Roy Plotnick has an insightful post over on Medium.  It’s about the 6th mass extinction.  News flash, just in case you’ve been hiding in a hole somewhere, it’s happening now.  He is commenting on a recent paper in the journal science.

This past summer, my wife and I took a lovely walk around Echo Lake in New Hampshire. What struck us, and we mentioned to a ranger, was the dearth of bird song. Despite the general solitude, all we heard was an occasional song in the distance. The only birds we saw were some ducks in the lake. Earlier this summer, we were in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. We could not help but notice the huge number of dead and dying trees. Back home near Chicago, it is difficult to ignore the decline in the number of insects. In years past, insects of all kinds would gather around our back-porch light at night. Now there seem to be but a few. This is despite our newly established native plantings.