Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for August 15, 2010

I love the zap instead of a light bulb in the fifth panel.Look at the wise and knowing look in the sixth.

exoticdoc, in what way are any of Clayton’s statements incorrect? If you lose one species, you endanger those species which feed on it. You also sometimes end up with overpopulation of those species upon which the extinct species previously kept under control (if you kill all the coyotes, you end up overrun with mice; your sheep are safe from predation, but your grain crop suffers; one of the reasons the Black Death spread so quicky through Europe was that there had been a religiously-inspired massacre of cats, which had previously controlled the rat population).

The only statement Clayton makes which is more correct than he knows or intends is “You can’t kill all the insects with this thing”; he means it as an imperative, but it’s simply a declarative statement of fact. If every house in the suburbs hung a bug zapper on their porch it wouldn’t significantly reduce the overall population of moths, mayflies, mosquitoes, and the like. That level of ecological devastation can only really be achieved by things like widespread spraying of chemical insecticides (which is regularly done) or continual and cumulative toxification of soil, air and/or water (also inarguably occurring). Still, it’s a mistake that any nine year-old might make, and if all the insects (or even one species) WERE completely eliminated, the effect might well be what Clayton fears.

Adam’s “The only good bug is a dead bug” is no doubt intended as a humorous exaggeration, and were he not kidding around with his young son he probably would think better of saying it.

What Clayton doesn’t realize is that the first thing he says in the second panel is literally correct. You CAN’T kill all of the flying insects that way and therefore, you’re not messing with the food chain.

spiders i do catch and release\

the tiny ants who are all over - no, but i give food to ants at work that are outside my workplace

saw 3 different colonies (colors and shapes ) fighting over half a bag of crushed doritos, gave them some stale chips that were going into the compost anyway, and poof, i am the powerful ant peacemaker

Not a tangent at all, exdoc (or no moreso than your irrelevancy about “hyper-environmentalists” in the first place). Adam’s “What are these schools teaching you?” sets up his “The only good bug is a dead bug.” Is that what ADAM was taught in school? Clayton is a child. Adam is a grown man.

At no point does Clayton say “I was taught in school that bug zappers will destroy the ecosystem”, but it’s possible (and likely) that he’s had a unit on ecolological balance. Although he’s overstating his case, Clayton is in the right.

as opposed to” the only good bug is a dead bug” Clayton’s education seems quite sound.

I repeat, exdoc, Clayton is a child. When a child learns about recycling, he’ll go through the trashcan with a fine-toothed comb, separating every scrap of paper stuck to every shred of non-recyclable plastic, and placing every gram of scrapped food in the compost bucket. When a child is taught the rules of grammar, he’ll point out every split infinitive and dangling participle that he hears his parents utter. That’s not the the result of fear-mongering education, that’s the nature of childhood.

Adam is a grown man. If he believes that “The only good bug is a dead bug”, he’s either joking or he’s a fool. It’s on a par with “If you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all”, or “Who needs spotted owls?”

What WOULD birds eat if the bugs were all gone? What if enough bugs WERE removed to cause a drop in bird populations? What if only ONE species were entirely removed? Look into “trophic cascades”, wherein the extinction of one “keystone species” leads to widespread disruption of an entire ecosystem. The sea otter eats the urchin, the sea urchin eats the kelp. As otters neared extinction (killed by humans who didn’t want competition for abalone), the unchecked urchins devastated the kelp forests (causing further decline in the abalone that the humans wanted to “protect” in the first place).

It’s the ecology, stupid.

This is a brilliant comic. A lighthearted look at a very serious issue. It’s not just the food chain Bassett is critiquing it’s education, political correctness and short-term comfort vs. long-term sustenance. And a father (read the system/current state of affairs) who disregards any argument to the contrary of his actions with a dismissive Schwarzenegger type line.

All under the guise of a conversation between a boy and his dad and a mosquito zapper. I also like that it doesn’t seem to take sides. I don’t know Basset’s political inclination, though I know he was once a political cartoonist I do not recall his work.

This is flawlessly executed and probably too deep for 99% of readers to undertstand.

Cain’t keeel dem all!!!!! Quit using mine when I saw how much electricity they draw.

Perhaps I should have put “It’s the ecology, stupid” in quotes, because it was intended as a play on the well-known political catch-phrase about the economy. That much I retract, and no more.

What we are doing now, what we have been doing since industrialization began, in no way remotely resembles “responsible stewardship.” Have we got chemical wastes? Let’s dump ‘em in the river. Is there an animal we don’t like? Let’s just kill ‘em. (A hundred years ago, the stated goal of the Department of the Interior was complete eradication of large predators.) The new gadget will solve all our problems, we’ve got inexhaustible space for landfills, drain all the wetland so we can build beach houses, you name it.

About 50 years or more after the birth of the Environmental movement, the best we’ve done is slow the rate of increase in the ecological damage done by human “stewardship”. And business interests,, “sportsmen”, and religious conservatives have fought it every step of the way. Toxins are still building up in the air, soil, and water. The hole in the ozone layer is still there. The polar ice caps are still shrinking. Species are still disappearing at an alarming rate, not only through toxicity of habitat but the loss of habitat themselves. We’ve got wide tracts of ocean that are absolutely LIFELESS; not one alga there, not one molecule of CO2 being returned as breathable oxygen. Not only are CO2 levels rising, the rate of increase in CO2 levels is rising.

But hey, James Watt said that Jesus is coming back any day now, and he’s going to want see that we’ve made good use of the resources God gave us. Let’s use up everything as fast as we can. This, from the Secretary of the Interior.

“Dominion over the Earth”? Yeah, I’ll grant you that we’ve amply demonstrated that. “Stewardship of the Earth”? What definition of “stewardship” could we possibly be said to be meeting?

(By the way, comicsexpert, I don’t know that Bassett even WRITES the strip anymore, even though he still shares credit with Harrell. If you are certain of the contrary, let me know.)

Geez.. I worked a gig where they had the zappers hung over the water at the dock/patio. I don’t know about anyone else’s opinion.. but .. zap and it was dinner time for the fishes. Those guys’s were definitely in favor of that and it was great entertainment for us musicians on break.