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pollinators
Discovering Intelligence in Unexpected Places
If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?
Aug 27, 2024
From the largest to the smallest and the oldest to the youngest creatures on Earth—Antarctic blue whales and coastal redwood trees, minute bacteria and human beings—we are all enmeshed in layers of relationships. We need each other, though some more than others.
Plants evolved hundreds of millions of years before the first humans and transformed the Earth—through their creativity in surviving predators—into a livable environment for all animals, including humans. We needed plants for our evolution and need them now for our survival from climate disaster. They, however, did not need us for their existence and would survive without us.
Putting humans at the top of the evolution chain as the crown of intelligent life, a Western worldview, is—as some keenly grasp—mistaken. The baleful consequences of this simplistic hierarchy are everywhere: out-of-control climate change; accelerating rates of animal and plant extinction; dead zones in the oceans and mass mortality of coral reefs; the vast pollution of land, air, and water; and the mounting likelihood of human extinction with nuclear war. All caused by humans, humans with financial and political power much more egregiously than others.
Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions. Why? Together—their combined beauty—attracts more pollinators.
Certain scientists who study plants—from the simplest to the exotic—are stirring controversy with their “ Are plants intelligent?” Consider that we humans owe our lives to plants for their food, medicines, and critical balance of 21% oxygen in the air we breathe. If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?
Studies have found that elephants recognize themselves in a mirror, crows create tools, dolphins demonstrate empathy and playfulness, and cats exhibit similar styles of attachment as human toddlers. The given explanation is that they have brains with neurological capacity for consciousness and intelligence.
But plants do not have a central brain. Could their mode of learning to evade insect predators and maximize their growth come from a diverse form of intelligence, possibly be distributed across their roots, stems, and leaves? Could the whole plant, then, function as a brain? Recent studies of plants have stirred the possibility that they are conscious and intelligent. Take communication, something we humans claim as our domain through language and more recently acknowledge that animals also possess.
Botanists have found that not only do alder and willow trees alter their leaf chemistry to defend themselves against an invasion of tent caterpillars, but that leaves of faraway trees also change their chemical composition similarly. Warned, as they are, by airborne plant chemicals released from the original trees under attack. Goldenrods signal an attack by a predator through strong chemical communication sent to all other goldenrod neighbors, just as humans warn their neighbors about a nearby fire or flood or crime.
Without any recognizable ears, plants sense sounds. The vibration of a predator insect chewing on its leaves causes a plant to make its own defensive pesticide. Beach evening primrose responds to the sound of honeybees in flight by increasing the sweetness of its nectar to attract them for pollination. Tree roots grow toward the sound of running water, including in pipes, where the roots often burst through causing great difficulties for municipalities. How do the various plants hear these stimulating sounds?
Plants have memory, some anticipating from past experience when a pollinator will show up for the plants’ pollen. Plants express social intelligence: Members of the pea family form relationships with bacteria living in their roots to have the bacteria supply beneficial nitrogen for the plants’ growth. Several kinds of plants provide a home and food for compatible ants who then attack the plants’ ant pests. Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions. Why? Together—their combined beauty—attracts more pollinators.
In finishing, I express my immense respect for the Indigenous worldview where wind, rocks, air, and rain are our kin, together with plants and nonhuman animals. We, humans, the most recent beings, depend on all of these elder kin; and this awareness, this worldview of connectivity among all beings, is our path back to Earth well-being.
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Agree on a Key Point: Moths Will Not Be a 2024 Campaign Issue
The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
Aug 05, 2024
In a recent column, Paul Street wrote how there "are plenty of deadly sirens in contemporary American life but few are as powerful as the savagely time-staggered big money corporate crafted narrow spectrum major party big media candidate-centered 'quadrennial [electoral] extravaganzas'—Noam Chomsky's term—that are sold to the masses as 'politics,' the only politics that matters."
Street is absolutely right. In the thousands of years of bread and circuses—from Roman gladiators to free internet porn—never have the masses been bought off by such vapid shtick.
