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Dave Goulson Quotes (1965-)
About Dave Goulson
Dave Goulson (born 30 July 1965) is Professor of Biology (Evolution, Behaviour and Environment) at the University of Sussex, specializing in the ecology and conservation of insects, particularly bumblebees.
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“‘Normal’ is different for every generation.”
“One man’s weed is another man’s wildflower.”
“As with most new technologies, however, our enthusiasm for the benefits blinded us for sometime to the downsides.”
“If one looks at the bigger picture, modern farming is part of a staggeringly inefficient, cruel and environmentally damaging food-supply system.”
“These are beneficial creatures, and should be celebrated, not persecuted and poisoned in some misguided psychotic urge to kill anything that dares to thrive.”
“Insecticides kill all insects, not just the ones that they are aimed at, whatever the doublethinkers who manufacture agrochemicals may ask you to believe.”
“If one was designing a system from scratch to feed the world with healthy food in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way, it would look nothing like our current forming system.”
“It took many millions of years for evolution to slowly create unique assemblages of plants and animals in each region of our planet, and only a couple of hundred years for us to muddle them up.”
“Why he was asked to comment on a subject on which he has no expertise is unclear, but in these strange times it seems common for the opinions of celebrities to be valued regardless of qualifications or experience.”
“Even today there are deniers, sadly including the previous President of the United States and many of his followers – but then there are also people who argue that the world is flat.”
“Personally, I do not think we should dismiss GM technology. However, so far most GM crops have been developed by large corporations, with the clear goal of lining their pockets rather than benefiting people or the environment.”
“We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so that we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?”
“Supporters of the chemtrail theory are generally dismissed as crackpots, and rightly so, because it is absurd to believe that a conspiracy on the scale they describe could possibly be kept quiet. It is not much more plausible than suggesting that the Earth is flat.”
“For me, the economic value of insects is just a tool with which to bash politicians over the head. They only seem to value money, so I point out to them that insects contribute to the economy. But if I’m honest, their economic worth has nothing whatsoever to do with why I try to champion their cause. I do it because I think they are wonderful.”
“Suppose one were to invent a new wheat variety that gave twice the yield. Would the world’s wheat farmers turn half their land over to nature? Of course not. Wheat prices would collapse, and we would find ever-more-wasteful ways of using the surplus, for example by feeding more to animals or using more for biofuels. The farmers would end up farming harder than ever to make ends meet, and nature would not benefit at all.”
“One theory as to why metamorphosis is such a successful strategy is that it enables the immature stages and the adults to each specialise in different tasks, and to have a body designed for the purpose.‡
‡Please note that I am not suggesting intelligent design by a supreme being. ‘Design’ is shorthand for the blind tinkering of evolution over millennia.”
‡Please note that I am not suggesting intelligent design by a supreme being. ‘Design’ is shorthand for the blind tinkering of evolution over millennia.”
“Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control.”
“Glyphosate is a general-purpose herbicide, killing any plant it touches. It is systemic, which means that it spreads through the tissues of the plant to kill the roots. I hate to admit this now, but I once used to use it quite a lot in my garden, as I believed the manufacturers when they claimed that it was non-toxic to wildlife and broke down very quickly in the environment. I used to be very naïve.”
“I am not suggesting that petitions are a waste of time – they actually take up very little time – but don’t expect them to achieve much. There is a danger that people feel that the job is done, just because their favoured petition has reached a certain number of signatures. We will not save the planet simply by signing petitions, no matter how many we sign; they are a little more than a displacement activity.”
“I have never grasped why some folk are so desperate to have a perfectly uniform, green lawn, unmarred by pretty flowers. The concept of a ‘weed’ is entirely within our heads; one man’s weed is another’s beautiful wildflower. If we could somehow engineer a shift in attitude, so that ‘weeds’ such as daisies or clovers were seen as desirable additions to a lawn, rather than enemies to be battled against, we would save ourselves an awful lot of time, money and stress, while helping nature into the bargain.”
“The £3.5 billion a year in farm subsidies currently takes taxpayers’ money and uses it to support an industrial farming system that produces copious greenhouse gases, damages the soil, overgrazes the uplands, employs few people, pollutes rivers with fertilisers and pesticides, drives wildlife declines, and over-produces unhealthy food stuffs while under-producing food that is good for us. Why exactly should we pay our hard-earned taxes to subsidise all of this?”
What Dave Goulson Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Dave Goulson shared regarding contemporaries.
Dave Goulson on Paul R. Ehrlich
“The American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened the loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of an aeroplane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove ten, or twenty, or fifty, and at some point there will be a catastrophic failure and the plane will fall from the sky. Insects are the rivets that keep ecosystems functioning...In Paul Ehrlich's analogy we may be close to the point where the wings fall off.”
Dave Goulson on Rachel Carson
“what is driving these declines? In 1962, three years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become. Insect-rich wildlife habitats such as hay meadows, marshes, heathland and tropical rainforests have been bulldozed, burned or ploughed to destruction on a vast scale. Soils have been degraded and rivers choked with silt and polluted with industrial and agricultural chemicals or drained dry from over-use. The problems with pesticides and fertilizers that Carson highlighted have become far more acute, with an estimated 3 million tonnes of pesticides now going into the global environment every year. In the US, the weight of pesticides applied has increased by 150 per cent since Silent Spring was published, while at the same time new pesticides have been introduced that are much more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson's day. For example, the neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid is now the most widely used insecticide in the world, despite an EU-wide ban since 2018 brought on because of the harm it does to bees. Imidacloprid is about 7,000 times more toxic to bees than the insecticide DDT which was widely used in the 1960s and '70s. On top of all these pressures, wild insects now must cope with climate change, a phenomenon unrecognized in Carson's time.”
About Dave Goulson
Dave Goulson (born 30 July 1965) is Professor of Biology (Evolution, Behaviour and Environment) at the University of Sussex, specializing in the ecology and conservation of insects, particularly bumblebees.