Music Glows In The Air Around Me

In fields and along country roads in areas where agriculture is more industrialized, insect song is muted. There is little natural vegetation left in fields made tidy by herbicides and the vigorous application of the plow. Diverse native grasslands and forests have been transformed into monocultures of annual crops. A 2016 report synthesizing the knowledge of sixty experts in insect biology found that Europe’s grasshoppers, crickets, and their kin are in crisis. About 30 percent of species are threatened with extinction, and the majority of species for which we have good population data are in decline. In North America, grasshopper populations are dwindling even in areas away from the plow and the fog of insecticide. Likely stimulated by extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants on the prairie have doubled their growth in twenty years, but nutrients in this rank vegetation have become diluted. The grasshoppers’ food is now more like bulky, savorless straw than nutritious salad. Not only are crickets and grasshoppers in trouble, but so, too, are many other insects. These insects are the foundation of most ecosystems on land. By biomass, insects outweigh all mammals and birds combined by over twenty times. By number of species, they are at least four hundred times more numerous.

Here Comes Trouble

On land, the sonic diversity produced by hundreds of millions of years of evolution is being sharply cut back. In the growing silence of insects in forests and meadows, we hear the decline of the animals whose lives sustain the vitality of all terrestrial ecosystems. All these social and economic factors exist in a culture of inattention and lack of appreciation. Our ears are directed inward, to the chatter of our own species. Introductions to the sounds of the thousands of species that live in our neighborhoods have no place in most school curricula. We generally regard human language and music as outside nature, disconnected from the voices of others. When a concert starts, we close the door to the outside world. Public monuments to sound are rare and honor a handful of canonical human composers, not the sonic history of the living Earth. Permostridulus’s discovery passed without comment in the media. These are essential ways of knowing and thereby healing the world, but they omit the lived experience of animal senses. Diversity of sensory experience is a generative force, a catalyst for future biological innovation and expansion, not merely a product of evolution’s creativity. The Permian period ended 252 million years ago in a spasm of extinction.

Should I Laugh Or Cry

In the seas, more than 90 percent of species went extinct. On land, both animal and plant diversity was reduced by more than half, including the loss of most of the insects and vertebrates whose fossils dominate the Salagou Formation. The causes of this global cataclysm are much debated, but they likely involved a combination of massive volcanic activity, global heating and deoxygenation of the oceans, and the release from ocean sediments of poisonous levels of hydrogen sulfide. We’re now in a rapid decline of our own making, albeit one that is, so far, much less severe than the decimation of the end of the Permian. One necessary part of our response to this swift decline must be to reawaken our senses and thereby human culture to the community of life. Paying attention to sound offers us a pleasing and instructive invitation to this reawakening. Because so much of our human communication is aural, our ears and minds are primed to listen and understand. Our curiosity, care, and love are evoked by all these senses. I sit down on a slab of bloody stone and close my eyes. Cricket music glows in the air around me. I smile, astonished. We live surrounded by the many gifts of flowers.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Their aromas, colors, and varied forms are a delight for the senses, of course. But their fruits, roots, and foliage also, and less obviously, give us the vitality and diversity of the living world as we know it. Except for the products of the ocean, almost every bite of human food comes from a flowering plant. Pressed fruits give us olive, canola, and palm oil. The flesh of domesticated animals is made from grass, corn, and other flowering plants. Leafy greens, sugar, spices, coffee, and tea, too, all come from flowering plants. What is true for the human diet is also true for nonagricultural ecosystems. Prairies, tropical forests, deserts, salt marshes, and deciduous woodlands are populated primarily by flowering plants. Only in the chill of the boreal forests or the dry soils of subtropical pine woods do the flowering plants’ cousins, the pines and their relatives, take over. Might flowers have also given us some of the diverse sounds of Earth? This seems an improbable link. Yet voiceless greenery yielded much of the modern acoustic exuberance of animals. 1 billion years of wind and water, 3 billion years of bacterial hum and quiet animal motion, and 100 million years of chirping crickets. Then, between 150 million and 100 million years ago, Earth’s terrestrial sounds flared into the stunning variety we know today. The trigger for this explosion was likely the evolution of flowers. Literally, a flourishing of sound. This was not the only time that plants lifted the acoustic vibrancy of the world. The first forests therefore offered a leg up for sound. The first flowers offered not structural support but energy and ecological richness. Compared with the fine dust of fern spores or the seeds of conifers, flowers and fruits are a bonanza for animals, rich in sugars, oils, and proteins. This action was fueled, in part, by new underground symbioses. Flowering plants united their roots with communities of soil bacteria, to the benefit of both. Roots protected and nurtured the bacteria within root nodules. Nitrogen is in short supply in most ecosystems and so the union of roots and bacteria gave flowering plants an edge over their competition. Flowering plants then slowly diversified through the Jurassic and exploded in diversity in the Cretaceous from about 130 million years ago. It is from this fanning out of plant lineages in the Cretaceous that we have the first unambiguous flower fossils.