After taking a cloer look at the author of Thuringia's "red list of butterflies", another name raised my suspicisions fairly early into my amateur studies of my local flora and fauna. Right after I was gifted "Schmetterlinge – Die Tagfalter Deutschlands" by my friend from Austria and skimmed a bunch of descriptions, I noticed some descriptions offering recommendations for practices to boost certain species' abundance, yet nearly all of those sections sounded strangely identical to me.
I thus began to track how many recommendations are identical. Out of all butterflies included in this book (141), only 35 species either list no recommendations at all, hint at a lack of data, point towards a paricular speices being a "traveller" or make relativizing statements with a tendency towards "not (really) threatened". 101 species either offer direct recommendations or list measures in an indirect way with a tendency towards the emphasis of being threatened. 74 species list or imply a return to traditional grazing and mowing practices, a clear demand for clearcutting is made for 30 species, whereas 26 species are said/implied to require the re-introduction of Mittenwalds. 42 species list different measures. Many species list multiple recommendations, yet overall there is a strong bias in avor of tradtitional grazing and moving practices.
This is in stark contrast with my observations. On both of the two cow pastures in my village, the amount of individual species is on par with the agricultural monocultures nearby, almost close to zero. The vast majority of butterflies I encounter occur in areas with little human activity and traditional ways of crop growing, however the latter also tend to see their biggest declines during years in which those fields are required to be kept bare for a season – species then flee to other, unaffected areas, even to some that are said to be unsuitable like barely-touched wetlands (see my observation of C. argiolous in Zone III). Obviously, if all those traditional fields are harvested at the same time or more than one farmer decides to give their field(s) a break while the planted ones are being harvested, many species have nowhere to go and thus may simply starve¹.
Because of this, alongside the multiple instances in which loaded words such as "dramatic" are being used, I began to wonder who the authors of my field guide are. Only Joself Settele appears to be easily searchable while R. Steiner, R. Reinhardt, R. Feldmann and G. Hermann are relatively obscure researchers.
Indeed, Settele is such a prominent researcher that he's got his own Wikipedia page. He studied agrobiology at the Hohenheim University in the 80's and focused on agricultural practices on the Phillippines. One year after receiving his PhD, he began to work at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research ("UFZ") in 1993. From 1996 to 2002, he was an outside lecturer at Hohenheim, and later an outside lecturer at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he became adjunct professor in 2016. While not formally specialized in lepidopterology, he is regarded a butterfly expert due to having published several pop-science books focusing on butterflies.
At least according to his Wikipedia page. His public CV does not list butterflies among his research and related interests, rather it is implied that his focus lies on all insects in cultural landscapes, project management and political/sociological matters.
Interestingly, his publications not only reveal that he still focuses on agricultural practices in the Phillippines and still harbors a particular interest in rice growing in Asia, many of his publications are multi-authored statements dealing with eco-political matters. Publications listing his name alone are opinion pieces for random magazines and mainstream press interviews.
One guest article is striking in the sense that it has got nothing to do with his research at all – no, it deals with the COVID-19 pandemic.
While I may call myself a defender of Feyerabend's "anything goes" philosophy, Settele turned out to be one of those researchers that would be better off by sticking to their day job. Despite admitting that he's not very familiar with virology, he blames climate change and the decline of species on the emerge of COVID-19, advocating for future prevention of disease transmission from other animals to humans (no, not the other way around, humans are free to spread their diseases to other animals). He further blames all of humanity for claiming more land and thus making it easier for humans to get in touch with wild animals. Later, he recommends to "stop eating bats", as he assumes that it may have contributed to the emerge of the pandemic.
Since the origins of the disease remain unclear and never will be understood simply due to the sheer amount of factors playing a role in the emerge and spread of novel diseases, Settele made very bold claims and recommendations for someone also claiming to not really know what he is talking about. But this may not be the worst interview in which he reveals his fundamentally broken understanding of "nature".
