering insects. Very weird to see someone would actually want to protect them in cities.
> Light traps for insects are to be banned outdoors
So you won't be able to kill mosquitoes outside?
> So you won't be able to kill mosquitoes outside?
There are plenty of other, more specific ways to do that, no? The problem with light traps is they are indiscriminate.
Not to mention that if you apply some repellent, you don't need to kill them at all.
Well you do usually want to kill as many as possible. Bringing up mosquitoes because it's one of the most common. I cannot go out and sit down in my garden if I have insects flying around. Unless they keep an appropriate distance as to not be intimidating.
> Not to mention that if you apply some repellent
If you mean the skin applied kind it's totally unsatisfactory.
There are chemical sprays/diffusers that work very well, but even though they are marketed as "repellent" they absolutely do kill mosquitoes and many others. That's what I usually use.
Indiscriminate across species - those traps kill everything, not just mosquitoes. I'm sorry that you find insects intimidating but killing everything is not the answer to that and in the long run, unless you don't care about having food, ultimately counterproductive.
> If you mean the skin applied kind it's totally unsatisfactory.
Why? I've spent a lot of time in tropical countries and found it very effective. Even just a running fan keeps most mozzies away as they aren't generally strong fliers.
The overarching issue is that we need to coexist with our many-legged brethren, however inconvenient it may be.
Do we though? What is the point of having them in the cities specifically?
Since you seem to know about that, which bugs should one avoid killing?
> Since you seem to know about that, which bugs should one avoid killing?
I'm not trying to hold myself up as an expert but on the other hand a lot of this stuff seems pretty obvious... Anything non-invasive? Anything not causing a serious public health risk? OK, mosquitoes are an obvious target here and I hate them with a passion but that doesn't mean we should kill everything just to get to them. Try reframing the question - which birds should you avoid killing? Which big cats are OK to shoot? Honest question - what is it about insects that feels like it's OK to wipe them out? Is it because they're so numerous? That simple extends the amount of time it's taking us to destroy them all, but we seem to be making good progress there.
I do not know but this is besides the point. I still do not see why we should protect the insects that are in the city as they do not bring us any benefit.
> Anything non-invasive? Anything not causing a serious public health risk?
Let me rephrase it, which bugs should one avoid killing because they benefit us directly or indirectly? Only bees come to my mind at this moment.
> which birds should you avoid killing?
The ones that benefit humans directly or indirectly.
> Which big cats are OK to shoot?
Big cats tend to not come to the cities so they do not really pose any danger to humans.
> Is it because they're so numerous?
In general they are gross, numerous, invasive, and they carry diseases.
The bees are an easy win - they do a lot of pollination work, but there are other insects that do that too. But is that all that's important? How about the oxygen you breathe or the nitrogen in the soil that nourishes the plants you eat or the rain that waters them? All these things depend on multiple complex cycles involving things like forests, the health of which depend on many other interconnected webs of life at all levels from mammal to microbe. It's Chesterton's Fence on a grand scale - if you don't know what it does, you really shouldn't remove it until you do know what it does. We're still working that out in many, many cases.
A lot of insects provide food for other animals - kill the insects, and we also kill all the things that feed on them. And there are certainly numerous other natural cycles and systems than those I outlined above (did you know that ocean microbes can seed cloud formation? https://news.agu.org/press-release/bacteria-feeding-on-arcti...) - these are just the ones that come to my mind as someone with an amateur interest in these things; I am, as I said, no expert.
> In general they are gross, numerous, invasive, and they carry diseases.
I understand why you might feel that way but, aside from the first (which is your opinion): the second, as we're discussing, is increasingly not the case; the third is generally only true where humans have transported a species to where it shouldn't be; and the fourth is really only true in very few cases - things like cockroaches and house flies, but even these fulfill important roles breaking down organic matter that would otherwise litter the surface of the planet, and thus returning nutrients into the soil, keeping it fertile. Cockroaches etc. are only a disease risk when they intersect with us, find a huge source of waste, and multiply excessively - and in those cases of course we have to deal with them.
