THE 6TH MASS EXTINCTION
A Holocaust too small to notice
The silent extinction happening on your front lawn
I’m sunbathing blocks away from my flat in north London. It is a beautiful sunny 26C day, fresher than the all time record of 38.5C just days ago. That was the day when I went to two supermarkets and they were both closed because the refrigerators broke down in the heat. It was the day when mass brawls broke out all across the UK in lido swimming pools where people waited in 3-hour queues just to take a dip in some dirty water. The day when rail lines buckled under the heat, stranding hundreds of thousands of London commuters. It was a vision of the future that is already upon us. Welcome to Climate Change.
A Diverse Micro-forest under threat
As I lie down on the grass on my side, with my face touching the beach towel, my eyes assume a very peculiar viewpoint: the viewpoint of an ant. The weeds around me look like huge, tall trees. It is because I’m lying on an “unkept” lawn that has been allowed to grow undisturbed all spring and summer.
And then I notice I am actually in one of those Disney insect movies. There is a snail, attached to a Dandelion. An ant, sunbathing in a grass kernel. A tiny bug I have never seen before, just having a good old walk on a stalk, as it says “yo” to a butterfly strutting the hood above.
From this viewpoint, I can see just how many different plants and insects live within just centimetres of my face. It is a megacity of species living next to each other on what is, to them, a habitat as rich as a rainforest.
Contrast this with a well-kept, manicured lawn. Sterile. Lifeless. Probably full of chemicals, and with an equally lifeless soil beneath.
At a time when insect populations worldwide are declining by alarming estimates of up to 80% in some cases, we are still not doing the obvious: letting insects be, right in front of our houses and parks.
The unkept grasslawn is the elephant in the room. The rainforest we have been ignoring all along. It harbours a tremendous diversity of life. As I get up from my towel and walk around, it doesn’t take long for me to realise how much something so simple as a grass lawn is actually brimming with life. Crickets, grasshoppers and other insects create a symphony of sounds in the heat of the midday summer, to remind me, and all of us:
This lawn is alive. There are souls living here. Millions of them.
What we need is new regulations, that stem from the Climate Emergency that London has declared as a response to the Extinction Rebellion. Unkept lawns can be extra carbon sinks at a time when we need all the carbon capture we can get. Some of them can even be turned back to forest. They can safeguard the continuation of thousands, millions of insect species that are the basis for our food chain. They pollinate our crops, they are food for birds and animals, they maintain soil health. Insects are the basis for the food cycle, without them we’d be doomed.
We still don’t know why insects are in such steep decline
It is worrying that we still do not understand why insects are declining so much, so rapidly around the world. It has been suggested that even minor changes in temperature can affect the survival of many species of insects, who are much more susceptible to temperature fluctuations compared to larger animals.
Given that there is a severe lack of research in the impact of climate change on insects, we cannot afford to take risks. We need to start respecting insects as much as we respect pretty birds and pretty animals. The warnings are everywhere:
Insects are going extinct
Small things can make a huge difference
let’s let large parts of our lawns run wild. Throwing wild-flower seed mix in the spring and giving insects a chance to have a home. Small actions like these can make us feel encouraged and hopeful about the future despite the bleakness. They can educate our children to grow up and become the environmental warriors that they’ll need to be.
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