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Chapter 1: What is the spotted lanternfly and why is it a problem?
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Chapter 2: How did the public respond to the lanternfly invasion?
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Okay, I have returned today to a scene from my past. This is where I was standing last summer when I saw a bug skittering up this tree trunk. It was a very distinctive bug. It has a polka dotty sort of wing with red underneath. This unmistakably was a spotted lanternfly. The spotted lanternfly may be pretty small, but it has the potential to cause big problems.
The invasive species showing up around the tri-state area this summer. These gray and black dotted bugs that are said to be a destructive pest that feeds on more than 70 different plants that are critical to the state's agriculture.
So I knew what this thing was. I had seen these many times before. They are all over Brooklyn. They took off around 2020, 2021. And so I knew what I was supposed to do in this situation.
Authorities say if you see one, you're asked to kill it.
You heard right. Kill the bugs. So I ran after it. I ran up to this tree, and I remember I tried to stomp it, like, on the tree, which is hard to do. So it got away from me, and I was going after it again. And then this is what I remember most. This woman yelled at me from down the street, like, And I don't remember exactly what she said, but the spirit was like, yeah, get it. Get the lanternfly.
And this is not the first time I've had that kind of interaction. Like, this has definitely been the vibe. Welcome to New York, guys, where citizens have turned merciless mercenaries to protect nature. Your friend Lanthropog, and ask him about it. Ask him what happens when you f*** with New Jersey. Huh? No, he ain't here? I wonder where he went. Maybe under my f***ing shoe.
Like people really, really got on board with just the mass murder of bugs. And I, in that moment, was actually feeling really ambivalent. Because like on the one hand, it did feel good to be a part of this big civic project with my neighbor. And also it is satisfying to kill one of these bugs. Like it feels like you're almost scoring a point in a game, right?
But I also kind of wanted to say to her, like, isn't it weird that we're all just happily participating in this big project that is about killing living creatures and we're like giving each other high fives over that? Something about it just feels also really bad.
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Chapter 3: What ethical dilemmas arise from killing invasive species?
And I did not say any of that. I was kind of just like, oh, it was a lanternfly. But now lanternfly season is coming again. There's a chance the lanternflies are above me in this tree right now, like getting ready to hatch.
And I'm once again going to be faced with essentially a moral question of a kind that comes up in conservation all the time, where we're forced to choose between different types of beings and their lives. So the question is, should I personally be killing these invasive lanternflies? And also just what is the right way for any of us to think through that kind of decision?
One of the first people to learn that the lanternfly had arrived in the United States was a scientist named Julie Urban. An old acquaintance of hers unexpectedly left her a message. You know, Julie, this is Leo. Call me back. I'm like, they found it.
They got it.
It's here. I knew instantly. You knew just from that? I haven't talked to the guy in like years, right? You were like, it's the lanternfly. It's got to be. Totally. Wow. Oh, my gosh. How'd you feel? Freaked out. Totally freaked out. The lanternfly had been on Julie's radar because she studies the group of insects that it belongs to, the planthoppers.
And she got into that work not because she was interested in invasive species management, but because she was into evolutionary biology. And she just thought that these bugs were incredibly cool. Cicadas are great and everything, but if you've seen one, seen them all, okay?
They kind of have the same, like, body shape and form. But planthoppers, they're extremely, we call it morphologically, but body shape diverse, right? One of them, its common name is the peanut-headed bug because it looks like it has a peanut on its head, right? Okay, good. Like who has that, right? And some of them shoot wax out their rear ends. And I'm like, wow.
I'm like, they shoot wax out their butts.
I'm in. But like, even if you're in it for the wax, you do have to stay up to date on bugs you study that could have a real world impact. So that's why Julie had her eye on lanternflies.
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Chapter 4: How do experts recommend managing lanternfly populations?
Because around 2004, they had landed in South Korea and they did a lot of damage there. mostly to grapevines, but also to apples and other tree fruit, to ornamental trees and timber trees. They have this straw-like beak that sits along their abdomens, and they use that to suck on a part of the plant tissue called phloem, which carries sugars that are created by photosynthesis.
