Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2019.
In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered the extermination of every sparrow in China. He could scarcely have guessed the magnitude of the disaster he had set in motion.
They called it “The Four Pests Campaign.” Part of the Chinese Communist Party’s notorious Great Leap Forward, the public health effort called for the elimination of disease-carrying rats and flies, malaria-ridden mosquitoes, and sparrows, which ate grain seed and fruit. A propaganda poster from the time reading “Exterminate the four pests!” depicts oversized cartoon versions of the campaign’s targets, impaled like grotesque shish kebabs on a Chinese sword. In another, a peasant boy aims his slingshot off panel — a dastardly sparrow in his sights.
Urged on by their leaders, the people shot sparrows from the sky by the thousands, and hunted down and destroyed their nests. Children would bang pots and pans at sparrows resting in trees, chasing them until the little birds plummeted from the heavens, overcome by exhaustion. Within a year, the sparrow population in China had been decimated, pushed nearly to extinction.
At first, it seemed as though the plan had worked. The problem was, sparrows eat more than just grain and fruit. They also eat many kinds of insects, including a species of short-horned grasshopper commonly known as locusts. With their natural predator gone, the locust population skyrocketed, and hordes of ravenous grasshoppers swept through the countryside, devouring everything in their path and contributing significantly to the Great Chinese Famine. By 1961, tens of millions of Chinese peasants would be dead — starved to death by a tragic convergence of economic mismanagement and ecological imbalance.
Puzzle Pieces
God’s creation is vast and complex — an infinitely interconnected puzzle of creatures and plants, minerals and microorganisms, all fitting together in a delicate ecological balance.
Genesis 1:31 says: “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.”
That “all” refers to the whole of creation, even the parts we think of as insignificant, dangerous, or as pests. God created each piece of the puzzle with a specific role to play, a unique purpose in the natural order. Remove but one, and havoc often ensues. Each is a part of God’s intricate design, and all of life, including our lives, depend on their well-being.
“We’re inextricably intertwined with creation,” said Covenant College ecology assistant professor Heath Garris. “If you look at our original created purpose… we were made in God’s image to rule over the created order. But there’s also language in Genesis 1 and 2 referring to the ‘keeping’ of creation. … If we look at the dominant translation for the term ‘to keep,’ it usually means ‘to watch’ as in from a watchtower — to look over, to preside over.”
God’s creation is vast and complex — an infinitely interconnected puzzle of creatures and plants, minerals and microorganisms, all fitting together in a delicate ecological balance.
“I find that to be a very convincing argument that part — not all — but part of what we were created for was to delight in keeping watch over and studying creation,” he added. “Especially if you link that to our first role in creation as rulers and stewards. We’ve learned through hard experience that poor observation or understanding of creation leads to disastrous management. To be wise managers we first have to be really good observers of creation. Those two are strongly linked.”
Proper stewardship, in other words, requires both looking closely at the tiniest creatures to suss out their importance and role in the natural world, and zooming out as much as we can to see how all the pieces fit together. Wise stewardship requires good science.
Entomologists and astrophysicists, microbiologists and geologists, they’re all observing and studying the tiniest details of the natural world, working to name and understand weevils and gravity and moss and distant planets — slowly, slowly revealing information that should empower us to be better stewards, to explore space, make medicines, improve agriculture, care for the land, and sometimes even just sit back in awe at the wonders hidden all around us.
As for Garris, he loves a good swamp.
Worlds Hidden in the Wetlands
As a Furman University undergraduate, Garris — who originally studied music — struggled at first in the sciences. But after being exposed to field research and conservation during foreign study ecology classes in South Africa and Belize, he was hooked. A few years later, Garris found himself researching environmental toxicology, studying climate change impacts on wetland systems for his Ph.D.
“I kind of fell in love with these wasted landscapes,” he explained. “At least, we perceive them to be wasted, but they turn out to be really useful.”
The wetlands Garris studies are miserable places: uncomfortable, muggy, bug-ridden, and hard to navigate.
According to Garris, after World War II, the federal government launched several major programs aimed at draining America’s wetlands. The land, so they thought, served only as a waste of space, a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and a reservoir for disease. Approaching the project as a public service campaign, the government converted many of these areas into farmland, taking advantage of rich organic deposits in the soil. In the end, they did too good of a job.
