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Hello, I'm Tina Dehealy and this is Beyond Today where we ask one big question about one big story.

Today, can we stop the insects from dying?

Chapter 1, a Fable for Tomorrow.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seem to live in harmony with its surroundings.

The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms with fields of grain

and hillsides of orchards where in the spring white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields.

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.

There was a strange stillness.

The birds, for example, where had they gone? It was a spring without

voices. Those words you just heard are from Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, a groundbreaking

work that inspired a whole generation of environmental activism.

She was David Attenborough before David Attenborough was David Attenborough.

And she wrote those words 57 years ago, warning about the dangers of using strong pesticides on our planet.

David Attenborough himself had this to say 14 years ago.

If we end, the rest of the backbone animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world

would get on pretty well.

But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse.

And yet, we've just been told this week that insects could be wiped out within a century

because of pesticides, with catastrophic consequences for the

whole planet including us. We are in the middle of a biodiversity crisis. In the last

50 years alone the populations of all mammals, birds, reptiles and fish

...