Bringing Back Insects

IN THE MIDDLE of a grassy prairie land sits a solar energy facility, corporate owned and operated, with its array of solar panels spread out across the land in neat rows, the panels resting atop metal frame platforms, overhead. On the ground below, beneath the solar panels an in the rows seperating the rows platforms is a ubiquitous grassy field of wildflowers, buzzing with insects, including many different pollinators, mainly bumble bees. A bee keeper maintains ten different colonies of bees, each colony a loarge wooden box with a screen lid, inside of which is a massive beehive, and thousands of buzzing bees, making honey. The beekeeper spends much time each day maintaining, caring for the hives, which serve as massive bee production facilities, sending a constant swarm of bees out into a world in which the population of pollinating bees,and insects of all sorts, have declined in population by more than fifty percent, a dangerous indication of the surrent state of the health of the world's ecosystem. Solar energy and insect nursery at one location, two birds with one stone, so to epeak, a perfect combination for a sustainable future for all life on Earth. If memory serves, there is also a monarch butterfly sanctuary on the American side of the Rio Grande. The more, the merrier. May the entire planet become a sanctuary for all species of life. Each spring in recent years I designate a small part of of my year, an areabout nine square feet, or three feet square, one in my front yard and another in the back, as a natural habitat and insect sanctuary. I keep the lawn mower out of these protected wilderness areas, and let the weeds grow. As the growing season proceeds, the insect activity within these sancturaries becomes quite extensive, telling me that the project is worthwhile. I have noticed, or think I have, that during my lifetime there has been a decrease in insects, especially the fire flies of warm summer evenings, among other species. Insects used to end up smashed upon the windshield in large numbers after a drive along any American highwayas those of a certain age will recall; now, our windshields stay more free of smashed insect bodies, or at least so it seems to me. And, as a matter of fact, the entymologiststell us that indeedthe insectpopulation of teh world, all specis on all continents, has seriously decreased and is seriously decreasing, a trend which, if it continues long enough, will bring about the extinction of all life on Earth, including us. Alas, we need to return to a world where our windshields are covered with bugs. When I was a kid in the nineteen sixties I wa taught in school that there were about three billion people in the world, and about two hundred and fifty million in the United States. When the world population reached tehe five billion mark, in 1987,it seemed like a very large number, and I kept wondering how high it would eventually go. The newspaper in my hometown celebrated one hundred years of publishing in 1997 by sponsoring a contest,in which people worte an submitted essays describing their vision of the worldin the year 2097.I got thirdplace,and won twenty five dollars, by writing about a worldin which twenty billion people live in super high rise bildings thousand of feet tall. Here in the real world, we are wll past eight billion, the global birth rate is declining, fast, almost as if nature is turning off the baby machine, and it is predicted that the world's population will max out at about nine billion by mid century, will level off, and then steadily decline back to previous levels. This scenario sounds preferable to me to my version. Assuing, of course, that hamans are not alone on the planet, and are still sharing it with billions of insects, pollinating vast areas of wildflower wilderness.