The Bugs and Balloons of Childhood--Oh, that awful windshield

Do you remember 30 or 40 years ago, you’d go on a long drive in the summer as evening came on and by the time you go to your destination your windshield was so covered with bugs you wonder how you saw through it. And if you tried to use the wipers, they’d just smear all over the surface and make things worse. On a bad night you had to pull into a gas station just to clean them off.
And do you ever wonder why that doesn’t happen anymore?

It’s not just global warming—that’s bad enough—but also the lack of biodiversity on the planet. Monocultures. Razing forests and ploughing up plains for crops. It’s killing the insects. And that’s why there are so many birds than you remember. People born in the last twenty or thirty years think this silence is normal. It’s becoming normal, this silent spring. But the skies used to be full of birds and the air with their songs. Now you hardly see or hear them.

And the lack of food and territory is killing a lot more than bugs and birds. One million species are threatened with extinction at this very moment. Humans aren’t. Humans are thriving. We’re the ones pushing out all those other species. But in the long run—we too are a threatened species. We need the bugs as much as the birds do. And we need the birds too, for both practical and spiritual reasons.

And is our government doing anything? Yes it is. Under Trump it is making it easier and easier to build coal burning power plants and drill for more and more oil—even though if we burn the stores we already have we’ll pass the threshold for viable life on this planet. And it’s making it easier for agricultural interests to convert more and more of the land to food production. Three cheers for the economy, Watch it expand like a big red balloon—bigger and bigger, with laughter and cheers. Like the balloons of childhood.