The thing that gets on my nerves is that this is really an unsolvable political problem.

When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.

And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy.

There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know).

Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments.

I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land.

Wildlife has absolutely disappeared.

It's really a tough, tough political battle.

Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.

> When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.

The problem is... farmers are a pretty split bunch. On the one side you have the last few remaining small holdouts trying to make ends meet with a few dozen cows or so, they already get swamped in ever increasing bureaucracy, and on the other side you got the megafarms who not only have the benefits of scale available to them (in anywhere from machines to sheer purchase power for feedstock) but also got dedicated full time employees just taking care about getting government handouts.

Of course the small ones get up in arms whenever anything changes, they don't have the capacity and resiliency left anymore.

Tell it like it is!

Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems.

I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).

Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.

Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.

> Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.

Sure, but the real push came over the last few decades, (IMHO) closely correlating with the utter decline of employment in the primary sector [1], that was all machines and efficiencies of scale.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindik...

But that isn't true in all areas. And the particular study in Germany that found a 76% decline was done in forest areas.