The origins and history of insect conservation in the United States

Abstract

The indigenous insects of North America did not co-evolve with extensive agriculture, as the British fauna has done ever since late Pleistocene glaciation (New et al. 1995). Native American land use, such as burning and garden cultivation, moulded habitats to some extent, as did the impact of the Pleistocene megafauna, mostly extinct within the past 10,000 years. But the imposition of European-style land use - chiefly the cow and the plough, but also the sheep and the goat, the steel axe, and dense occupation - was new to the continent. Its entomofauna doubtless began to change in response to European colonisation from the sixteenth century in California and the Southwest, and from the seventeenth century on the East Coast. Westward movement, extensive 'sodbusting', industrial expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and rapid human population growth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have driven numerous species range contractions and local extinctions (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981).