19 quotes
‘Normal’ is different for every generation.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
One man’s weed is another man’s wildflower.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
If one looks at the bigger picture, modern farming is part of a staggeringly inefficient, cruel and environmentally damaging food-supply system.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Insecticides kill all insects, not just the ones that they are aimed at, whatever the doublethinkers who manufacture agrochemicals may ask you to believe.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
These are beneficial creatures, and should be celebrated, not persecuted and poisoned in some misguided psychotic urge to kill anything that dares to thrive.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
It is sometimes said that humanity is at war with nature, but the word ‘war’ implies a two-way conflict. Our chemical onslaught on nature is more akin to genocide.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
As with most new technologies, however, our enthusiasm for the benefits blinded us for sometime to the downsides.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
If one was designing a system from scratch to feed the world with healthy food in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way, it would look nothing like our current forming system.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Truth was defined by those who shouted loudest, or had the money to buy it.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Globally, beef provides just 2 per cent of the calories we consume, yet 60 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Even today there are deniers, sadly including the previous President of the United States and many of his followers – but then there are also people who argue that the world is flat.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Ants alone outnumber us by about one million to one. Until perhaps the last 200 years, an alien looking down on Earth at any time in the last 400 million years would have concluded that this was the kingdom of the insects.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Why he was asked to comment on a subject on which he has no expertise is unclear, but in these strange times it seems common for the opinions of celebrities to be valued regardless of qualifications or experience.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Supporters of the chemtrail theory are generally dismissed as crackpots, and rightly so, because it is absurd to believe that a conspiracy on the scale they describe could possibly be kept quiet. It is not much more plausible than suggesting that the Earth is flat.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Personally, I do not think we should dismiss GM technology. However, so far most GM crops have been developed by large corporations, with the clear goal of lining their pockets rather than benefiting people or the environment.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
It took many millions of years for evolution to slowly create unique assemblages of plants and animals in each region of our planet, and only a couple of hundred years for us to muddle them up.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so that we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)
One theory as to why metamorphosis is such a successful strategy is that it enables the immature stages and the adults to each specialise in different tasks, and to have a body designed for the purpose.‡
‡Please note that I am not suggesting intelligent design by a supreme being. ‘Design’ is shorthand for the blind tinkering of evolution over millennia.
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021)