This is our presidential election year, and a batshit crazy one with two demented geezers slobbering through a debate that would elicit head shakes and chuckles if it occurred in a bar or in the waiting room for a Peter Pan bus. Then one geezer gave up the ghost....I don't have to retell the story. You might not know the name of your home galaxy, but you know Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—you can hear their voices scratching and echoing in the passageways winding through your brain. You see their faces—as though they pressed up threateningly just inches from your nose.
If a mass shooter sprayed your local Big Y with gunfire you might offer a minute of thoughts and prayers, but then the election would gently bring you back to your reserved seat in the collective fantasy, because this election—just like all the others—will decide the fate of creation, the balance of force between democracy and Nazi wannabeism, and pretty much everything else. This election will determine if the greenness of trees, the blueness of skies, the beige hue of dirt and the wetness of water continues for another four years or not.
Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
But I just discovered something so secretly horrific, that it demands our complete attention—turn off the election coverage. You might have discovered the exact same thing. It is the nature of collapsing cultures to keep secrets out in the open. The collapse itself is a secret, even when it loudly and openly proclaims itself. We are completely riveted to banal spectacles, to siren songs as Street writes, and almost nothing can bring us back to nominal reality. While we are diddling away time on this stupid election, the shit has hit the fan. What sort of jolt would slap us hard enough to wake us all up?
Maybe an alien invasion would knock the cobwebs aside. A techno-superior, intergalactic army of cosmic conquerors claiming our world for the flag of some nameless solar system at the far edge of the Laniakea Supercluster—that might reset our priorities. Let Trump build a wall between Andromeda and the Milky Way—and boast that Andromeda will pay for it.
Another thing that might alter our perspective would be a super volcano eruption. Human history has yet to see the fury that patiently gathers beneath the paper thin layers of crustal plates. We have had tiny pop-gun doses of tectonic rage like Vesuvius or Krakatoa, but never the real deal. If Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, or Lake Toba blow their calderas, that might reorder our priorities in a hurry. I could describe the cubic miles of homicidal magma, the sulfuric, sun blocking emissions, and subsequent buildup of greenhouse gasses, but you can go to YouTube to savor a limitless collection of videos that recreate volcanic Armageddon with special effects.
Unfortunately, neither an alien takeover nor a super-volcanic display of cross continental lava can equal the destruction already hiding in plain sight.
Scientists tell us that greenhouse gasses now increase in atmospheric density at a speed ten times faster than the velocity created by Permian mega eruptions. The Siberian Traps super volcanoes (that drove the mother of all mass extinctions 252 million years ago) would sit on the bench of a dream team comprised of Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP and Saudi Aramco.
Allow me to digress and obliquely approach my main point by going back in time - not deep time, but my own time. It is 1964 and I am a high school freshman playing basketball from sunup to sundown with hoop dreams percolating in my head. My two elder companions and summer league teammates (let's call them Doug and Dobie) walk along the border of North Hartford one evening and talk about their philosophy regarding girls and fighting. The topic is about unwritten rules - if you are out with a girl and someone makes a provocative remark, do you stare him down, push him aggressively or throw a sucker punch? This discourse strikes me rather abstractly as I had never been "out with a girl.” The conversation makes me uncomfortable—my naivete will inevitably be targeted. Fortunately, the ritualized display of preening masculinity is preempted by a street light mounted on a telephone pole. Around the light, in a fluttering frenzy, fly thousands of moths.
The sheer number of them creates a mosaic of gyrating shadows at our feet. While each moth flaps silently, the utter mass of them, the aggregate force of weightless creatures, creates a dry, hissing sound—evil and magnetic. These creatures belong to the spirit world—a place greater than our lives of hoops, school and adolescent pretense. We all look up at the lamp and mutter "holy fuck."
That many beating wings have the capacity to induce awe that we don't normally associate with the lowly moth. Moths have, like all insects, the superpower of industrial breeding. They overwhelm the law of averages with such prolific egg production that the remnants of the hungry Mesozoic (birds) can't scarf their way to a mothless world. Moths can gather in dizzying swarms that mock mortality. These communities, swirling vortex-like around every light bulb, prove the strength of numbers.
