Did you know that the Entomolgy Congress 2025 in Giesheim is sponsored by Bayer? Well, now you do:
HOCHSCHULE GEISENHEIM UNIVERSITY – Deutsche Gesellschaft für allgemeine und angewandte Entomologie e.V. (DGaaE) – Hochschule Geisenheim University – 2025
Programm/Program (skip to page 3)
If you are unfamiliar with Bayer for some reason, they aren't just one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, they also are one of the largest manufacturers of "agricultural chemicals" in the world. They make billions of the intentional killing of "pests", including insects[1]. No attendee or speaker, which largely consist of landscape planners and over-educated farmers, sees anything wrong with this, in fact they are happy about it.
This however may explain the likes of Settele, a keynote speaker at this event. He encourages the development of palm oil plantages in the Philippines and considers tropcial rain forests "dangerous for harboring diseases":
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 responsible 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 rain forest 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.
I was wrong in one aspect, though. Settele isn't just a naive political pundit for his own perverted understanding of ecological matters, this guy is a straight-up lobbyist for Bayer and large agricultural enterprises, the main drivers of the decline of biodiversity among both flora and fauna. Of course he will never call them out directly; he's being fed by them, just like his colleagues speaking at the Entomology Congress 2025.
I already could tell back in grammar school that "science" largely is just another highly-competitive industry, which also influenced my decision to graduate at the end of 10th grade and not obtain my "Abitur", despite one teacher in particular (my German teacher and "Oberstufenleiterin") trying to change my mind. Just now, on the other hand, I'm learning of this to its full extent after having come across several misleading statements and plain false facts spread by both local NGO's and scientists.
Maxwell Formes' series "The PhD Metagame" addresses in its second chapter, "Don't Try to Reform Science", that there are two "sciences". The first science is what the majority of people believe the "scientific practice" to be, the second science is the industrial complex, the actual science practiced by universities, businesses and various organisations. Their main goal is NOT to advance knowledge – they may, at the very best, be a side-effect – but to keep their profitable businesses and their brands running and generating economic profits and keep every outsider that isn't as neoliberal as them outside of their elite circles, lest they end up risking their undoubtedly comfortable lifestyles not so different from your average tech bro CEO.
Because I came to a similar yet much more vague conclusion when I was just 15 and at a very spot mentally, this paradoxically ended up fostering my belief in "science 1" and twist Disney's Ratatouille's "everybody can cook" philosophy into "everybody can do science" way before I would come across Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn by studying books published by entomologists (lepidopterologists) in the late 19th and early 20th century, alongside the few papers published by GDR entomologists that survived German reunification and now are almost entirely disregarded by professional researchers.
However, I would extend "science 1" to include any amateur not affiliated with any academic institution or NGO. They do exist but you won't hear from them unless you go out of your way and search for them. Of course, they may not be any more trustworthy as the likes of Settele and may spread not just plain false ideas but bizarre shit such as this chemtrails conspiracy but those are very easy to spot and can be ridiculed into deleting their social media profiles at least; the "professionals" are funded by your taxes and receive special attention from your press (which may or may not be funded by your taxes as well, e.g. public broadcasters).
Investments in wind energy to ‘offset’ environmental damage continue attempts at rebranding mining as ‘sustainable mining’ (Kirsch, 2010), a notion that has extended to contradictory notions of ‘green uranium’ (Sullivan, 2013b: 82). Wind turbines are now renewing environmental destruction associated with extraction and processing industries, propelling industrial growth forward with new possibilities of receiving ‘climate’ and ‘clean’ technology funds and loans. Wind energy is being used to advance, and not replace, ecologically destructive modes of production (Dunlap and Fairhead, 2014), giving the opposite impressions marketed to the public by wind companies and governments signing climate change legislation laws and creating climate funds. The green economy attempts to renew not only Wal- Mart’s, Grupo Mexico’s, and other corporate images as environmentally responsible, but also stimulate revenue streams, creating the possibility for continued economic and infrastructural expansion. This reality concerning wind energy is largely unacknowledged by environmental activists, NGOs (Sierraclub, n.d.; Greenpeace, 2015) and even some Indigenous land defenders (Richardson, 2016). Wind energy, and renewable energy in general, are positioned by public discourse as the solution to anthropogenic ecological and climate crisis, which is facilitated by a narrow concern and/or fixation with fossil fuels and the econometric counting/commodification of carbon. Let the case of wind energy development and use in La Ventosa cause reflection on the negative reality and processes enabled with renewable energy generation.
I highly recommend this paper published by geographer Alexander Dunlap in which he analyzes the boom of wind turbines in La Ventosa, Mexico. Although this is one of the more extreme examples in which "green energy" is a vector for "business as usual", this sentiment is a global phenomenon also affecting my village in Central Germany[2], with no such criticism being voiced by anyone but some local people and few municipalities that end up being ridiculed by those wanting to profit off "green energy", including local politicians, local newspapers and that neighbor with his huge house and four cars that "forced" him to remove his front yard and turn it into a parking lot.
Of course, this is not limited to wind energy[3] but I do not want to stray too far from the main topic. I don't trust German entomologists or any German that is part of an NGO such as NABU, BUND (and daugher organizations) and my local "Landschlaftspflegeverband". They don't care and never will.
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[1]
[2]
Just a while ago I counted the wind turbines I can see from village, with the closest wind park with 50 wind turbines being situated just four kilometers away from me. I counted a whopping 152 wind turbines, with at least 30 more to come in the next years. While none of those are permitted to be closer than one kilometer to nearby villages and towns, I've observed quite many bird species having changed their flying routes. When I was a kid, I never saw any cranes passing over my village and took a direct route between two storage reservoirs between 20 and more than 40 kilometers away from my village. One such reservoir became almost directly encircled by 15 wind turbines just a few kilometers north to it, with more such parks further blocking this direct path in-between, thus having prompted cranes circumvent them all by flying low above my home each year since 2023. A hardly-ever-mentioned population of bee-eaters approximately three kilometers northeast to my village, which started to travel above my home in the same year, will be at risk of a proposed wind park near the village east to mine, which is less than one kilometer away from my home and is expected to be established right through the bee-eater's new travel route. The fact that I didn't even know about my area harboring eaa-eaters up until this one evening in the first place despite excessively searching for papers where this has been documented should tell you enough about how local populcations are kept ignorant about such matters. Our local NABU also never mentioned that my area hosts an endangered toad up until the very day it was decided that they will be relocated so our local Mercedes offspring can expand its factory – NABU also did not protest at all and merely organized this relocation to a spot more than 20 kilometers southwest to my village.
[3]