That sugar is what fuels its growth. It allows it to reproduce, that kind of thing.
But it's also famously delicious.
Exactly, right?
And so the insects are stealing that. So Julie calls Leo back and she learns that the lanternfly has indeed been detected in the United States, specifically in Pennsylvania. And a little while later, in the spring of 2015, she heads up there with a team of people who are trying to figure out what to do.
We went to the landscaping company where it was thought that that was like ground zero, so to speak. I had never seen a landscaping company at this scale. What did it look like, like greenery or? Greenery, well, piles of stone, like really from around the world. The lanternflies seem to have arrived on one of those piles of stone, a shipment from Asia.
These bugs are unusually good at hitchhiking. And when the team looked closer, they found old egg masses on the grounds of this landscaping company, meaning that actually the lanternflies had probably arrived more than a year earlier.
And they also noticed that lanternflies seem to be feeding especially on the Tree of Heaven, which, despite the nice sounding name, is actually itself an invasive species from Asia. Now, non-native species arriving in new places, that is not always a problem. Like, honeybees are not from North America, nor are most earthworms.
But the worry is that a non-native species with no natural predators can get out of control. They can displace other species, or in the case of lanternflies, they can kill a lot of trees. So Pennsylvania took some steps to manage the lanternflies. They put some areas of the state under quarantine so that things like landscaping materials had to be inspected before they could move.
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Chapter 5: What are the consequences of killing lanternflies?
She said, Julie, I'm out here. I'm going to the Walmart. They're flying into Walmart. And I'm like, what the? What are you guys doing here? And then she called me again at that vineyard. He also grew apples. And she called me. She said, Julie, I'm, you know, at the vineyard and they're flying over into the apple trees. They're hitting my car. And we had never seen them on the apples before.
The general public gets wind of all this. And some of them begin to take matters into their own hands. One enterprising individual goes after some lanternflies with a blowtorch. Try to surprise attack them here and just go at them. And some people who are hearing about the rise of lanternflies start getting angry. They say, why didn't you just nuke them at the beginning?
Everything you did was wrong. Julie and her colleagues, including at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, They had been balancing a lot of concerns as they figured out how to deal with the lanternflies. Like, they could have just torched the infected area with strong, nasty insecticides. But, you know, they already were using powerful insecticides.
They were just trying to do it in a way that didn't kill too many other bugs. But the containment measures didn't totally work. By 2018 and 2019, despite the quarantines and the pesticides, the lanternflies are really on the move. They spread to the city of Philadelphia, about 60 miles away from where they were first detected.
And in the summer of 2020, amid everything else going on, they are exploding. Invasion of the spotted lantern flies in University City, and it looks like ground zero is this Chipotle at 34th and Lancaster. There's footage of the bugs absolutely blanketing the sidewalk at the entrance of this ill-fated Philadelphia Chipotle.
There are photos of the bugs wrapping around the trunks of Pennsylvania trees, which is very creepy, though also oddly beautiful. And ordinary people in Philadelphia are fighting back. as they have been told to.
In the summer of 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture posted on Facebook about the lanternflies, saying that you should, quote, squish their guts out anytime you see them, unquote. A kill order. And people get very into this. Stomping, squishing. There are reports of kids in Philly going after them with skateboards.
And it did seem to me that the point of the various lanternfly campaigns was to inspire us all to action. But I did wonder, like, why? One thing I've been curious about is, like, is the stomp it part of the campaign, like,
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Chapter 6: How does community involvement impact pest management?
actually to help bring down populations? No. So what is it for, then? It's, again, if you don't kill it, you're going to carry it. Now, we don't have good data on this, but it doesn't seem like the individual stompers have had that much of an actual impact on lanternfly population levels. Other mitigation measures are way more effective.
But Julie and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture are really focused on whether the lanternfly will spread. Like you stomp it so it doesn't try to hitch a ride with you in your car. And if you look a little more closely, you can see that the public outreach campaigns in Pennsylvania and eventually New York do include information about this.