The ancestors (Holometabola ) of moths and butterflies (Lepitoptera) evolved some 300 million years ago—as such, this superorder that emerged in the late Carboniferous has survived three of the five mass extinctions of deep time—specifically, the aforementioned end Permian, the Triassic and the Cretaceous/Paleogene. The worst, most murderous conditions that mother-nature can concoct in her most terrible moods have never derailed our fluttering masters of hard times.
Moths have evolved spectacular means of adjustment—including the ability to consume the nectar of flowering plants (which emerged in the Cretaceous) and the capacity to sense sonar waves emitted by bats that prey upon them. The leptitopterans have radiated into 180,000 species. This mind blowing fact might be weighed against the six and a half thousand mammalian species currently struggling to limp into the next century.
Moths are one of the most critical pollinators. They also break down rotting leaves and create fertile humus to nourish fields and forests. Their larvae (caterpillars) sustain countless famished species. Moths are the superglue holding the biosphere together—or rather, they once were.
Unfortunately, I have bad news. While I had my face buried in the internet, moths went extinct—at least the sorts that hovered about street lamps in clouds of organic confusion while Doug, Dobie and I looked on in wonder a mere six decades ago. The street lamps in Northampton, Massachusetts—where I now reside as an old man—are now empty, lonely, and silent places.
And in my backyard, funnel spiders would build their webs next to the porch light and grow to enormous sizes feasting on the moths that fell into their ancient traps. Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
We have gotten the narrative ass backward. The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first. The good thing about mass extinction is that T-Rex and the Gorgonopsia had ambitious heirs. But we have created a mass extinction so powerful that heirs have become irrelevant - think about that for a moment. The degradation of nature is now threatening to be total. The toxic sludge, industrial fumes, agricultural poisons, plastics, greenhouse gasses, artificial light, nuclear waste and deforested wastelands have snuck up on us like a hooded assailant in a dark ally.
The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first.
My anecdotal musings may not suffice as an official signature on the Lepitopteran death certificate, but the experts say that bugs are collapsing at record rates—unprecedented in evolutionary history.
While I announce the complete demise of moths in my backyard and my street, a study in the UK has moth populations down 32% since 1968 in the UK. A study in Scotland puts the local moth decline at almost 50%.
A recent study in a small Florida city concluded:
Comparing the rural site with the greatest total abundance and the urban site with the lowest total abundance across the entire year, we documented a 68% reduction in caterpillar frass mass, an 80% reduction in pooled micro-moth abundance, and a staggering 97% reduction in pooled macro-moth abundance.
Macro-moths means simply, big moths. The decline in population referenced above is not about a reduction across time, but a comparison between populations in urban parks and rural woodlands. Proximity to human beings has not gone well for moths.
And it’s not just moths—it’s all insects. Researcher, Francisco Sanchez-Bayo regarding insect population declines, told The Guardian in 2019: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
So scientists have been talking about a total insect genocide for a while now, and after a lifetime of obliviousness, I suddenly notice that the moths that have existed in vast numbers throughout my life—creatures that have flourished by the trillions of trillions for almost half the time since the "Cambrian Explosion" have now dropped dead in a finger snap. I could write about birds, bees, butterflies or a million other clades, orders and species getting fucked by humanity’s satanic religion—capitalism.
Imagine yourself going to the doctor for a routine checkup and being told that you have metastatic cancer. "It is in your bones, your brain, in your blood and has colonized the organs in your body." The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
I don't know if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are going to debate, but I am certain that if they do, neither one will say a word about dead and dying moths. Insects are the proletariat of the planet's organic systems, and you can depend on US politicians not to talk about the working class.
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Stopping the ‘Insect Apocalypse’ in the Garden of Capitalism
If neonics are so dangerous, what is the Environmental Protection Agency doing about it? Not very much, as it turns out
Jul 02, 2023
I was reading about bumble bees recently—specifically, their looming demise, thanks to human greed and ignorance—and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We should have eaten from it!