> I still do not see why we should protect the insects that are in the city as they do not bring us any benefit.
An obvious reason that comes to mind is that cities as a black hole for insects act to decrease the overall population by simple diffusion.
The logic here seems to be "insect populations are dropping so let's forbid some things that are killing insects".
> Why? I've spent a lot of time in tropical countries and found it very effective. Even just a running fan keeps most mozzies away as they aren't generally strong fliers.
They'll still fly around you. Sure when traveling somewhere that's the only solution.
Chemical diffusers work best for me. I rarely go outside, just deploy it as needed and it takes care of the problem pretty fast.
But say someone has a restaurant/whatever with an outside area. In addition to periodic chemical treatments, you might want to have a bunch of light traps in your arsenal.
And the article does talk about limiting use of insecticides too but isn't too clear on that.
And the counterargument is - let's keep killing them anyway? Why is that more logical?
It's the same logic as - fly/drive/heat less, to reduce carbon release; eat less meat to reduce land usage and methane release; etc.
It seems to me that maybe the primary reason we're doing so much damage to our planet is a combination of
a) for most people, personal convenience > planetary health, and b) as you say: "I have an extremely hard time believing average citizens are having such a huge effect"
The latter is especially pernicious - we are so successful as a species because, working together, we can achieve tremendous changes that aren't possible alone. But that potential for collective action can also have severely negative effects as well. Even a mountain can be leveled eventually if you keep chipping away at it. As an example of collective action, take a trip to Borneo and drive the 100km route from Tawau to Semporna - palm plantations literally as far as the eye can see in every direction, the whole route; it used to be rain forest. Individuals working together (whether deliberately or unknowingly) have a lot more power than they think.
Am I making sense? I'm not sure what's difficult to grasp about all this.
I've been doing handyman work at my boss's house during COVID-19 and he has clover growing in his yard. He has a fair number of bees, certainly more than on my end of town which is all chemlawns.
It's arguably ok to use a little weed killer by hand on dandelions if you must (better to spray 2-3 courses of vinegar instead). But killing all clover, morning glories, and other broadleaf flowers in lawns has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas. Herbicides and pesticides in agriculture wiped out the rest.
Edit: fixed the first sentence to distinguish between broadleaf herbicides and glyphosate (which kills everything).
Is that the case for sure?
I thought the state of the bee population wasn't quite that well understood...
I have no doubt that various herbicides hurt, but I'm not sure that just that science means their current population is entirely due to such use.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/651618685/study-roundup-weed-...
Admittedly, my sample size is only 1 as far as clover. I'd recommend anyone reading this to go to a clover honey farm near where you live, to see for yourself.
Part of the problem is that so many of us live in cities now that we have no personal experience about the issue, which leaves us more vulnerable to misinformation/propaganda from big agribusiness corporations, their lobbyists and the politicians beholden to them.
Weeds are opportunists. They tend to grow where other things don't want to. Better soil will invite other things in besides weeds.
2) Dig up what you can
3) See if you can find a syringe so that you can actually inject vinegar directly into whatever is left. Apply as close to the root as possible.
* If the ivy is near pavement, you could scald it with a tea kettle.
* Add a bird bath and/or salt lick to the yard to encourage white-tailed deer to snack on it.
* Get a goat.
Edit: they hold many other cards too - Food source sustainability was just the first to mind.
Glyphosate kills everything. If you use it as a broadleaf herbicide you are going to have a very bad week...
My wife is militant about this, insisting that our lawn is sprayed with horrible chemicals at least once a year to kill off the clover, daisies and moss.
Seems such a pointless thing to do, and very obviously not good for wildlife.
The cost of resisting is too high, so people end up picking their battles.
These are, in fact, battles you can pick. HOAs feel like living in an apartment but you're also the superintendent.
In some sections of the US, you can’t buy a single-family home built after 1980 without being part of an HOA.
