If these invertebrates were to disappear, the land’s ecosystem would collapse
above. Your home is not untidy: it’s lived-in. We don’t want a tidy countryside: we want a place full of life.
We have many great nature reserves and other wild places in this country, but they mean nothing unless they are joined up. Such connections keep the countryside alive. Roadside verges and field margins, buzzing and fizzing with insect life, are a classic way of joining up the dots. There are two more useful things that insects do: they are very good at eating, and very good at being eaten.The robin that sits on your spade, the blue tit that hangs upside down from your bird-feeder and the swallows and swifts in the sky all depend directly on insects and other invertebrates to stay alive.
Insects also eat other invertebrates, and many of these are inconvenient to humans. Hoverfly larvae eat aphids and so do ladybirds; parasitic wasps kill caterpillars; lacewings eat aphids and insect eggs; ground beetles eat slugs and snails.
It’s been estimated that the annual value to this country of the services provided – free – to agriculture by pollinating insects is £430million. It’s also been estimated that we use 31,000 tonnes of pesticide on farmland every year. In the United States they have used so much pesticide they have to hire – at vast expense – lorry-loads of domestic bees to do the job of pollination.
In parts of China they do the job by hand: shifting pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush or a fag-butt.
We live with a comfortable myth about our own country. We really believe that because we have a tradition of loving animals, our country reflects this love: that while some species may be in decline here, things are a whole lot worse in other countries.
THE TRUTH is that we live in one of the most nature-deprived countries in Europe. But we can all do something about this. You can support your local county wildlife trust (and yes, there is one for London).
You can make a point of using fewer toxic chemicals in your house, because they get out into the environment.
If you have a garden you can cut right down on pesticides – zero strikes me as a good number – and grow plants that insects love (try catmint). Doing nothing at all is also a significant act: let some of your garden go wild.
The back gardens of Britain are potentially the nation’s biggest and most important nature reserve.
The planet we live on operates on complexity: many, many different kinds of things living in many, many different ways, all of which interweave and interlock in ways that baffle the imagination. Complexity is life, resilience, strength. And insects, in their unimaginable numbers, are the crucial part of that complexity.
But let’s leave the last words to Sir David Attenborough. At the end of his great series about invertebrates, Life in the Undergrowth, he said: “If we and the rest of the backboned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if [the invertebrates] were to disappear, the land’s ecosystems would collapse.
“The soil would lose its fertility. Many of the plants would no longer be pollinated. Lots of animals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals would have nothing to eat. And our fields and pastures would be covered with dung and carrion.
“These small creatures are within a few inches of our feet, wherever we go on land — but often, they’re disregarded.We would do very well to remember them.”