Agent Smith was right

In The Matrix, Agent Smith describes man as a virus, a species moving from place to place, consuming all resources of said place before moving on but now, there is no other place, a reality being played out as we speak, regarding the Monarch Butterfly, wild bees and other insects crucial to our survival. 

This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn't come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.

“It does not look good,” said Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College.

It is only the latest bad news about the dramatic decline of insect populations.

Another insect in serious trouble is the wild bee, which has thousands of species. Nicotine-based pesticides called neonicotinoids are implicated in their decline, but even if they were no longer used, experts say, bees, monarchs and many other species of insect would still be in serious trouble.

That’s because of another major factor that has not been widely recognized: the precipitous loss of native vegetation across the United States...

A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels, farmers have expanded their fields. That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes.

Another major cause is farming with Roundup, a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.

As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.

What's interesting is the fact Monsanto is a primary player in this sad scenario as the maker of Roundup, along with Bayer and Shell (Neonicotinoids), as GMO foods (corn/soy etc, etc.) require extensive use of Roundup and insecticides in order to survive, something that's beginning to change as nature always finds a way to subvert artificiality via, in the case of GMO corn, the corn borer beetle, as seen in a BRT post titled Monarchs & GMO Corn.

For Agent Smith fans, here is the virus quote courtesy YouTube.