I’m not sure what that has to do with walkable neighborhoods?
One of the values I've found is that it does provide a way to collectively prevent certain eyesores. I don't really want to have someone with 5 cars in the street on in their driveway for extended periods of time. Having a BBQ party? Sure - have 15 cars there for a few hours. Want to collect cars and work on them and leave cars 'in repair' out the street for weeks at a time? I'd rather you didn't, and would rather there be some agreed upon process to resolve those disputes.
I do understand some HOAs have people that get power hungry - grass being a 1/4" too tall, etc. That's generally bullshit, and I think there's probably other things going on in those cases where the HOA issue is the public face of some other private neighbor disputes going on.
Oh, we did have a letter once or twice about "your lawn is not kept properly". We have a lawn service and they got delayed, then it rained heavy for 3 days, and they were backed up again, and... we had really long grass. It was cut the moment someone could cut it at that point. Nature happens. If the worst that came out of that was a $50 fine or something... meh.
Given that Germany has a much healthier employee representation than the US, it's much more difficult for management to slide in surveillance under the radar. (It's also rather painful if they get caught)
In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. If the employer can show that the employee actively sidestepped the employer’s controls, the employer can make a good case against liability.
I wonder if anything like that can happen in Germany. If not, then employee privacy on employer-owned devices makes sense.
Interestingly data privacy (more precisely the "Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung") is not named explicitly in the constitution, but has been "created" by the German constitutional court in 1983 in the context of a law suite against the German census of 1983 [1].
Historically I would argue all of this is the result of the experience 1933-1945 and also the (what was known at that time) experience in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati...
I always find this reasoning strange and inconsistent . Companies give company cars to employees which could injure people. Or I could stab somebody with an employer provided knife.
Of course, most companies' monitoring is pretty shallow and reasonable, but there are exceptions, and I certainly wouldn't choose to work for one of the exceptions.
If a company has a commercial kitchen, it seems reasonable to be to prohibit employees from running their own food delivery startup out of the kitchen... If you get access to a company car (I.e. travelling salesman), the company should reasonably expect to be able to take action against you if you use ot to go drag racing, or for a personal vacation.
Likewise, the notion that an employee should expect to have free reign over a company computer and company internet access is just strange to me.
The American body politic's focus on rights as the defining feature of the social contract isn't shared everywhere else. For example, in many countries, the focus is on the material benefits the government can provide for you ("development"). And because of that, there's less reflexive distrust in government as an institution able to benefit your life, in principle. Parts of the American citizenry absolve themselves of the expectation that government can, even in principle, improve your life.
America is living in the long 18th century - Enlightenment liberalism worked out over three centuries.
In Europe the middle class generally moves into cities and not out of them where you're for the most part left to your own devices rather than being bullied around by activist neighbours or your church parish or what have you. I mean just take a look at fiction, from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick, this sort of provincial clampdown on people is quite uniquely American. Between boyscouts and girlscouts and the cheerleading team there's not that much freedom left.
I noticed this most in my encounters with American college students abroad. They're like oversized children. It's quite striking how managed American life is. From school until the evening to clubs and on-campus living, into the nuclear family and then retirement in Florida.
And then there is The Addams Family. The 2019 film addresses their conflict with American suburbia quite well. In the end, the neighborhood accepts them. Sometimes art does not imitate life.
Not to mention they save me all the time I'd spend on arranging various home services, from window washing to roof cleaning to pest removal to repaving driveways. Having an HOA means I worry about what is inside my walls and nothing else.
1) Optional -- This puts the onus on the HOA to actually serve its residents, because if enough people dislike it enough to leave (after, say, a few elected residents go on a power trip), it will collapse.
