Скачать или смотреть The world's insect population is in decline — and that's bad news for humans

Habitat loss, pesticides and climate change are threatening insect populations worldwide. In 2019, Biological Conservation reported that 40% of all insects species are declining globally and that a third of them are endangered.

And while it may sound nice to live in a world with fewer roaches, environmental writer Oliver Milman says that human beings would be in big trouble without insects. That's because insects play critical roles in pollinating plants we eat, breaking down waste in forest soil and forming the base of a food chain that other, larger animals — including humans — rely upon.

"It would be an extremely dire place to live in — and certainly not something we should ever aim for," Milman says of an insect-free existence. "You would certainly have mass starvation [and] societal unrest ..... It'd be a place where there would be rotting feces and corpses everywhere because dung beetles and other insects that break down those materials would be gone."

Milman charts the troubling decline of insects in his new book, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. He says that while it's impossible to know exactly what's happening with every insect species in the world, the overall trends are not good: The monarch butterfly population in North America has plummeted in the past 40 years, for instance, and a U.N. assessment done in 2019 found that half a million insect species are under threat of extinction, some in the coming decades.