When I was a kid, I remember seeing clouds of them in the school field when we went out to play. There used to be so many that they would cover your windshield. For the last few years I have hardly seen any around. Today, I only saw a single solitary bug lazily flying through the air.
I suspect the rapidly changing climate is the cause but, I guess I feel a bit of shock at realizing and reflecting on the fact that this is happening right at home.
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We’re terraforming our entire biosphere so that the only thing it supports are domesticated animals and crops. Even if you ignore all the unintended consequences of that, the intended consequences are: we are destroying almost all the food and shelter required for wild creatures to survive on earth. Wild bugs, animals, and plants literally only survive because there still exist small random patches of land that were not economical to develop, and they cling to life on them. Everywhere else on earth is a wasteland, re-shaped by these unfathomable beings that taken over and imposed their will on the very land and air.
I remember one day passing by a group of geese wandering through a walmart parking lot. Me and them just stood there and looked at each other, and I imagined that we had swapped places. What if we were just people living in the world, and these absolutely unfathomable advanced alien entities came to earth and just started reshaping everything, leaving us wild humans to live on the fringes of still unchanged land that the aliens had for some unknown reason not converted yet to their own environment? Imagine being a human wandering through the landscape of the Changed Zone, reshaped into forms that you can’t even understand, but with are anathema to human existence. And then imagine that you stumble upon one of these alien entities, and are trying to understand it, to communicate with it… but receiving no answer, not because they couldn’t, but because they just don’t care about you at all. The goose doesn’t have that level of understanding, of course, but that’s the experience they were going through. Nature is cruel, but what people are doing to it is one of the most evil crimes in history.
Reminds me of the core themes of A Roadside Picnic, which draws a parallel between the horrifying causality-breaking bullshit in The Zone and the aftermath of a family stopping for a picnic on the side of the road and leaving trash and leftover food everywhere, which must seem similarly alien to the wildlife.
