Age of insects

This week is Canada Environment Week, and the national newspaper observed it with a series of articles entitled "Death wish." It reviews the evidence than humanity is pushing itself and many others toward extinction. It is a timely warning.

But the Globe and Mail also makes some puzzling statements about the primacy of our species. It glibly asserts that Homo sapiens was "the big winner when the dinosaurs surrendered the Earth." It repeats the outdated notion that we're living in "the Age of Man," and even proposes metaphorically that we have become the fifth element—a malevolent one to be sure—along with earth, air, fire and water.

It's strange that writer Alanna Mitchell travelled and researched as far as she did without realizing that, except for all the havoc we're raising, humans are relatively insignificant. Since the dinosaurs vanished, life on earth has gone through vast swells of evolution and species diversity, and even some later spasms of extinction, long before early humans arose. We've been wandering around the planet and causing trouble for only a brief flicker of geological time.

And as these articles predict, we will probably disappear in another imperceptible flicker. We may even cause the grimmest plague of extinctions since a massive meteorite slammed into the planet 65 million years ago.

But what's hard to acknowledge is that life will go on. Not for us, to be sure, but for those organisms which, on the rawest level, are truly adaptable and resourceful.

On a mild spring day, I'm sitting on my favourite high black willow limb overlooking the Eramosa River. In the last few weeks the woods has come alive. The backwaters teem with polliwogs, the trees have burst with lush growth, and the canopy buzzes and whistles with birds: black-capped chickadees, an American redstart, an indigo bunting. But no creature group is in evidence as much as the various insects: water striders skimming the river's surface, minute gnats drifting among the trees, large black ants scouring the bark of my willow.

Whatever killed off the dinosaurs, it never defeated insects. They were among the first land animals, and have been around for more than 400 million years. Giant dragonflies were cruising the primeval swamps tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs appeared on Earth.

Dinosaurs could hardly shake a tooth or claw at insects. Even when the giant meteorite turned the planet's surface into a widespread holocaust, insects were well-adapted for adversity.

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