Why is the forest silent?

On anecdotes in science, the insect apocalypse, and Sean Connery’s golf course in the south of France.

The other day, a friend forwarded me an article in the Financial Times about declining insect populations, reminding me of a conversation we’d once had, in which I’d lamented the fact that a forest I’d known for years in the south of France no longer thrummed, as it used to, with cicadas. As the biologist Dave Goulson observes in his 2021 book Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse, which is cited by the FT article, insects are indispensable for growing most of our crops, recycling matter, and controlling pests; their decimation by chemical pesticides and fertilizers, in tandem with loss of habitat and climate change, spells disaster for life on earth.

In the article, journalist Manuela Saragosa stresses the many informal ways in which insect data is collected, for example, by volunteers, conservation enthusiasts, and “citizen scientists.” And she notes what ecologists refer to as the “shifting baseline syndrome.” That is, how each new generation takes the world it grew up in as a touchstone for biodiversity loss. She also discusses how datasets are analyzed, the biases that affect interpretation, and critical knowledge gaps. “You get the picture,” she writes, “scientists agree there’s trouble in the insect world. They just can’t agree exactly how much trouble.”

Anecdotal evidence is often rightly dismissed by scientists as unscientific, an impediment to empirical-based reasoning and decision-making. And yet, anecdotes have played a crucial role in the history of scientific knowledge-making, which is perhaps the moral of the story about Isaac Newton and the falling apple, which prompted him to reflect on gravity (a true story, as it turns out). New hypotheses develop from hunches and the gathering of informal evidence, which are then tested and rejected or accepted.

So, in the spirit of anecdotal science, here’s a story about the silencing of a forest.

Until I was in my late teens, I spent most summer and Easter vacations at my grandparents’ house in rural Provence, where amenities were basic but one of the joys was the immersion in nature. It had once been a lavender farm, but at some point in the early twentieth century, the place had been abandoned, and by the late 1950s the stone buildings had become dilapidated and the track leading to the plot all but impassable. After a forest fire ripped through the land, thorns, junipers, and maritime pines had dislodged the stone terracing.

In the early years, we showered with a bucket at a well and fetched drinking water from the village fountain. Eventually, a local dowser with a forked stick found a groundwater supply, and my grandparents sunk a borehole to get their own off-grid supply.

My grandfather was an environmentalist, and he loved this almost 20-acre parcel of reclaimed wilderness. It was a haven for animals: praying mantises, dung beetles, ants, fireflies, spiders, scorpions, bees, butterflies, bats, grass snakes, tortoises, and a knot of toads that came out with the summer rain. As for birds, we had woodpeckers, nightingales, treecreepers, hoopoes, scops owls, and eagles. There were critters galore. We caught crayfish in a nearby stream. When you walked through the scrub, scores of orange-winged bush crickets, or sauterelles, flew out ahead of you. And in the day millions of cicadas worked their incendiary tymbals, as the poet Jorie Graham writes,

like kindling that won’t take.
The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember 
the terms of...

But about ten years ago, when I went back, I noticed that the once-deafening sound of cicadas, or cigales, was growing weaker until one year they were barely audible. The trilling of the tree frogs that had once filled the nights had all but disappeared, too.

What had caused this insect decline? Was it the frenzied construction going on around, all those rushed pink stucco villas and fiberglass pools, and beyond that the distant techno-beat of new roadside bars, and the light pollution from the coast that washed out the Milky Way?

Whatever it was, it was reminiscent of the biologist Rachel Carson’s ‘Fable for Tomorrow’ with which she opens her 1962 book, Silent Spring. There, to convey the devastation caused by pesticides, she paints an apocalyptic picture of the future as a place that’s been destroyed by an “evil spell,” which has brought forth “mysterious maladies.” “Everywhere,” she writes in prose with a biblical cadence, the Earth is blanketed by the “shadow of death.” A “strange stillness” prevails, and silence lies over the fields and woods.

It felt as if that strange stillness had finally reached Provence, and I blamed the actor Sean Connery for it. At some point in the 1970s, he’d driven up country from the coast and evidently liked what he saw because in 1979 he bought a swathe of land nearby and set about felling trees to create an 18-hole golf course, Domaine de Terre Blanche. For several years the high-pitched whine of chainsaws (like a phalanx of megaphone mosquitoes) echoed through the valley with the clang of tractors ploughing up stones in the scrubland.

There were mutterings of backhanders and political shenanigans because much of the land had belonged to the local commune. At around the same time, in 1982, the novelist Graham Greene, who lived on the coast at Antibes, published J’Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, alleging that organized crime flourished with the connivance of the judiciary (Greene was taken to court for libel and lost).

Connery eventually sold up to the German software billionaire Dietmar Hopp, but the damage had been done. Where once there’d been some 300 hectares of pine, Mediterranean oak, and cork trees, there was now a Four Seasons Hotel and Spa with lounge music in reception and luxury villas that earned the glamorous golfing compound fifth place in the CNN Money Dream Vacation Home Guide.

Roads were widened, lights put in, and a helipad built so that the convenienced wealthy could chopper back and forth from the airport at Nice. Perhaps it was this despoliation and the maintenance of so much weed-free grass that was the tipping point, and the reason that wild boar now run amuck and the insects have been muted.

This is obviously all anecdotal. As Saragosa writes in her article, there are many reasons to explain the boom-and-bust of insect populations, including fluctuations in temperature and seasonal changes, fires, heat waves, and repeated droughts (last year, the drought was so severe, many swimming pools lay empty). At the same time, golf courses today are seeking to minimize their environmental impact. Still, when Donald Trump and Joe Biden bickered about their golf handicaps during the June 2024 presidential debate—with Trump boasting that he’d just won two club championships—all my golfing prejudices were reaffirmed. I couldn’t help but think of a 2017 photograph by Kristi McCluer of golfers at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in Washington state, putting on a green while a wildfire blazes in the background, across the Columbia River in Oregon. That, and Carson’s “shadow of death,” and the hushed cicadas in a forest in Provence, which the rhythmic hiss of fairway sprinklers will never replace.