Nature's Best Hope (Young Readers' Edition) by Douglas W. Tallamy

Author:Douglas W. Tallamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s strange that we don’t appreciate them.

Do you know people who panic when they see a spider or who go out of their way to step on an ant? Are you one of those people?

First of all, calm down. Second of all, keep reading and see if you can develop a new attitude toward the tiny creatures that are actually keeping you alive.

Swatting a fly or slapping a mosquito here and there is one thing, but human beings have declared war on insects. We spray our lawns and gardens and farms with poisons, trying to kill them, and I’m sorry to say that we’re succeeding.

You know already that there are only a few monarch butterflies left. Karner blue butterflies, European honeybees, and four thousand species of native bees in North America are also in trouble.

Three species of North American bumblebees are already extinct. Thirty percent of grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids in Europe are at risk. Forty-six species of butterflies and moths have disappeared completely from Germany. The number of insects in the world has gone down by 45 percent—nearly half—since 1974.

Okay, I know. Mosquitoes bite us. Bees sting us once in a while. (Only a few kinds, and not very often!) Flies are annoying. It’s true.

But once we understand how important insects are, and how most of them can’t hurt us at all, we can learn to change how we feel about them. And then we can change how we treat them.

After all, we’ve done it before.

We once hunted whales close to extinction because we saw them as nothing more than a source of oil to light our lamps. Now we protect them. We thought of wolves as deadly predators to be slaughtered. Now we’ve brought them back to Yellowstone, where they are keeping the park balanced and healthy. Egrets were nearly wiped out because we loved to see their long white feathers in ladies’ hats. Now these graceful birds soar over the Everglades again.

If we did it for these larger animals, we can do it for insects. (And for their arachnid cousins like spiders too.) We can learn to share the earth with the animals who are making it possible for us to live here.

We’d better.

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