Bugs, Biology, and Molecules, part 2: Flame Off
The nature of our interaction with everything around us is molecular.
We dwell within a sea of molecules, which we’re a very intimate part of. Although we believe that we have some kind of identity independent of the molecules, we don't. Even our thoughts themselves are a function of molecular relationships.
The planet earth has consisted, for much of its history, as a long experiment in not just mineral but also organic life. Minerals already make a complex enough set of intricate molecular relationships to begin with; but organic life is far more creative, and has resulted in a staggering number of new and novel molecules not found, for example, on Mars, where molecular relationships are extraordinarily simple by comparison.
Everything that we do ultimately depends on the relationship between the molecules in our body and the way that those molecules relate to molecules in our outer environment. They’re engaged in a perpetual and extraordinarily complex exchange with one another at every instant. In order to model the scale of data being generated and exchanged from moment to moment, consider the fact that no supercomputer on earth could come remotely close to calculating even a tiny fraction of all the molecular interactions that take place in a given instant in a single human body.
Despite the fact that almost everything we do depends on this, we largely ignore the fact that we’re molecular creatures and that we depend entirely on molecular relationships for our health and well-being. I explained much of this, at least from one limited point of view, in my blog The Microbial Octave, also a book—which I will provide a free link to if I can get around it. The point is that beneath everything we perceive lie the floorboards of molecular interaction. Microbes are in direct contact with it; and insects are in much more immediate contact with it than we are due to their tiny size.
Think about it this way. I weigh 160 pounds (about 72.7 kg.) The average housefly weighs .007 g. I am 20 million times heavier than a housefly; and in a general sense — this isn’t exactly scientific, but it gives you an idea of the scale —a housefly is a staggering 20 million times more susceptible to the intimate action of molecular chemistry than I am, because every interaction is that much more concentrated relative to its size. Consequently, chemicals that we put into the environment that have almost no effect whatsoever on us may be catastrophic to insects. And, as we are in fact learning, they are. We’re flooding the environment with a vast range of chemicals that have staggering and life-threatening impacts on bugs. A chemical rated as “safe” for human beings by the FDA, for example, at 10 ppm (parts per million) may be absolutely deadly to insects and their larva at that level of concentration. Scientific studies have borne that contention out; many of the chemicals we produce that are deemed “harmless” create hormone analogs that are causing insect larva to mutate or die, and affecting the sexual reproduction of insects in general. Even more disturbingly, those same “harmless” chemicals are probably to blame for the fact that young women are reaching puberty at much earlier ages than they used to.
The problem is that we produce so many novel chemicals in our industries over the course of the average year that it’s next to impossible to study them all and understand even their short term impact, which is the only impact we have the attention span to study.
Because so many of the studies that do examine chemicals and their consequences have serious economic impacts on the companies that make them—almost always because it turns out they are very poisonous and really bad for us, as in the case of flame retardants – industry lobbyists have spent billions of dollars over the last 50 years lobbying in Washington to make sure that not a single penny of federal funds is spent studying novel chemicals and what they do. It's now literally illegal to use federal funds for that purpose, leaving all of what little research there is in the badly underfunded and relatively tiny private sector at universities. Even there, there are forces that don’t want anyone to look at these questions.
It might cost them money.
There aren't enough people interested in this problem. Over the past 40 years, America consequently poisoned literally billions of American infants by saturating their mattresses with deeply carcinogenic flame retardants to make them "safe" from potential fires. We also applied those same flame retardants to all the cushions in our living room sofas, adult mattresses, etc. – and then sat around wondering why more and more people get cancer every year.
Well, wouldn’t you know. We finally realized how bad the flame retardants were, duh, because some of those pesky scientists were finally listened to. Finally, after their studies (which the chemical industry actively tried to discredit) made it absolutely clear that these chemicals were terrible for everyone and everything, they were banned — and the industry promptly came up with a whole new set of similar chemicals which hadn't been studied. They’re still in use because there simply isn't enough money to fund research on them. The little research that has been done suggests, by the way, that they’re just as bad as the original chemicals (surprise!) but no one is doing anything about it. Remember: it's against the law to use federal funds to find out if chemicals are poisonous to people.
You can't make this stuff up. Unfortunately, you don’t need to.
Even more interesting and alarming — tests on a wide range of infant mattresses 5 to 10 years ago indicated that a lot of the banned chemicals are still in active use, because the mattresses are made in China where no one cares about this, and the industry is very badly policed.
These chemicals—the flame retardants are just one of hundreds of thousands of examples—which are acutely poisonous to human beings, are much MORE poisonous to tiny little insects. And we are dumping them all over the planet at an alarming rate. This is most likely why so many bugs are dying.
We ignore the molecular nature of our existence at our peril. Above all of the unsustainable things we do, novel molecules from the petrochemical, plastic, and pesticide industry are probably the number one reason that the insect apocalypse is currently underway. There are those who will argue differently than me — Doug Talamy, for example, who wrote “Bringing Nature Home" and other important books on the subject believes that it is our failure to plant native species. I agree with him; it's a major problem. But even native species cannot withstand the onslaught of the massive dumping of foreign and novel chemistry into the molecular environment which insect have to inhabit at all times. What looks like an innocent, healthy, natural environment to us has become a sea so polluted that much of the wildlife in it is struggling to keep its head above water.
This is all taking place on a scale which we never give much thought to; but the chemicals I’m talking about here are going to kill a lot more people than Vladimir Putin’s depredations. We remain oblivious to the situation, and because of its nature are probably going to continue to do so until it is too late.
