This is our presidential election year, and a batshit crazy one with two demented geezers slobbering through a debate that would elicit head shakes and chuckles if it occurred in a bar or in the waiting room for a Peter Pan bus. Then one geezer gave up the ghost....I don't have to retell the story. You might not know the name of your home galaxy, but you know Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—you can hear their voices scratching and echoing in the passageways winding through your brain. You see their faces—as though they pressed up threateningly just inches from your nose.
If a mass shooter sprayed your local Big Y with gunfire you might offer a minute of thoughts and prayers, but then the election would gently bring you back to your reserved seat in the collective fantasy, because this election—just like all the others—will decide the fate of creation, the balance of force between democracy and Nazi wannabeism, and pretty much everything else. This election will determine if the greenness of trees, the blueness of skies, the beige hue of dirt and the wetness of water continues for another four years or not.
Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
But I just discovered something so secretly horrific, that it demands our complete attention—turn off the election coverage. You might have discovered the exact same thing. It is the nature of collapsing cultures to keep secrets out in the open. The collapse itself is a secret, even when it loudly and openly proclaims itself. We are completely riveted to banal spectacles, to siren songs as Street writes, and almost nothing can bring us back to nominal reality. While we are diddling away time on this stupid election, the shit has hit the fan. What sort of jolt would slap us hard enough to wake us all up?
Maybe an alien invasion would knock the cobwebs aside. A techno-superior, intergalactic army of cosmic conquerors claiming our world for the flag of some nameless solar system at the far edge of the Laniakea Supercluster—that might reset our priorities. Let Trump build a wall between Andromeda and the Milky Way—and boast that Andromeda will pay for it.
Another thing that might alter our perspective would be a super volcano eruption. Human history has yet to see the fury that patiently gathers beneath the paper thin layers of crustal plates. We have had tiny pop-gun doses of tectonic rage like Vesuvius or Krakatoa, but never the real deal. If Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, or Lake Toba blow their calderas, that might reorder our priorities in a hurry. I could describe the cubic miles of homicidal magma, the sulfuric, sun blocking emissions, and subsequent buildup of greenhouse gasses, but you can go to YouTube to savor a limitless collection of videos that recreate volcanic Armageddon with special effects.
Unfortunately, neither an alien takeover nor a super-volcanic display of cross continental lava can equal the destruction already hiding in plain sight.
Scientists tell us that greenhouse gasses now increase in atmospheric density at a speed ten times faster than the velocity created by Permian mega eruptions. The Siberian Traps super volcanoes (that drove the mother of all mass extinctions 252 million years ago) would sit on the bench of a dream team comprised of Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP and Saudi Aramco.
Allow me to digress and obliquely approach my main point by going back in time - not deep time, but my own time. It is 1964 and I am a high school freshman playing basketball from sunup to sundown with hoop dreams percolating in my head. My two elder companions and summer league teammates (let's call them Doug and Dobie) walk along the border of North Hartford one evening and talk about their philosophy regarding girls and fighting. The topic is about unwritten rules - if you are out with a girl and someone makes a provocative remark, do you stare him down, push him aggressively or throw a sucker punch? This discourse strikes me rather abstractly as I had never been "out with a girl.” The conversation makes me uncomfortable—my naivete will inevitably be targeted. Fortunately, the ritualized display of preening masculinity is preempted by a street light mounted on a telephone pole. Around the light, in a fluttering frenzy, fly thousands of moths.
The sheer number of them creates a mosaic of gyrating shadows at our feet. While each moth flaps silently, the utter mass of them, the aggregate force of weightless creatures, creates a dry, hissing sound—evil and magnetic. These creatures belong to the spirit world—a place greater than our lives of hoops, school and adolescent pretense. We all look up at the lamp and mutter "holy fuck."