2) Give access to neighborhood amenities (e.g. a pool or clubhouse)
3) Provide neighborhood services (e.g. snow removal or tree trimming, extra trash collection)
4) Are NOT in the business of mandating minutiae such as grass length, paint color, approving remodel plans, handing out fines, etc
5) Are NOT part of a private developer's subdivision (usually goes hand in hand with point 4) so much as a collection of residents which formed organically
Basically, I like the idea of HOAs if they're more similar to Los Angeles's Neighborhood Councils than LAPD: Home Edition (although, for so many other reasons, I think LA's Neighborhood Councils are unrepresentative and ineffective at serving the wider community's best interest so much as they benefit exclusively the homeowner's interest). Otherwise, I strongly believe they cause more harm than good -- not to mention they can easily be weaponized against a minority homeowner moving into a majority-white community.
Unfortunately, it seems like HOAs as described above are in the vanishing minority.
Large parts of the country have very little housing stock, especially newer housing, that isn’t HOA-encumbered.
Like any human collaboration they can be awesome or terrible. A good HOA can manage resources for ammenities like pools and sports courts, they can help homeowners settle disputes over things like fencing and street parking. Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.
At the end of the day HOAs do get a lot of heat because they often enforce community guidelines on things like mowing your lawn and not painting your garage door to be the nazi flag. Like anything, this is a tradeoff - you may want to run a ham antenna in your backyard and be told you're not allowed.
Sounds like a good use-case for sortition. Require that people "submit to the potential for being drafted for HOA service" as part of the purchase agreement of the houses built in the development. Then at least the HOA will mostly be composed of harried people who don't want to do the job and want to get it over with as quickly as possible; rather than busybodies with idle hands.
Most HOA's are formed when a developer plats a subdivision. They attach the Covenants and other deed restrictions at the property at that time. They do it so they can maintain control over properties they have already sold until they have sold every property in the development. They want to maintain that control so they can cultivate the image for the neighborhood that maximizes their ability to profit from it.
This notion that HOA's get created for altruistic reasons is almost universally false, and should go away. Yes, some HOA's survive in a way that isn't toxic, but even that is really in the eyes of the beholder.
[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule
There's also noise and odor/smoke pollution. An HOA is pretty much the only mechanism to ensure that a group of people who don't smoke marijuana can band together to live in marijuana-smoke-free air. (Yes, some people smoke enough potent skunkweed for the stink to carry multiple houses away. No, the police don't care.)
Most of the things HOAs care about are indeed idiotic, though. IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins. The point of the HOA is to control/constrain the externalities you have on other houses/communal properties. If you put a garden gnome on your lawn, there's no externality.
Actually, the HOA’s right to dictate ends with whatever you agreed to by contract when you bought the property. And the HOA can enforce that contract in court, to the point of foreclosing on your home if necessary.
So, yeah, when you buy a house in an HOA, read those covenants before you sign. They are usually at the bottom of the 90 page stack of papers when you close.
HOAs created out of regular separately-developed SFH dwellings are the latter kind, and what I was referring to in my previous comment. (I kind of forgot that the baked-into-the-property kind existed for a moment. Oops!) In the voluntarist kind of HOA, it really is up for debate where the HOA's right to tell you what to do ends, because ultimately the HOA's power in such a voluntarist contract derives from the other members' willingness to shun you, annoy you, or at most refuse to give you access to communal resources like tennis courts, for failure to comply.
I guess it is the 'community' aspect.
Most homes that do not have HOAs are on busy streets, which are less desirable.
I've never got a straight answer on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My neighbors recently installed AstroTurf in their backyard because of this.
About three years in a row now she's tried to get lawn seed and poured a load of cheap weed and feed on instead. Completely going overboard on the quantities for good measure. At this point I'm amazed we have anything left to grow.
If covid ever lets up, you should try taking your wife on a trip to Japan. The moss in Japanese gardens is extraordinary!
They are really nice to walk on too - almost springy.
Recovering a lawn that is overrun with weeds is very expensive, time consuming, and hard work under the hot sun. A well maintained lawn only needs a few maintenance applications of weed killer every season, or can even be handled by hand. If you want flowers for the insects (I'm all for it) plant flowers. But just "let it go wild" never ends well.
