ISSUE #42: Reading a Book About Insects Disappearing and Having a Chill Time

A Bugstack book report.

a portion of a print by E.A. Seguy, who will be the subject of a future post

I realized about a month ago that I read barely any nonfiction books in 2024, which, while I do tend to read mostly fiction, is unusual for me. My nonfiction count at time of publication is seven (I’m doing the Penelope hair twirl), which includes a book about the Museum of Jurassic Technology; Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, a richly detailed travelogue of British waterways; and The Cloudspotter’s Guide, an encyclopedia of clouds and atmospheric phenomena by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. All three of these are great and come highly recommended from me, but none of them are specifically about the most important thing in my life, which is bugs.

I decided last month that I would finally read a book that I had honestly been putting off for some time: Oliver Milman’s The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World (subtitled more gently in European printings: Our Fragile Dependence on the Planet’s Smallest Creatures (which is the edition I have)). It was released in 2022, and I’d been putting it off because of the obvious fact that it’s about extinction, which is something I do enjoy reading about but also something that tends to bum me out.

Despite that, I think it’s good to regularly remind ourselves that what is happening in the world at this very moment is maybe not what is supposed to be happening, and that perhaps endless growth is not what our ecosystems, both natural and sociopolitical, are designed to sustain. The Insect Crisis is about one very specific aspect of our ongoing ecological collapse—the net loss of insects and insect diversity—that has ramifications that extend outward into all aspects of our lives.