“We didn’t [look] close enough at what these ecosystems actually do for us,” said Garris. “The fancy term is hydrologic buffering.”
Wetlands, it turns out, are incredibly useful. They act like giant sponges on a landscape scale. Near large river systems, they absorb and level out flood events and mediate storm surges. In their absence, communities suffer much more significant problems with flooding and maintaining river boundaries. Though wetlands are indeed a breeding ground for insects of all sorts, they’re also a breeding ground for fish and important migratory stopovers for ducks — sources of food and enjoyment for anglers and duck hunters. When wetlands go away, so do the ducks and fish. They’ve been called “the kidneys of the landscape,” intercepting toxic substances and industrial waste that would otherwise make its way into streams and rivers. As a result, watersheds with wetlands tend to have healthier streams.
When most people look at a wetland area, they see what the U.S. government saw in the 1950s and ’60s — good-for-nothin’ swamps full of disease and lacking potential. When Garris looks at a wetland, he sees a universe of hidden worlds — what renowned Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson calls “the fractal world.”
“Picture in your mind a large beetle, 50 millimeters long, living on the side of [a] tree,” writes Wilson in his book “The Diversity of Life.” “As it walks around the trunk … it cannot take account of the much smaller world at its feet. The beetle is scarcely aware of the many dips and hollows in the bark only a millimeter across. In that irregularity live other species of beetles small enough to make it home. They exist in an entirely different scale of space. … Let us descend deeper into the microscope. At the feet of the small beetles are still smaller crevices and patches of algae too narrow for them to enter. Living there, however, are the smallest of all insects together with armored oribatid mites, measuring under a millimeter in length. … Finally, the tiny insects and mites stand on grains of sand lodged in algal films and the rhizoids of mosses, and on a single grain of sand may grow colonies of ten or more species of bacteria.”
Among the smallest of the swamp creatures are tiny microbes living deep in the wetland bowels. These minuscule workhorses are responsible for breaking down organic materials — and have an outsized impact on global warming.
“Wetlands right now make up somewhere around 6% of the terrestrial surface by area, but they store about one-third of the world’s terrestrial organic carbon,” said Garris. “It’s a big chunk. They’re disproportionately important in terms of earth’s climate systems.”
On a global scale, wetlands impact the planet’s climate. On a landscape level, they keep floods in check, clean our water, and host some of our favorite food sources. “Deeper into the microscope,” layer upon layer of tiny creatures live in the wetlands, and only by looking closely and studying carefully can we learn, and harness, their secrets. And when we lose a wetland, we lose the opportunity to explore these wonders and their potential.
Under your feet, there are tiny cows dancing
Tommy McElrath, an entomologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, is a connoisseur of the weird and wonderful stories of the insect world, but one of his favorites is the story of the Collembola.
The Collembola, also known as “springtails,” are tiny soil-dwelling critters (on average, a fully grown adult is around one millimeter long) that live virtually anywhere soil and moisture exist.
“One of the things I’ve learned … is to never underestimate the complexity of the world that God has created. We as humans were placed into this world to care for something that we don’t even understand, [and we have to] have humility when we do that.”
“There are over 8,000 species worldwide,” McElrath said. “In a single meter of soil, there can be up to a hundred thousand of these things. It’s insane. If the soil is healthy you’re going to have them [there.]”
Equipped with a miniature catapult on the underside of their bodies, springtails eat fungus, dying leaves, and other decaying matter — breaking down organic material that falls from above. Simultaneously, they serve as a primary food source for larger insects, which are then fed on by birds and other creatures.
“They’re a foundational part of the soil ecosystem,” McElrath said. “And [some of them] look like tiny cows.”
It’s true. Sminthurid springtails have big heads, longer antennae that look uncannily like a cow’s horns, cartoon-like eyes, and a big oval-shaped backside.
“[So there are these] little cows wandering around, grazing on microfungi … and they do a dance to find a mate,” he explained. “[There’s] this circular back and forth movement — a little insect waltz. And so, under your feet there are tiny cows dancing.”
