Summer meadow is full of flowers. The sultry air is saturated with the aromas of wormwood and strawberries. You are lying on the soft grass. High above you is the blue sky, and below, very close to you, someone is flying and buzzing.
There are a lot of them: butterflies, bumblebees, some midges. They are literally swarming around. Beetles and ants scurry in all directions. One has crawled into my ear, the other is trying to get under my shirt. You wave it off, throw someone off, and unwittingly kill someone. It was like that in childhood, one of my dear memories.
As adults, traveling by car across Europe and America, I also constantly encountered—literally encountered—swarms of flies and midges. They remained on the windshield in a thick layer that was difficult to clean off.
When I first arrived in Oman, I was amazed that the windshield remained clean after hundreds of kilometers of travel. I thought it was due to the climate, but then I realised it was because Oman doesn't have much greenery. After all, all insects live where there is greenery and water. But this is how it happened historically. But when I began to notice that in the northern countries, where there is a lot of greenery and water, the situation is the same, I began to understand that it is not only this. Insects are disappearing everywhere due to some terrible changes in nature. Getting acquainted with the works of recent scientists revealed to me the essence of the ongoing drama: it turns out that out of 100 million tons of the total mass of insects, 2.5 disappear irrevocably every year.
Nowadays, insects have become noticeably smaller, so much smaller that their conservation has become a subject of special concern for ecologists. Species are disappearing and populations are declining. Every year by a few per cent. And after them, there are gradually fewer birds, because insects are their main food. And this happens everywhere.
Even in Oman, where there weren’t that many of them anyway – because they need greenery. Twenty or thirty years ago, when I started traveling to Oman, in the lagoons by the sea and in the lakes you could see flocks of pink flamingos. Where has this most graceful bird gone? They are no longer there. Apparently, their food supply is disappearing, and there are fewer insects. Thinking about this, you no longer want to mindlessly take the life of some tiny creature with a random clap. She, this little midge, is as necessary a part of nature as a tree, a fish, a parrot or a camel. Without it, our world will become poorer and more boring.
Human activity and sophisticated human imagination lead nature to degradation, to the loss of its original functions, the prototype of existence. And against the backdrop of this tragic situation, you often come across a statement from the progressive public that the main evil is red meat, we need to get rid of it, and artificial proteins from insects should be its replacement.
The beetle, the natural food of poultry, becomes a meat substitute for humans. But if we allow such development, the degradation of the insect world will become even greater. And it will no longer be the cheerful jumping colourful birds that will fill the world with their songs, but the well-fed rumbling of overfilled stomachs.
Let's leave our world to the birds, butterflies, and dragonflies the way we saw it at our birth. Man is a sufficiently intelligent being not to start the genocide of farm animals for the sake of the abstract ideas of philosophers, who for some reason have stopped loving meat. Let their fantasies remain fantasies. Can we hope that Greta Thunberg will come to the aid of a bird that has lost its food?
Let us all be a little more attentive and careful to the world around us. It would be a huge loss if bird populations decline these "Forest orderlies."
Forest fires in Siberia and America led to scorched or millions of hectares, respectively, inhabited by insects, birds, animals.
Although natural disasters will still make themselves felt, today it should be understood that the volume of insect biomass has probably long been less than 100 million tonnes. I don’t want to indulge in calculations when the next catastrophe will occur in small harmless creatures.
The writer is author of A Reformer on the Throne: Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Al Said, sergey.plekhanov@gmail.com
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