In a guest article for the German channel n-tv, he repeats his claims and demands action to prevent future pandemics. In this piece, however, he states that the destruction of "untouched habitats" is reponsible for diseases jumping from wild animals to humans, citing COVID-19, SARS-CoV-1, MERS, malaria, ebola, AIDS and "variations of the flu", emphasizing a fundamental difference between "animals" and "humans". Even worse, he makes the assumption that the heart of the Amazon rainforest is entirely untouched by humans, despite the very existence of primitive human tribes still living in the depths of the forest. The entirety of this article's purpose, however, is to promote a new book of his called "Die Tripe-Krise" ("The Triple Crisis"), which again repeats the same claims he's already made in interviews and public statements. Feel free to use any translation engine of your choice and tell me that he is NOT just another political advocate relying on dramatic speech to primarily promote his career, rather than a genuine researcher.
The funny part about his emotional pleas is that they had no effect on anyone. Global travel is booming once again and everything is "back to normal"; COVID has been forgotten faster than Ursula von der Leyen's highly suspicious rise to the EU Commission presidency². Settele is among the majority that "all of the sudden" appeared to forget that COVID even happened.
He certainly also has accumulated more travel miles than I ever will during my lifetime and raised through the ranks to lead a comfortable life as an advisor to the current German government. His ideas, unsursprisingly, have no effect on the government at all and farmer organizations suceeded at weakening EU-wide environmental laws. He still has not released any public statements about it and likely never will.
Naturally, his work outside of of publishing butterfly guides makes me question the integrity of said guides, especially after realizing that the "Introduction" chapter only blames modern agricultural and forestry practices, the abandonment of once-used land and climate change on the decline of butterflies. He and his colleagues do not even mention the expansion of urban land and impervious surfaces, general lifestyle changes of humans and the growing dependence on digital technology resulting in service jobs growing as fast as your average corn field and at the expense of trational manual labor such as farming.
While farfetched I still assume that he thinks that subsidies for "eco-farmers" will solve the decline of insects, ignoring that subsidies become perverse incentives very quickly that easily can be exploited. Instead, he blames the unpopularity of certain traditional farming and forestry practices on a "false understanding of nature", even though he demonstrated his own flawed understanding perfectly during the COVID-19 pandemic by outright preaching the disputed theory that the pandemic was a result of "some people eating bats", climate change and modern agriculture. In fact, he attempted to spread the fear of "all the diseases hiding in the Amazon rainforest", fully convinced that "wild nature" is scary and deadly.
He is not trying to protect "nature", he is frightened of anything that isn't an area radically managed by "westernized", profit- and "growth"-driven humans. He is a hypocrticial idiot.
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[GER] Josef Settele (Wikipedia Germany)
Prof. Dr. Josef Settele (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research)
[GER] "Corona ist nichts gegen das, was noch wartet" (ntv, 13 December, 2020)
"Parliament weakens member states’ obligations under EU soil legislation" (Euractiv, 11 April, 2024)
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¹ There is another phenomenon I documented that always occurs in May. Once dandelions get sparse, there's roughly a week in which almost no nectar plants are blooming whatsoever. Once this brief period has passed, nectar plants such as clovers, sailfoin and fire lily bloom, however it takes up to two weeks for butterflies and bees to feed on them, the ones that survived the week in which no plants were available actively avoiding the now-blooming plants. My friend and I are assuming that the wave of nectar plants following the dandelion dominance period are low on sugars and/or other nutrients, thus failing to attract insects. Another theory or possibly even an extension of the first may be the end of the dandelion dominance falling into the same period in which most farmers begin to spray pesticides, herbicides, other chemical toxins and fertilizers that get transported to my study areas via winds and water, yet this doesn't explain why stinging nettles across all areas show typical signs of nutrient deficiency and both stinging nettles and deadnettles, once very abundant, disappearing slowly and the few inidividuals still growing remaining very tiny, respectively. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to do soil and plant studies on a molecular level to test any hypothesis of mine.
² Does anyone remember that there already were to male candidates, Manfred Weber and Frans Timmermans? Neither of those ended up being proposed for the election, despite the German media having reported them as already-set candidates, and instead Ursula von der Leyen suddenly was almost unanimously proposed as the sole candidate for the presidency and subsequently won "with a narrow majority". The German press did not question this at all, so few people ever noticed this to begin with and those that did notice, mainly oppositional parties, quickly moved on from it.