That many beating wings have the capacity to induce awe that we don't normally associate with the lowly moth. Moths have, like all insects, the superpower of industrial breeding. They overwhelm the law of averages with such prolific egg production that the remnants of the hungry Mesozoic (birds) can't scarf their way to a mothless world. Moths can gather in dizzying swarms that mock mortality. These communities, swirling vortex-like around every light bulb, prove the strength of numbers.
The ancestors (Holometabola
) of moths and butterflies (Lepitoptera) evolved some 300 million years ago—as such, this superorder that emerged in the late Carboniferous has survived three of the five mass extinctions of deep time—specifically, the aforementioned end Permian, the Triassic and the Cretaceous/Paleogene. The worst, most murderous conditions that mother-nature can concoct in her most terrible moods have never derailed our fluttering masters of hard times.
Moths have evolved spectacular means of adjustment—including the ability to consume the nectar of flowering plants (which emerged in the Cretaceous) and the capacity to sense sonar waves emitted by bats that prey upon them. The leptitopterans have radiated into 180,000 species. This mind blowing fact might be weighed against the six and a half thousand mammalian species currently struggling to limp into the next century.
Moths are one of the most critical pollinators. They also break down rotting leaves and create fertile humus to nourish fields and forests. Their larvae (caterpillars) sustain countless famished species. Moths are the superglue holding the biosphere together—or rather, they once were.
Unfortunately, I have bad news. While I had my face buried in the internet, moths went extinct—at least the sorts that hovered about street lamps in clouds of organic confusion while Doug, Dobie and I looked on in wonder a mere six decades ago. The street lamps in Northampton, Massachusetts—where I now reside as an old man—are now empty, lonely, and silent places.
And in my backyard, funnel spiders would build their webs next to the porch light and grow to enormous sizes feasting on the moths that fell into their ancient traps. Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
We have gotten the narrative ass backward. The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first. The good thing about mass extinction is that T-Rex and the Gorgonopsia had ambitious heirs. But we have created a mass extinction so powerful that heirs have become irrelevant - think about that for a moment. The degradation of nature is now threatening to be total. The toxic sludge, industrial fumes, agricultural poisons, plastics, greenhouse gasses, artificial light, nuclear waste and deforested wastelands have snuck up on us like a hooded assailant in a dark ally.
The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first.
My anecdotal musings may not suffice as an official signature on the Lepitopteran death certificate, but the experts say that bugs are collapsing at record rates—unprecedented in evolutionary history.
While I announce the complete demise of moths in my backyard and my street, a study in the UK has moth populations down
32% since 1968 in the UK. A study in Scotland puts the local moth decline at almost 50%.
A recent
study in a small Florida city concluded:
Comparing the rural site with the greatest total abundance and the urban site with the lowest total abundance across the entire year, we documented a 68% reduction in caterpillar frass mass, an 80% reduction in pooled micro-moth abundance, and a staggering 97% reduction in pooled macro-moth abundance.
Macro-moths means simply, big moths. The decline in population referenced above is not about a reduction across time, but a comparison between populations in urban parks and rural woodlands. Proximity to human beings has not gone well for moths.
And it’s not just moths—it’s all insects. Researcher, Francisco Sanchez-Bayo regarding insect population declines, told
The Guardian in 2019: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
So scientists have been talking about a total insect genocide for a while now, and after a lifetime of obliviousness, I suddenly notice that the moths that have existed in vast numbers throughout my life—creatures that have flourished by the trillions of trillions for almost half the time since the "Cambrian Explosion" have now dropped dead in a finger snap. I could write about birds, bees, butterflies or a million other clades, orders and species getting fucked by humanity’s satanic religion—capitalism.
Imagine yourself going to the doctor for a routine checkup and being told that you have metastatic cancer. "It is in your bones, your brain, in your blood and has colonized the organs in your body." The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
I don't know if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are going to debate, but I am certain that if they do, neither one will say a word about dead and dying moths. Insects are the proletariat of the planet's organic systems, and you can depend on US politicians not to talk about the working class.
