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This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross.

If you've been around a few decades, you might remember driving with your parents on a highway

and seeing the windshield of your car become parked with the carcasses of countless bugs

who met their end with vehicular contact.

Well, you may not have noticed, but there are far fewer bug smudges on windshields and headlights these days.

Our guest, Science Writer Oliver Millman, says that's just one measure of a phenomenon that could spell trouble for humans,

the striking decline in insect populations around the world.

Driven by habitat loss, pesticides and global warming, the collapse of insect species means more than the loss of biological diversity on the planet.

Many insects play critical roles as pollinators, not just bees, but flies that pollinate vegetable plants and midges essential to the reproduction of cocoa plants.

Other insects break down rotting plant and animal waste to release nutrients and nourish soil,

and many insects are critical parts of the food chain.

If they disappear, the birds and other animals who eat them starve, putting the larger mammals who prey on them in trouble.

Millman's new book describes evidence of the insect again, as some call it, and what scientists think can be done about it.

Oliver Millman is a British journalist who's the environmental correspondent at the Guardian.

His new book is the insect crisis, the fall of the tiny empires that run the world.

Well, Oliver Millman, welcome to Fresh Air.

You know, I'm wondering, before you got into this subject and started doing this research, did you think much about insects?

I didn't much. I think like many of us, I barely thought much of them other than to think of them as an occasional annoyance.

I mean, I remember as a child turning over stones and marvelling ants and the kind of complex societies they managed to construct underground.

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