Though possibly the most adorable, springtails are far from the only insect that plays a vital role in the global ecosystem. Tens of thousands of different species of flies, bees, beetles, ants, butterflies, wasps, and more serve as pollinators — crucial for growing and improving plant-based foods, our most important global food source. Insects themselves serve as the primary food source for larger creatures, such as birds and fish, which themselves are food for even bigger predators.
Insects also keep the population of other insects in check. Whenever a particular insect population grows too large, tiny, species-specific parasitic wasps find and destroy the surplus. During its lifetime, a single dragonfly will eat several thousands of mosquitoes, controlling their population and limiting the spread of diseases such as malaria.
Even mosquitoes and flies, oft-cited as clear products of the Fall, are an important piece in the puzzle. Besides serving as a key food source for dragonflies, birds, and other predators, many mosquitoes pollinate plants that other insects miss.
“Usually when people think of flies, they think of the worst ones — mosquitoes, houseflies, and other biting flies,” said McElrath. “And to be fair, they are one of the worst insects in terms of human health. They vector diseases that kill more people worldwide than any other cause of death. … But male mosquitoes don’t bite. They feed on nectar in flowers. So, half of all mosquitoes are pollinators. … And many mosquitoes are so small they can actually reach small flowers that bigger pollinators like honeybees can’t reach. … (A)lmost no one talks about that.”
Then there are the cleanup crews: Many insects, like the springtails, break down dead organic matter. Without them, rotting plants, animals, and excrement would simply pile up, rendering life on earth impossible.
In her recent Wall Street Journal article “The Bugs We Can’t Live Without,” biologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson tells a story that poignantly illustrates the importance of our tiny janitor friends. When British colonists brought the first cattle to Australia in the late 18th century, they soon found that Australian dung beetles were ill-suited to breaking down cow patties. By the dawn of the 20th century, there were more than a million cows in Australia, and all that time the dung had continued to stack up.
“Up to 500,000 acres of grazing land a year were becoming unusable because of the crust of dung,” Sverdrup-Thygeson wrote. “It wasn’t until a large research project in the 1960s and ’70s brought in cow-dung decomposing beetles from abroad that the problem was finally solved.”
Insects — these small, seemingly insignificant, biting, stinging, buzzing, annoying creatures — are vitally important pieces of God’s puzzle of creation. From dung beetles to springtails, honeybees to mosquitoes, our God has wrought millions of unique species, each with their own fascinating life cycles and proper places in the created order.
A New Perspective on Conservation
“The tree of life is filled with these intricate little stories and life cycles that you have absolutely no idea are happening until you sit and look,” said McElrath. “One of the things I’ve learned … is to never underestimate the complexity of the world that God has created. [We have to be] really careful about oversimplifying. We as humans were placed into this world to care for something that we don’t even understand, [and we have to] really have humility when we do that.”
Too often, we think that a concern for creatures (“save the whales”) or their habitats (“save the rainforest”) shows a lack of concern for people. Man is made in God’s image, after all. And God gave us the earth to rule over.
But this is entirely the wrong way of looking at creation.
The tiniest plants, animals, and insects, are all necessary puzzle pieces in God’s world. Without them, the entire ecosystem (for which we are responsible) falls to pieces. We may not see how some of these pieces fit, or why they matter, or how they are even good, but our ignorance does not diminish their importance. Rather, it calls us to a joyful, wonder-filled, urgent state of humble learning and robust creation care. There are biblical reasons, even self-preservation-driven reasons, to defend the existence and habitat of creatures that seem insignificant to us. You never know what key part they may play in the bigger picture.
“What we don’t know can hurt us,” said McElrath, “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t ever use ecosystems for man’s ends, but we shouldn’t be doing it nearly as carelessly. We are losing out on potential solutions and new products by wiping out biodiversity without even thinking about it. … A lot of these stories may have very little effect on a person. But biodiversity as a whole and natural resources are the foundation for human society. And understanding those resources and understanding biodiversity is integrally linked to human flourishing. God created the garden before he created humans. They need the garden to survive.”
Andrew Shaughnessy is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. A graduate of Covenant College, he has lived and worked in England, South Sudan, and India, honing his craft with a focus on nonprofits, business, and international affairs.
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