Putting bugs into politics

‘If we die, we’re taking you with us’ A great image that has been doing the rounds is a picture of a bee saying ‘If we die, we’re taking you with us.’ Invertebrates are the glue that binds the plants, microbes, fungi and animals to each other on this small planet, and we can quite safely say that we would not last long without invertebrates.

Loosing even a small amount, a tiny percentage, of bug life could be catastrophic locally. Bugs sit at the bottom of the food web; if they disappear, so will the species that feed on them. We would lose many bigger animals such as birds, bats, some mammals, sh, reptiles and amphibians that we’ve come to love, and which mean so much for our identity and culture. Whole ecosystems and even landscapes will change in a cascade of impacts we can’t even imagine.

Bugs are a vital part of the recycling of nutrients, without which we cannot survive. The soil in which we grow most of our food is created largely by the guts and jaws of worms, mites, springtails, termites, beetles and many more. They mash up the leaf litter and the dead bodies, so we don’t have to, releasing some nutrients and making plant material more easily decomposed by fungi and microbes, which then releases more vital nutrients like sugars, nitrates and phosphates for plants to absorb and grow.

And, without many bugs, most plant pollination would be impossible save for some carried out by the wind and a few reptiles and mammals (if they don’t need the bugs, too, that is). But these larger beasts won’t t into a buttercup or a bluebell. The intricate way in which plants and bugs have evolved together is extraordinary and largely irreplaceable. To be blunt, without pollinating bugs and other beasts (which, in turn, need bugs to survive), almost 90 per cent of our owering plants would die o . 4 This would have a catastrophic impact on ecosystems worldwide, not

to mention the food on our plates. The world would be drained of its colour.

Robo-bees A third of the crops we eat – and I am not talking just the basics here like fruit and vegetables, but also those essentials, such as chocolate and co ee – need invertebrates for their pollination. Some human and machine pollination is used: in China, for instance, where wild bee colonies have disappeared in some areas, workers pollinate orchards using brushes. But they can only cover a tiny proportion of crops and it is expensive. If we had to perform all that pollen transfer ourselves or with machines it would take a vast army of workers or a whole new level of robot insects.

We may be able to engineer tiny robo-bees in their billions to try and do the job, but they will never be as good, or as cheap, self-replicating and non-polluting as the real bees and the ies and the moths. Such robots are actually already being produced in laboratories. A ‘RoboBee’ has been developed at Harvard University for arti cial pollination, potential rescue services and, possibly, military surveillance, too. But as the expert bee academic Professor Dave Goulson points out:

Consider just the numbers; there are roughly 80 million honeybee hives in the world, each containing perhaps 40,000 bees through the spring and summer. That adds up to 3.2 trillion bees. They feed themselves for free, breed for free, and even give us honey as a bonus. What would the cost be of replacing them with robots? 5

Billions of pounds is the answer, yet we can get these services for free, or via relatively cheap honeybee colonies. The use of tiny robots could also create a pollution disaster

and an additional vulnerability into our food system. And what would the animals that feed on the bees like birds and mammals then eat – the metal robots?

One of our sweetest gifts from the insect world, honey, would no longer be available in a world without bees. Synthetic substitutes can never taste the same, given honey’s complex makeup, which includes vitamins, minerals, pollen, fragrance compounds, and even antibacterial and antifungal agents. Nor would we likely be able to grow enough sugar-forming plants to replace the honey because the soil would be so badly depleted without the critical and complex work of invertebrates.

Bees are only one part of the pollination picture. Our plates would be so much duller with a vastly reduced selection of plants pollinated by many invertebrates – no broccoli or sprouts, tomatoes or raspberries, to name only a few that would be gone. And the soil, which the bugs keep healthy and fertile with their industrious activities, would be so weakened that it is likely that many non-pollinated plants could not grow either.

If we lose hover ies, ladybirds and wasps, which are fantastically e ective predators of many real pests such as aphids, we could also see huge infestations and yields plummeting. More food disasters.

Maybe we will be able to grow some of our food and bres in sterile systems or factories without needing soil. The nutritional implications of getting all our food this way is di cult to imagine. We are only now realising how vital the complex soil microbiota – the communities of protozoa, viruses, bacteria, fungi and bugs – are for providing the nutrients we need to ensure gut health. And how it’s the multiple connections between these microbiota and the growing plants that are exchanging, delivering and mixing the huge

range of nutrients, from sugars to trace minerals, in the system we rely on. Recreating this dynamic, complex web formed over many millennia in a lab may just prove impossible.

A changed landscape

The world would also look so di erent without the bugs. The joy of a buzzing meadow would be a distant memory, seen only in lms showing how the world around us used to have such vibrant colour, sounds and smells. The owers and trees that rely on bugs would no longer light up our lives as we walk the streets or provide shade on a hot day. But we may also be walking in ever-growing mounds of our own waste as we would have none of the fantastic invertebrates that clean up our mess and digest our poo.

You may be surprised to know that we use bugs in sewage treatment plants to lter and break down matter, and help neutralise toxins. Without them, chemicals would be the primary way we’d clean water and I’ve no idea how we’d manage that without poisoning ourselves.

The intimacy with which our lives, even our skin, are entwined with invertebrates is too rarely considered. From the bed we sleep in and the clothes we wear, to the clean water we need to drink and wash with. We take it for granted. What would we wear if we had no invertebrates to ensure the grass grew for the sheep and cattle or to help the cotton crops thrive? With no wool, leather or cotton, we would have to resort entirely to arti cial bres. How long before the pollution from plastic micro bres irreversibly damages the rivers and seas?

