Superbowl

That's why I'm here tossing this education around all day, every day! 😇

That is great to hear. I know some don't like them and have some reasonable objections, but hey, the wolves were here first!

I just happened to step outside late one night as the mosquito truck rolled by, with a dopey sounding single stroke engine pumping out a cloud of spray.

It works, we don't have any skeeters in our neighborhood. We also don't have lightning bugs, labybugs, dragonflies, butterflies, bees, or most other flying critters. We do have wasps, though. Those bastards are indestructible apparently.

I was in Queens, NY, in THE city, no woods, pastures, or even parks around anywhere nearby, and yet there were lightning bugs everywhere we went at night. We can't have them where we live next to nature, but they have them in the city, because they don't spray clouds of POISON down their streets, "for the bugs."

I mentioned this to group of residents recently, and we all agreed said that we'd be happy to trade a few skeeter bites each summer if it meant we could see lightning bugs and butterflies again.

I remember the fireflies in late summer outside the cities. They are nowhere to be found anymore, unfortunately.

So you're saying my brown thumb is not totally my fault??? 😉

The wife is terrified of bees, but I get excited to see them anymore. Especially the weird local bees.

I tried to plant some bee and butterfly friendly plants but they all got cooked in a heat wave last year or something.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/fifty-years-ago-david-attenborough-changed-the-way-we-see-the-world-now-we-must-heed-his-warning-8294239

In my lifetime – and even more so in Sir David’s – the natural world has suffered an extraordinary and devastating decline. Since the spread of industrial agriculture, the planet has lost more than two-thirds of its wildlife populations. Today, 96 per cent of all mammal biomass on Earth is made up of humans and farmed animals. Just four per cent is wild.

At COP26, he ended his address with words that deserve to be remembered: “If working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilise our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it… In my lifetime I’ve witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could – and should – witness a wonderful recovery.”

It would become a very long cartoon if we included everywhere. 😁

Wherever the environment changes, it benefits some organisms at the cost of others. The Northern Spotted Owl vs Barred Owl situation has really highlighted that here.

Like you said, nature itself is always changing, and things will adapt or fall off to accommodate the new reality. A healthy and natural ecosystem doesn't need to look like the picture, it just tried to highlight how we can lose an understanding of how things could or should be over generations.

Things were much better back in my day. Everything went to hell around the Triassic. You kids wouldn't know, with your phones and your tablets and opposable thumbs.

EDIT: That was a good read btw

I feel as guilty as the next human for things out of my hands, but even I won't take blame for what happened before an apocalyptic meteor strike! 😜

Neat article though! I love the Devonian.

Look what they took from us.

In case you weren't aware, the picture doesn't depict the ecosystem of a city

We thankfully don't have rivers catching fire anymore, and air won't kill us in most places, but we've added a ton of mechanization and tech since then so the scope and speed of our ability to destroy has accelerated, even if the amounts and intensities of the damage average lower in some cases.

Mainly I just feel we still have lots of room for improvement. About 90% of animal rehabs are due to people, our junk, and our pets.

My parents continue to try to rationalize the bonkers-ass weather we've been having every year.

I try to explain some concepts to them, like artic jets that cause flash freezes in otherwise mild winters, or the unseasonably warm weather we have throughout most of the winter, or the rarity of snowfall we've had over the past few years. Even ten or twenty years ago, it wasn't like this.

And yet whenever I try explaining these things, I can practically see the layers of cognitive dissonance they're spinning it through in their heads before they give a non-committal "yeah" in one of those insincere "everything is fine because I wasn't actually paying attention" sort of ways...

I'm only 40 years old and I remember how different it was. If you went on a weekend trip your car would be splattered with insects all over. Our garden used to be full of butterflies and other insects. I've been stung so many times but for my kids it's a really rare occasion.

Not to mention the weeks of snow instead of the scattered few days we have now. And hardly anybody seems to care.

No do not clean up your leaves. Baby bugs use the leaves to keep warm in the winter. Cleaning up the leaves is reducing the population of helpful bugs.

I like to ask people i meet IRL if they have a lawn. Follow up question is why then?

A lot of people seem to be unaware of the history and origin of lawns. Put oversimply, they are and have always been about gross excess resources expenditure to show those around you how rich you are.

Or, leave the leaves, and have beautiful lightning bugs in the summer