Also, when it is time to sell your house a buyer is going to look at a wild lawn and just see a money/time sink.
And wild blackberry vines come up straight from hell.
Why do you want bees in residential areas ? I think that it's illegal to keep bees in some proximity to residential areas around here (my grandparents used to keep bees).
I'm allergic to bee stings and I'd prefer not to have my neck swell up to the point where I can't breathe because I accidentally sat on or pinched an insect. And I don't want random insects biting me or my children, spreading disieses, etc.
Residential areas are called that because they are built to accommodate humans, I don't see anything particularly problematic about not having bees there.
And I do realise they pollinate a lot of plants - again residential area - I don't have anything against bees on farms or in nature.
It sounds like Germany is already on their way to banning glyphosate[0]
0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/04/germany-...
For the home owner, you can use alternatives like vinegar, or even better, manual removal of dandilions, etc. Entire towns have gone spray-free, but that requires a team of dedicated people out there in the parks removing.
For big-ag, they don't have a replacement. They are way too dependent.
It's like asking what is the replacement for petrolium. A whole lot of pain and much extra work.
US just renewed it. https://foodandwaterwatch.org/news/why-it-should-anger-all-u...
I feel like it's been nice. I think the clover is pretty, and I feel like we have many more butterflies this year than any of the previous years. The grass has been thriving. Dandelions don't seem to enjoy growing with clover very much, so there's less of them this year, although goosefoots seem more than happy to coexist with clover.
The clover has held up well to dogs, too, which has been a nice bonus.
I think I'd like to add some creeping thyme next year.
Before the widespread use of herbicides having some clover in the lawn was viewed as a good thing because of this. Lawn seeds even included a bit of clover.
When herbicides came out that killed clover as a side effect then we saw people saying (marketing) that clover is bad.
They would describe it better than I can, but they can get away with e.g. just having plants that are repulsive to aphids (and plants that attracts insects that eat them).
They sometimes do have to use stuff like bordeaux mix but very rarely (if ever) use glyphosate.
Their garden is pretty amazing as a result. There are tons of birds (they have bird feeders) and insects. Bats in the summer as well.
Definitely how I see my garden if I ever get a house (I have been living in large cities all my adult life).
https://www.amazon.com/Scotts-Turf-Builder-Clover-Lawn/dp/B0...
After seeing this, I realized it was perhaps a bit unfair to assign so much blame to one company, and even bought a bag.
> In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The Coast Guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer.
But species do it without human help. I remember caterpillars had boom bust cycles in my hometown as a kid. They’d eat all the leaves and die off.
Humans will find a way.
And I say this even not considering Trump, which is a big menace. But democrat candidates in the US also don't care about the environment, not showing much promise. So do the Americans in general with their huge SUVs and completely unhealthy lifestyles(for them and the environment). I wonder how much this shitshow can go on.
How is it "more about than"? What are the costs to people by mandating dimming the light?
It makes it harder to see at night.
Is not a "us or them" dichotomy. The only possible alternatives are insects-win/humans-win or insects-lose/humans-lose. We can't have agriculture without insects.
Incredible as this may sound, around half of the US land area is completely uninhabited. Fully 1/3 of the land is owned by the federal government, and most of this is managed with environmental considerations at the forefront. The only part of the US that is even vaguely like European population density is the northeast corridor from Boston to DC, which represents a small percentage of the country.
People in the US care a lot about the environment, but the issue has been politicized of course and pits different factions against each other. We also have a housing crisis, and it’s very difficult to get humans to worry about saving anything else when they can’t get a roof over their head.
The US has myriad environmental problems and needs to do better, but it also has a very different situation on the ground compared to Europe, and thus requires different approaches in some areas.
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/a-century-ago-pennsy...
The US created the concept of state-protected wilderness reserves and national parks.
The US was the driving force behind the Kyoto Protocol, and the originating nation of solar power, wind power, and nuclear power.