And to complete this picture… what would we sit on? Have you sat on a wooden seat, used a wooden table or been in a house with wooden oorboards today? With no bugs to maintain the soil for healthy tree growth, there would be little new timber to produce furniture, buildings or even paper. Plastic, metal or concrete sofa, anyone? If you used any wood today, the tree it came from needed that army of bugs – some for nutrients, others for pollination and then more to spread its seeds, or as food for the birds that spread the seeds.

Time to take action

It is a deliberately bleak picture I am painting. I do not think it will come to this. We have stepped back from the brink in the past. The book widely recognised as one of the most important environmental publications of the twentieth century, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, was published in 1962. Carson, both a scientist and a renowned author, wrote carefully and passionately about the impact of indiscriminate use of insecticides – the chemicals being used to control crop and human pests. Back then, the world listened to her call to action. The evidence was strong and well presented, and she made careful proposals. Despite staunch industry resistance, those in power made some signi cant changes to legislation, created new

What are the main causes of decline?

There is no simple or single reason for the alarming losses of invertebrates we have started to see across the globe. We are still unsure, for instance, what caused mass bee colony declines in North America, despite serious money being thrown at the problem. But from the evidence and long-term studies, the drivers t into the following areas:

industrial farming of crops and livestock, mining and urban development have destroyed the habitats invertebrates need for food, mating, egg laying and shelter, and have removed the natural corridors (or created barriers such as roads and developments), which prevent species from moving, colonising and mating air, soil and water pollution, mainly by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers biological factors, such as the introduction of new diseases or species which can predate or outcompete the domestic varieties climate change, including temperature shifts and extreme weather events light and noise pollution and even 5G and wireless signals that may be cooking the bees 6 microplastics lling the bugs’ stomachs

agencies and eventually banned to use of the most harmful chemicals – the organochlorines – from most applications.

But, almost sixty years later, the alarm bells are ringing loudly again, everywhere, and the problems (and the humans and their consumption) have multiplied. Invertebrates have an intrinsic right to thrive, but regardless of whether you appreciate this, given how essential they are to us, we need to act.

The great rebugging challenge

You are probably getting the picture. We need to rebug. Let me stop describing what a world without invertebrates would look like. I would far rather talk about how rebugging our lives could reboot our relationship with nature – and why it is such a brilliant idea.

This book is about how we can all rebug the planet and be part of the change we need to see. Rebugging will be like using a vacuum cleaner in reverse, undoing the sucking we have done on the land for too long. Scattering back those tiny vital bits onto the green and not-so-green carpet of the planet.

How this book can help I will show you how through rebugging every part of our lives – from small to large scale – we can help rewild our lives. And not just in nature, but also culturally and economically – and politically, if you are up for it. Because one stark observation I can draw from my work is that we need to change whole systems, not just bits of them, to ensure we can live in harmony with all the creatures on this planet.

We need to protect the entire habitat for invertebrates, not just the edges. Move to smart pest management using natural tools and knowledge to control pests, not just banning the worst chemicals while continuing to spray other toxic

The only sea dwelling insect

While many invertebrates ll the seas, from crabs to seas cucumbers, there is only one insect that calls the ocean its home. It has a wonderful common name: the sea strider. This carnivorous insect sprints on the water surface looking for prey that has fallen onto the water, such as zooplankton, sh eggs, larvae and dead jelly sh. In turn, it provides a source of food for sea birds and surface feeding sh.

pesticides around. Campaigns to protect a habitat for one rare species are valuable, but they are seriously not enough. Everything must shift. The rewilding movement feels like a strong expression of this need, but it must be about all the land, everywhere. Allowing nature to recover both itself and us in the round – and allowing us to recon gure our relationship with it – to help save the life systems on which we depend.

The rst two chapters of this book start with us. We have to rebug our attitudes and cherish the bugs, not only as fellow inhabitants of our planet, but by appreciating the work they do to make it comfortable for us. It is by re-evaluating our relationship to bugs, individually and societally, that we can begin to make the fundamental shifts in individual action, as well as policy-level changes to e ectively rebug our world. We need to see bugs as citizens of our planet, with the same right to live and thrive as all humans and creatures.

The next chapters look at bugs within our ecosystem: how bugs are an intrinsic part of rewilding and must be part of our e orts to restore the natural world. I hope that chapter 4 will help you to do this at home and in your local environment, while the later chapters go big picture – how environmental changes have a ected bug life and how we need to re-examine our food and shopping habits, and therefore our farm and agricultural practices.

The shocking Covid-19 pandemic was horri c and has rightly created some vital space for an urgent call to rethink our relationships: with the land, with the stu we buy, with forests and with their inhabitants. Researchers have been pointing out for years that the continued destruction of forests, humans encroaching on more wild spaces with farms and infrastructure, and the impact on wild animal populations increases the risk of pandemics. This is now, rightly, coming under greater scrutiny.

In the end, though, rebugging has to happen at the highest level of society. We need political and economic structural changes, and chapter 7 examines the systemic challenges – and solutions – to rebugging. Issues of power and inequality may seem far removed from rewilding but they are critical. Finally, I end with a vision of what a rebugged world could look like, as well as ideas and names of organisations that will help you get involved at all levels of the great rebugging challenge.

I have woven rebugging tips throughout the book, some of which are simple and easy to do, while others will take a bit more e ort. So, even if you have only a little time, there is still always something you can do. Small things you can do every day or every month, and some which can even save you time and money. However, if you have more time to do the things that need a bigger e ort, you may nd that you

discover new communities and make new connections along the way. In the nal chapters of the book, I have included ideas which involve a greater use of your time and resources and, if you want, your power as a citizen with in uence. We all have some power.

And, above all, appreciate that although you are just a large, annoying, but occasionally useful, obstacle in the way of most invertebrates, you can still help them to help you.