The green movement has been taken over by corporate interests. This should be clear to everyone by now, with trillions of dollars earmarked for green projects. However, tribal thinking is such that even the obvious is hard to see. We cannot fight this with arguments. Rather, we must be the change we want to see. Instead of talking about the sad disappearance of insects, and bees in particular, plant some flowers, and use micro-composts rather than chemical fertilizers on anything grown outside. That way, we can put a positive spin on all arguments pertaining to disappearing insects.
The most amazing aspect of the micro-composts we have put into flowerpots on our balcony is the sheer diversity of insects that have been attracted. We have at least ten different species of flying insects, and there's at least as many crawling ones in the composts themselves. Most of these are fairly uninteresting. But we have at least two different kinds of hoverflies, which are positively serene to look at. There's also the occasional bee and dragonfly.
A happy discovery related to this is that the insects don't invade our house. They stay around the bins. There's also very little in the way of unpleasant smells. I just emptied the content of a micro-composter this morning, and the dump had no smell at all. When there is a smell, it's easily mitigated with a spray of water, or by simply letting the dump dry out in the sun.
Our plants love the micro-composts. They grow bigger flowers and leaves than they used to, and they have a generally improved appearance. They look healthy and clean. Leaves are not covered in dust, but kept clean, presumably by flies that lick off resin or similarly sticky stuff that has a tendency to make dust stick.
I can safely say that I've transformed our balcony from a desert with flowers that were barely able to survive on their diet of dusty soil and chemical fertilizers, into a thriving garden full of life. I'm not only growing flowers, I'm also cultivating insects, and the fantastic part of this is that it has been done without buying anything for this purpose. Everything came about on its own. All I did was to put finely cut kitchen refuse into micro-composters that I made out of plastic bins that used to contain Greek yoghurt.
We even have earth worms in our composts, and God only knows how they got there. We live one floor up from the street in a big European city. Clearly, the worms didn't crawl up the wall to get into our little plastic bins of goodies.
Another observation that's impossible to ignore is the great impulse to life that's present everywhere. Not only do we get a great abundance of insects, every little seed that goes into a compost will sprout. I've put a few sprouts into separate flower pots, just to see what comes of them, but for the most part, I pull the sprouts out when I see them. However, no-one can honestly say that the planet is too small to feed its population after having played around with micro-composts. Life is so abundant and insistent that our planet can feed many more people with ease, provided we stop doing stupid stuff.
Micro-composts demonstrate that our planet is doing just fine. The absence of insects and eco-diversity is not due to anything inherently wrong. We don't need trillions of dollars poured into green projects. We don't need to worry about the disappearance of insects. All we need to do is to stop turning everything into a corporate venture, and we can all make a real difference in this respect. The total number of insects on our balcony is in the hundreds, if not thousands. Imagine every little household with access to a garden or a balcony starting a small farm of micro-composts. We'd see the much wanted return of insects, and it wouldn't cost us a penny.
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| Contemplating a hoverfly over a cup of coffee |
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