Our Bugs Are In Dire Straits

There was a time, not long ago, when your summer road trip wasn’t complete without the smeared remains of a thousand bugs on your windshield. The messy, sticky aftermath of motion through a world alive. Fireflies blinked in backyards. Beetles clattered at porch lights. Moths and mayflies clouded around streetlamps like dust storms of life. Now? Silence. Stillness. Sterile clear glass windshields. The Horror!

And here’s the kicker: it’s not just about pesticides or paved-over wildlands. The real killer might be something so basic, so boring, and so utterly everywhere that we barely even see it — carbon dioxide.

A Lyric We’ve Turned Into A Lament

Mark Knopfler didn’t croon — he rocked. That fingerpicked Stratocaster, that gravel-dry voice — he gave us songs that cut deep. And in “The Bug”, he nailed one of the best lines in rock:

“Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug. Sometime you’re going to lose it all!”

It was a tough-love anthem for the highs and lows of life. But now, the metaphor’s broken. We’re always the windshield. The bugs are gone. And it’s not just poetic. It’s literal. The world of insects is crashing, and the reasons point to something far more frightening than we’ve dared imagine.

Underground, a Massacre

Most insects don’t start life in the air. They begin below our feet — buried in soil, tucked into leaf litter, growing in moist, dark, oxygen-hungry spaces. Eggs hatch into larvae, which feed, breathe, and build themselves for flight. These underfoot microclimates — rich with decay and life — are where many of nature’s most vulnerable creatures gestate. And they depend on one thing above all: healthy air, even underground.

But here’s the dirty secret: soil breathes too. Microbes feeding on rot release CO₂, making those insect nurseries naturally high in carbon dioxide. That’s been fine for millions of years. But now, with atmospheric CO₂ up more than 50% since the industrial age, something’s rapidly changed.

The laws of physics — simple, unavoidable — say gas exchange moves toward balance. That means the more CO₂ in the air, the more CO₂ ends up in the ground. And in those insect nurseries, CO₂ is spiking — often hitting 10,000 to 50,000 ppm.

That’s not annoying. That’s deadly.

The Bugs Can’t Breathe

Insect larvae aren’t built for climate change. They’re small, slow, and stuck in place. They breathe through tiny holes in their bodies — spiracles — and they can’t escape suffocating conditions. They also evolve and adapt to changes in thier environment, but they take centuries and millennia to do so. Studies show that above 5,000 ppm CO₂, their development begins to fail. At 10,000 ppm, survival rates nosedive. At 20,000 or more, it’s game over.

And here’s the horror: those once-rare high-CO₂ levels in soil? They’re becoming commonplace.

We’ve crossed a threshold — quietly, invisibly — where the Earth’s natural cradles of life are becoming death traps. The bugs aren’t adapting. Evolution takes millennia. This? It happened in a century. And they’re losing.

The Windshield Tells the Story

You don’t need a degree to prove it. Just drive. Your windshield stays clean. It’s not anecdote — it’s data. In Germany, flying insect biomass is down over 75% in three decades. In North America, fireflies are blinking out. Moths, beetles, bees — disappearing.

We used to joke about bug splatter. Now it’s an ecological eulogy.

Our highways are killing fields not just for the few insects that still make it to flight — but for the entire system that once pushed them into the air to begin with. We’ve become the windshield permanently. The bugs? No longer even in the race.

The Usual Suspects Are Not Guilty Enough

When people talk about why the bugs are gone, they reach for a familiar list:
Pesticides. Monocultures. Habitat loss. Overgrown lots. Lawn chemicals.
These are the “usual suspects.”

And they’re not innocent — they’ve hurt insect populations for decades. But here’s the truth we’ve been too scared to face:

None of those things explain a 75% insect collapse. Not globally. Not in nature reserves. Not across every ecosystem — forests, farms, deserts, tundra.

What does? The invisible gas that’s everywhere. CO₂.
Rising carbon dioxide in the air is now stealthily suffocating insect nurseries underground. It’s a far more widespread, potent, and inescapable poison than anything we’ve sprayed on a crop field. And unlike pesticides, this one comes from all of us.

From every car ride.
From every plane flight.
From every building we heat, every gadget we charge, every disposable thrill we chase.

We’ve been pointing our fingers at big agriculture and chemical companies — and sure, they deserve scrutiny — but that finger needs to come back around and point right at us.

Ted Turner used to have a great line he used when speaking of solving troubles, he said: “I’ll smash em like a bug.”

We didn’t just kill the bugs. We smashed them. With our breath, our fires, our speeding windshields. We turned the whole atmosphere into a slow suffocating death sentence for young life living in the soil.  This is not a comforting narrative. It doesn’t let us off the hook. But it’s the one that fits the facts. And until we face it, we’ll keep dancing around the real cause while the world beneath our feet collapses.

A Plea to Rock Legends — And the Rest of Us

So here’s the ask, Mark Knopfler: pick up that guitar. Play it raw. Let the world know the line is broken. There are no more bugs. There’s only the windshield, and that’s not how the song is supposed to end.

We need artists who can speak to what science alone cannot. We need voices that cut through the noise. We need to turn this clean windshield into a symbol of what we’ve lost — and what we might still save.

And for the rest of us: don’t celebrate the silence. Don’t accept the empty skies. Don’t confuse convenience with survival. Ask yourself: where did the bugs go? Then look around — and start doing something before the last flicker of firefly light fades forever.

Because sometimes you’re the bug.
And if the bugs go extinct — you might be next.

Its not just insects in dire straits, here’s some further reading on the plight of the insects and the birds that are starving for their loss. https://russgeorge.net/2018/01/06/hear-that-lonesome-whippoorwill/