How would one donate money to these specific people? What others are similarly no-nonsense and worthy of support?

> For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. “Scientists thought this data was too boring,” Dunn says. “But these people found it beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth for all the rest of us.”

Why don't we support that more? That was my first thought, and then I remember we instead kinda empower those that subvert it, e.g

> In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People's Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.

> A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...

Collectively, we're kinda like a youth on a motorbike riding without a helmet because their peers might find that "gay". By that I mean, the main hindrance is in our head, it's not that it's so hard to put a helmet on, compared to the power of habit, memes, peer pressure. And yes, when you actually are in that situation, it can be powerful -- but in hindsight, you sometimes realize all the options you had but dismissed.

> It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

-- Noam Chomsky

Just take that "paying for popularity can be fraud" article. I found it interesting from a technical/legal perspective, but the discussion itself is in big parts around the morality of it, namely how it's fine because "everybody does it, that's what a startup needs to do, etc.". My point isn't that that's so horrible and the reason the insects are gone, but compare that with this:

> And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. “We think details about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life histories of entomologists,” Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg’s on the 2017 paper, dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn’t want to talk about what drew him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying them.

That's not sexy, that's not "how it's done in the modern world" -- but it could be argued that it's how it should be done, and if we were more serious, too, then being so "dry" would be no problem at all. Just like not paying for popularity would be fine if nobody does it, and might make the marketplace a lot more efficient and friendly, as well save a lot of energy and resources. The notion of Kant's categorical imperative doesn't have to be completely absent from our thinking, we could rediscover it. Then maybe we could be talking about our survival as a species in a world that's worth living in.

Sorry for being being polemic, but frankly, my initial reaction to this article was to actually sob for a few minutes. This hurts like hell. I was alarmed by talk of bees disappearing over 10 years ago, but like everybody else I had "other shit to do", and I simply can't bear see it all play out in my lifetime. Because I know all the CRAP we distracted ourselves with, and I see how we lie about that later on. First the smug condescion towards those taking anything "too seriously" we don't want to take seriously or don't understand yet, and then instantly jumping to "oh well, it's too late, nothing anyone could have done". There always were and are small little voices, and we always mostly ignore them, and pretend that's being mature and realistic, instead of cowardly or foolish.

Let's change. We actually can. And let's start with stopping to excuse our own (in)actions with what everybody does, or "how humans are".

Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!

-- Bertolt Brecht, "The Exception and the Rule" (1937)

But go not "back to the sediment"
In the slime of the moaning sea,
For a better world belongs to you,
And a better friend to me.

-- Voltairine de Cleyre