California leads the world in automobile fuel economy targets, and the US as a whole has cleaner-burning fuel than the EU, which for bizarre reasons settled on diesel as their standard even though it's far worse for the air than gasoline.
Europe's pretty far behind in caring about the environment.
But that's not b/c of actions of local residents.
> The US created the concept of state-protected wilderness reserves and national parks.
That's quite incorrect, e.g. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bia%C5%82owie%C5%BCa_Forest
The forest was declared a hunting reserve in 1541 to protect bison. In 1557, the forest charter was issued, under which a special board was established to examine forest usage. In 1639, King Vladislaus IV issued the "Białowieża royal forest decree" (Ordynacja Puszczy J.K. Mości leśnictwa Białowieskiego). The document freed all peasants living in the forest in exchange for their service as osocznicy, or royal foresters. They were also freed of taxes in exchange for taking care of the forest. The forest was divided onto 12 triangular areas (straże) with a centre in Białowieża.And the national parks and forests in CA are very much the result of local residents.
The average American use about three times the fossil fuels the average Swede does, and if the statistics are correct, the ratio has been increasing for decades.
Germany is one of the European countries with the highest fossil fuel usage, at about half the US consumption per capita.
The European average seems to about half the US average.
As for Sweden, we've got strict rules for almost any kind of emission, and diesel cars have never been very common here.
California is great, Kyoto was great, but actual environment track record over the entire United States is far from great. Unfortunately.
If US has led as much in action as in words, I'd be happy to name you the best.
We're only 10 million in Sweden, and it's outright depressing to think how little it matters even if we reduce emissions to zero. It's still the right thing to aim at, and I hope we continue on this track, but it would be much easier if big economies like the US were more heavily invested.
It is of course very lucrative to try to convince others to use more expensive energy sources, and yourself use a cheaper one. Which is one perspective of the US involvement in Kyoto that is hard to entirely dismiss because of the somewhat lackluster results overall. The changeover to more gas instead of coal is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that US oil consumption alone is more than most EU countries use in combined oil, coal, and gas.
I'm all for big wild forest lands, I probably spent the first decades of my life more in forests than outside them, but that has barely anything to do with being environmentally conscious. It has little bearing on acting in the best interests of the environment, and all people who depends on it. It doesn't matter how much you care for the forest lands if excess carbon dioxide cause entire biomes to disappear, which is a significant concern today.
Careful here: the US optimises for low NOx for health reasons while the EU optimises for low CO2 for environmental reasons.
See for example https://theconversation.com/fact-check-are-diesel-cars-reall... (the first website I've found that doesn't look like an all car manufacturers propaganda site) which claims "In use, on average, this equates to around 200g CO₂/km for petrol and 120g CO₂/km for diesel."
They even refer to the Kyoto protocol as a reason for the push for Diesel and also point out the issues with optimizing for CO2 only. But still it's not as simple as "Diesels pollute, the EU must be mad".
I really don't want to get into a Europe vs US argument, but this statement strikes me as odd. Sweden and California are roughly similar in size, and Sweden is nearly 70% covered by forest. For California to have more forest than Europe as a whole, not only does California need to be covered in forest to a larger extent than Sweden (this may be true, I don't know), but Sweden needs to hold more than 70% of the total amount of forest in Europe - something that seems exceptionally unlikely at best.
What am I missing?
Germany: beetles!
Regardless, for any issue there is usually middle ground to be found and snark comments like yours do nothing to help find or support it.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Humans are already not allowed to build anywhere because of environmental regulations (unless you are a corrupt politician) and to keep the rents high.
Germany is getting more and more ridiculous. People must use energy saving bulbs to increase the profit for Philips, but one can legally burn 100l of fuel per day in a car.
Noise laws are lagging behind but insects need to be protected.
Yesterday I had 10 flies and 5 mosquitoes simultaneously in my room. What do the bats eat? They are everywhere.
