The Silence We're Not Hearing

Something is missing from summer.

Not dramatically missing. Quietly missing. The kind of absence you notice before you can name it.

Fewer moths circling the porch light. A garden that seems a little too still. An evening that once hummed and now, mostly, doesn’t.

If you have lived in the same place long enough, you may remember the difference: the hum, the flutter, the sense of summer as something alive and moving. Children growing up today may not. To them, this is simply what summer sounds like.

And that may be the most unsettling part.

The bugs are disappearing.

The declines vary by species and place, but the pattern is showing up across countries. In the United States, butterfly abundance fell 22 percent between 2000 and 2020. In the UK, more than half of butterfly species are in long-term decline. And a 27-year study in protected nature reserves in Germany found that the biomass of flying insects fell by more than 75 percent.

The German study wasn’t conducted on intensively farmed land. These were places set aside for nature.

It is easy to think of bugs as background noise, or as something we would happily have fewer of. But insects help hold much of the living world together.

They pollinate many of the crops we eat. Songbirds depend heavily on insects to feed their young. So do freshwater fish, bats, frogs and countless other animals. Insects break down dead plants and animals and return nutrients to the soil.

How did we get here?

There is no single culprit. Habitat loss, intensive agriculture, pesticides, climate change and artificial light all appear to play a role.

Even our lawns are part of the changed landscape. Turfgrass covers so much land that researchers have estimated it would be the nation’s largest irrigated crop if it were classified as a crop. Compared with native grasses, wildflowers and shrubs, a closely mowed lawn provides relatively little food and habitat for insects.

But there is another problem that is easier to overlook.

No one owns the insects.

No one owns clean air or a stable climate. Biodiversity belongs to no one, yet all of us depend on the ecosystems it sustains.

Economists have several names for versions of this problem, but the vulnerability is much the same: something can be enormously valuable without having an owner or a price.

And things without a price can be mistaken for things without value.

Farmers account for the value of every acre and the cost of seed, fertilizer, labor and equipment. But the wild insects pollinating crops rarely appear on a balance sheet.

Nature provides those services for free.

Until it doesn’t.

In parts of China, farmers have resorted to pollinating some fruit trees by hand, flower by flower, where natural pollination has become inadequate. Similar reliance on hand pollination has been documented in other countries. Work that insects once performed freely can require human labor.

What can we do?

The good news is that governments are not powerless to address insect decline. Germany responded to the evidence with a national insect-protection program and later legislation aimed at protecting habitat, reducing pesticide impacts and addressing threats including artificial light.

Many of the solutions are already well understood: protect and restore habitat, preserve wildflower strips and native vegetation around field edges, and reduce pesticide use and unnecessary artificial light.

At home, plant native flowers and shrubs. Leave some leaves and stems where insects can overwinter. Avoid pesticides when possible and turn off outdoor lights when they aren’t needed.

But backyard changes alone cannot solve a decline occurring on this scale.

Agricultural policy, pesticide regulation and habitat protection matter because the larger challenge is deciding how much value to place on things that markets do not naturally price, but that all of us depend on.

Clean air. Healthy soil. Pollinators. Biodiversity.

They can seem free because no one sends us a bill.

The cost arrives when they disappear.

And sometimes, before we see it, we can hear it.

A summer evening that used to hum, and now doesn’t.