Bugs!

 Sitting in my recliner watching a ballgame (one of my favorite things to do), an advertisement captured the screen: Get rid of all bugs immediately! It was a promise to take these troublesome creatures away, kill them, leave us happier and more comfortable. And indeed I, like everyone else, do not love to be bitten by mosquitoes, am bothered by flies. Unless they are getting in our way, it is easy to give bugs little attention. Most of us have been brought up to think of them as pests, and though the importance of pollinators has crept into our collective consciousness, our inclination to get rid of bugs persists: spiders, beetles, ticks, chiggers, flies, gnats, wasps, ants, mosquitoes, and all manner of creepy crawly things.

When my daughter Heidi was a toddler, she showed a passionate interest in bugs. She would sit in the garden and explore the caterpillars and the butterflies they would become. She watched the insects crawling up vegetable stems, noticed the holes in the leaves where they had eaten, and marveled at the flight of other tiny creatures. She was captivated. Her natural response to these small life forms was curiosity and fascination, not a bit of the repulsion that we later learn. I wondered if she would become an entomologist. That did not happen, but she has always loved plants and for years her career involved taking care of them.

Those of us paying attention to the gradual changes in our ecosystems will have heard stories about how only 20 or 30 years ago when you drove your car in the summer, the windshield would gradually be covered with bugs, smashed from the air by the speed of the car. I remember this clearly. It made washing windshields a necessity. And now, I can't remember a recent time when I noticed even ONE bug smashed on my windshield. It seems likely that this is evidence that the number of bugs has greatly decreased, not that bugs have gotten smart enough to avoid getting hit by cars. Although some folks might rejoice in this change, we also know enough to realize this is cause for concern. After all, it was no accident that insects appeared on the earth. In fact, they appeared long, long before we did!

It was 480 million years ago when the first insect crawled out onto the land, about the same time that plants also became land-dwellers. About 80 million years later, some insects had evolved enough to grow wings and were the first creatures to fly. It wasn't until 145 million years ago that some insects started to co-evolve with some flowering plants. Think of that! Two totally different life forms began to cooperate, the one pollinating the other so it could multiply, in return for the nourishment of sap or pollen. Especially important in this insect pollinator category were wasps, bees, ants, butterflies, flies and beetles. Right now in the present time, 20% of insects depend upon flowers, nectar and pollen for their food. And two thirds of all flowering plants are pollinated by insects. If we let this fact sink in, we realize that without bugs, we would be in trouble!

The near-sightedness of our species makes it a challenge to identify with an insect. However, I've found that to really see things in the world, it helps to try to become them in my mind. It's a fun and enlightening practice for me. And when I imagine what it might be like to be a bug, it's a stretch. My world would be so different! So much smaller, if I did not have wings. Probably many insects never have any contact with humans in their whole life span. The things they see, smell or feel are earth, plants, sun, or other insects. Their motivation is probably to find nourishment, and instinctively they know what they need and where it will be found. Instinct drives much of their lives. They lay eggs instinctively so their species continues. Their instinct drives them to the particular plants who may benefit from their presence by pollination. And their life span, compared to ours, is usually infinitesimal. Sometimes only days, or even one day. I wonder about how they communicate, what they sense, how they are connected with the wider system they crawl through. It is easy to anthropomorphize here, putting human feelings into bugs. But the truth is that they are far different than us, and we don't really know what they sense.

Even though most insects may never encounter a person or have any sense of us huge beings living on their world, our changes to the environment have affected everything profoundly including bugs. We all know this. Farming with insecticides, the "progress" of paving over the earth for roads, building of cities, pollution of air, climate change: these things have threatened the health of our wider ecosystems on the planet, including insects. And including us. If you're like me, you're beginning to wonder if we can turn back the tide, save the planet. And looking at the accumulated facts, it looks pretty grim. As I was reading about the long history of insects on earth, moving through many different eras, it gave me a new perspective. We are used to thinking about everything evolving around our own species. Maybe that's understandable. But the fact is that this planet earth has gone through many extinctions already. And it recovers. Things change, life dies, and then evolves again. No one species is more important than the others when it comes to the long view. We are in the midst of change. The earth tends toward balance. It is likely that in another million years, the earth will still be here, evolving, creating. Whether we'll be part of that picture is unknown, but it's been a good ride and I'm grateful!