There are more bats, foxes, rats and insects in big cities than ever before.
How do those insects mate in the city if light prevents them from doing so?
I wonder why we are still alive. According to the Club of Rome we should have been extinct by now. But these things are a nice diversion from the real problems and a good income stream for the pundits.
Edit: BTW, dimming down the lights isn't going to increase anyone's stream of income. The "pundits" will actually suffer some loss from this.
Speaking as an ecologist here, colleagues of mine were authors on one of the recent studies on insect decline in Germany (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1684-3). Believe me, we'd rather study other things than how fast nature is disappearing.
Also, foxes and rats have nothing to do with insect levels.
This has never happened 20 years ago, so someone is lying.
It is a massive credibility problem created by ideologues who will deny the foxes until there are 5 in every apartment.
There are probably over 10 million species of plants and animals in the world. Of course some of these are going to be better at coping with humans and their cities than others. As you correctly observe, foxes happen to be some of the best at adapting to city life. If you want more examples, just take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_wildlife
However, these exceptions change nothing whatsoever about the fact that in general, species very much are in decline and many are about to, or have already disappeared. Indeed, when we look at cities around the world, only 20% of bird species and 5% of plant species actually live in such an environment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027400/). Outside cities, the picture is not much better. Some species, like the crested lark in Europe, have suffered over 95% population drops. Others, like the passenger pigeon, have gone entirely extinct. I‘m citing bird examples here because we tend to have the best data for them (we have numerous birdwatching records reaching back 300 years), but I could cite others. In the last decades, an increasing number of observations suggest that by now, even insects are beginning to decline. And if you want to know what it‘s like when they‘re dead, just ask the Chinese labourers who are already having to pollinate apple blossoms by hand, because all the bees are gone...
https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/tierschutz-fuchs/
It is a crime to hurt a fox!
But I am sure that if there are 5 foxes per person in Germany, there will be a new "Referentenentwurf" and everyone will ask how this could possibly have happened.
If you cannot see how this hurts credibility, you have to get out of your ecological bubble. Why should people believe numbers on insects if numbers for other animals are clearly wrong?
You need to differentiate between endangered species and protected species, and between biodiversity conservation ("Naturschutz") and animal rights ("Tierschutz").
The fox is not an endangered species, as both the German and the global red lists show (https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23062/46190249, https://www.rote-liste-zentrum.de/de/Detailseite.html?specie...).
It is, however, a protected species in Germany (Anhang 1 BArtSchV), though at the lower protection level ("besonders geschützt", not "streng geschützt"). Note, however, that there are multiple reasons to give a species legal protection. These include a need for conservation (not the case here), but also ethical implications (higher animals like birds and mammals generally enjoy higher protection levels than insects or plants) and cultural reasons (in this case, the fox is a huntable species, which means that it falls under the Jagdgesetz).
In short: yes, the fox is protected, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's also endangered.
Furthermore, those that live in less-urbanized less-sterile locales are painfully aware that nature and her army of insects always has the upper hand.
That there are insects in some places doesn't mean the issues with insect, and general biodiversity loss suddenly disappears.
Bugs are everywhere, but there are species disappearing every at a rate much much higher than they should disappear for natural reasons.
There certainly are cases where fetishization can be part of it environmental policy, but usually it's then about something you can brag about, not about the impact light has on the sex life of bugs.
Even with the possible fetishization of nature, most people still don't care enough to be willing to lower their standard of living, even quite superficially. Generally, I would say cynicism regarding environmental policy is often misplaced, as even terribly inefficient policy makes the existence of the larger issue apparent, and opens the door to better and more informed policy the next time around.
Look at almost any are of legislation, the first plodding steps into a new area is often hilariously misplaced, or terribly expressed with the 20/20 of hindsight. Regardless, they were necessary steps. In some areas, biodiversity arguably one of them, the first plodding steps are taken just now. It's progress, if small.
So perhaps, maybe, "speculation in action", this is not only useful or exclusively about insects