Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects

i mean, at least where I live many records about average and max temperature have been broken 3 years in a row now. I suppose if this continues it will actually start to be not unusual for this to happen.

my parents have been avoiding using stuff like glyphosate for years.

They would describe it better than I can, but they can get away with e.g. just having plants that are repulsive to aphids (and plants that attracts insects that eat them).

They sometimes do have to use stuff like bordeaux mix but very rarely (if ever) use glyphosate.

Their garden is pretty amazing as a result. There are tons of birds (they have bird feeders) and insects. Bats in the summer as well.

Definitely how I see my garden if I ever get a house (I have been living in large cities all my adult life).

I didn't provide any anecdotes but I would point out that even if evidence is just an anecdote, it doesn't mean it's wrong.

> The logic here seems to be "insect populations are dropping so let's forbid some things that are killing insects".

And the counterargument is - let's keep killing them anyway? Why is that more logical?

It's the same logic as - fly/drive/heat less, to reduce carbon release; eat less meat to reduce land usage and methane release; etc.

It seems to me that maybe the primary reason we're doing so much damage to our planet is a combination of

a) for most people, personal convenience > planetary health, and b) as you say: "I have an extremely hard time believing average citizens are having such a huge effect"

The latter is especially pernicious - we are so successful as a species because, working together, we can achieve tremendous changes that aren't possible alone. But that potential for collective action can also have severely negative effects as well. Even a mountain can be leveled eventually if you keep chipping away at it. As an example of collective action, take a trip to Borneo and drive the 100km route from Tawau to Semporna - palm plantations literally as far as the eye can see in every direction, the whole route; it used to be rain forest. Individuals working together (whether deliberately or unknowingly) have a lot more power than they think.

Am I making sense? I'm not sure what's difficult to grasp about all this.

I've been trying to encourage you to think about this holistically because then you might understand where I'm coming from. How about this: look at the front wall of your house - which bricks is it safe to remove? Which of those directly or indirectly benefit the wall? Maybe those over a doorway or window are obviously important, can't lose those, but what about the others? How many can you safely remove before it no longer fulfills its function? How about if it's a giant game of Jenga? Or a massive construction of scaffolding that's been built and rebuilt again and again over thousands of years and overall is holding up a giant roof but with no clear plan how? Which parts of that are safe to remove?

The bees are an easy win - they do a lot of pollination work, but there are other insects that do that too. But is that all that's important? How about the oxygen you breathe or the nitrogen in the soil that nourishes the plants you eat or the rain that waters them? All these things depend on multiple complex cycles involving things like forests, the health of which depend on many other interconnected webs of life at all levels from mammal to microbe. It's Chesterton's Fence on a grand scale - if you don't know what it does, you really shouldn't remove it until you do know what it does. We're still working that out in many, many cases.

A lot of insects provide food for other animals - kill the insects, and we also kill all the things that feed on them. And there are certainly numerous other natural cycles and systems than those I outlined above (did you know that ocean microbes can seed cloud formation? https://news.agu.org/press-release/bacteria-feeding-on-arcti...) - these are just the ones that come to my mind as someone with an amateur interest in these things; I am, as I said, no expert.

> In general they are gross, numerous, invasive, and they carry diseases.

I understand why you might feel that way but, aside from the first (which is your opinion): the second, as we're discussing, is increasingly not the case; the third is generally only true where humans have transported a species to where it shouldn't be; and the fourth is really only true in very few cases - things like cockroaches and house flies, but even these fulfill important roles breaking down organic matter that would otherwise litter the surface of the planet, and thus returning nutrients into the soil, keeping it fertile. Cockroaches etc. are only a disease risk when they intersect with us, find a huge source of waste, and multiply excessively - and in those cases of course we have to deal with them.

> I still do not see why we should protect the insects that are in the city as they do not bring us any benefit.

An obvious reason that comes to mind is that cities as a black hole for insects act to decrease the overall population by simple diffusion.