Well, we did, but then apparently upchucked everything we learned and, in the process, fooled ourselves into thinking that technology has allowed us to recreate the Garden of Eden from which we’d been banned. You might call it the Garden of Capitalism, in which humans can take what they want without consequences, forever and ever and ever. This seems to be the myth at the core of dominant global culture.
But of course there are consequences, which we officially refuse to let ourselves see. For instance, Amy van Saun, an attorney for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, writing about the shocking disappearance of bees and other pollinators of much of the food we eat (fruit, vegetables, nuts), notes that one of the primary causes is the ever-increasing use of pesticides, in particular, something called neonicotinoids (or “neonics”), which wreak their own special hell on the planet’s ecosystems.
Like cluster bombs, land mines, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, “they persist in the environment,” almost as though—forgive the analogy—commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature.
Neonicotinoids “are the most widely used insecticides in the world,” she writes. “Unlike traditional pesticides, which are typically applied to plant surfaces, neonics... are absorbed and transported through all parts of the plant tissue.
“ ...Modeled after nicotine, neonicotinoids interfere with insects’ nervous systems, causing tremors, paralysis, and eventually, death. Neonicotinoids are so toxic that one corn seed treated with them contains enough insecticide to kill over 80,000 honey bees.”
And, like cluster bombs, land mines, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, “they persist in the environment,” almost as though—forgive the analogy—commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature.
If neonics are so dangerous, what is the Environmental Protection Agency doing about it? Not very much, as it turns out, despite scientific evidence of their danger, which is why Center for Food Safety, along with the Pesticide Action Network North America, are suing the agency. As van Saun writes, “almost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds,” but the agency refuses to regulate them.
The result, according to a U.N. report, is that cropland is approximately 50 times more toxic than it was a quarter of a century ago, at the beginning of the 21st century, and the world is currently experiencing an “insect apocalypse.”
And indeed, it begins to appear that the EPA has a mission that transcends “environmental protection.” It may well be that this agency—part of a governmental culture that supports and benefits from wealth and war—has a mission that is more about official denial of the dangers of planetary exploitation. The EPA’s refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by neonics is just a small part of it.
“Critics accuse the EPA of being inappropriately cozy with the pesticide industry, and biasing its decisions to favor companies selling pesticides,” the Guardian writes. “Several EPA scientists came forward last year, publicly alleging that EPA management routinely pressures EPA scientists to tamper with risk assessments of chemicals in ways that downplayed the harm the chemicals could pose...
“The scientists complained, among other things, that key managers move back and forth between industry jobs and positions at the EPA.”
This is when I started hearing an alarm go off in my head: Cultural malfunction alert! Cultural malfunction alert! This is what things look like when exploitation prevails: when grabbing all the goodies you can is at the cultural core, rather than something a bit more complex, such as understanding—and revering—the eco-reality (also known as nature) in which we live.
And beyond that, can we not create a culture that faces the paradoxes of life with a certain level of openness and a continued interest in learning? Life is not something to be reduced to simplistic opposites: win vs. lose, good vs. evil. There is darkness within all of us, but we can’t let it determine our fate or shape our understanding of the world. Yet I fear this is the nature of “modern,” as opposed to Indigenous, culture. Humanity, over the past few millennia, has moved its sense of reverence away from Mother Earth and essentially to Father Sky, rather than continuing to revere both. As a result, Mother Earth is ours to do with as we choose.
This is what things look like when exploitation prevails...
The opposite viewpoint—apparently the indigenous viewpoint, which European land-grabbers called “savage”—isn’t quite so simple. The natural world, while rife with struggle, can’t be reduced to “survival of the fittest.” Rather, it exists in a state of complex cooperation among all concerned—plants, animals—and evolves via the interdependence of all life.
As Rupert Ross wrote in his remarkable book about Indigenous culture, Returning to the Teachings: “The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest... waste... weed.”
Back to pesticides then. Back to weed killers. Back to climate change and the apparent inability of the polluters who purport to be in charge of Planet Earth to address it adequately: Superficial change won’t do it. The change has to be cultural. It has to be spiritual.
Believe me, if we fail to change who we are and the bees—the pollinators—disappear, we’ll all feel the sting.
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