Like, make sure to report these bugs if you see them outside of the quarantine zone. In Pennsylvania, you can call the hotline at 1-884-BADFLY. A lot of their communication is also about scraping away egg masses, which is more efficient than stomping individual bugs. But when I started to hear about this, it seemed like some of that nuance had gotten lost.
People were kind of just stomping with abandon, even with a sense of glee. And like, we were sending children off to do this. Girl Scouts love taking action. They love finding ways that they can help out in the community. And one of the ways that Girl Scouts are showing the love to parks today is through a little bit of a lanternfly squish-a-thon.
But there were also signs that people were conflicted about the kill orders. One friend told me that in the summer of 2021, she saw someone running after a lanternfly, yelling out, the New York Times told me to kill you. I personally know a couple of people who gave up stomping. And the question even made it on Jimmy Fallon, where comedian Kate McKinnon was making an appearance.
And I saw this baby on the street and I was like, oh, This moth. What? It's like sepia-toned wing. Fishnets, basically.
Basically, it's gorgeous.
Peak of red with polka dots. Like, this is a burlesque dancer.
But she promises that now that she knows it's invasive, she's going to kill it.
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Chapter 7: What moral frameworks can guide decisions about killing pests?
People were starting to wonder why exactly we had to kill these gorgeous burlesque dancer bugs. And actually, the science was getting a little more murky on this question, too. The initial worries about how the lanternflies might kill all these trees and crops, those did not pan out. As of now, in the U.S., the bugs are really mostly a problem for grapes, and therefore for grape growers.
Though Julie told me, in her mind, there is still urgency around making sure that the lanternflies don't expand to new places.
So if heat makes them develop, they're going to develop earlier as they move south.
That could mean more time to feed on Georgia peaches or maybe on the many grapes in my home state of California. So even though things haven't been as bad in the Northeast as they initially feared, it is still possible that in other places it could be worse. These past couple of summers, I have shared Kate McKinnon's ambivalence about stomping lantern flies.
And I have felt especially ambivalent about the kill orders and how happy we all seem to be to comply. But this year, I don't know. I wanted to face my ambivalence head on. It is really not the biggest deal in the world. So I was like, I should actually just decide once and for all what I'm going to do here. Make a moral choice that I can live by.
Do you think it's morally right for me to kill lanternflies? Yes, because I think if anything, it can only help. Julie doesn't like the idea of killing living things, and she knows better than anyone what cool creatures lanternflies are. But she was like, we just got to do it.
I mean, this is it's kind of like as humans, we've manipulated our environment so much, you know, and ethically, it's our responsibility to try to fix that or keep it from getting worse as much as we can. You know, we have to do our chores environmentally. Right. And a lot of times they're distasteful. And this is one that's very distasteful. I totally see how Julie landed here.
And yet, even with what I had now learned about the science, I felt like there were still ethical questions here that I wanted to think through more deeply, ideally with the help of a moral philosopher. And when I did, I learned more than I had bargained for about the ethics of conservation and of decision-making in general. That is after the break.
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Chapter 8: What personal decisions did the host make regarding lanternflies?
Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part?
Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.
Hasan Piker has blown up in recent years. After the 2024 election, the popular leftist Twitch streamer became a go-to voice for the Democratic Party, but Piker's glow-up has angered a section of Democrats who are growing louder in voice. Hasan Piker is anti-American, he is bigoted, he's anti-Semitic, and he is deeply misogynistic.
So in March, a Democratic group called Third Way published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal's opinion section saying, quote, Democrats are too cozy with Hasan Piker. He is such an extremist that it will only do damage to Democrats and hurt their chances of beating right-wing populism. Now, Piker is controversial, no doubt. But is he toxic? I don't think this helps Republicans at all.
I think, as a matter of fact, Third Way's brand of politics has helped Republicans. Their attitude has been to constantly concede on culture or issues of the Republican Party and never focus on economic populism. I'm Ested Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
I read several different papers and articles as I was trying to think through my decision about whether or not to kill lanternflies this summer if they should be so unlucky as to cross my path. And there was one that I kept thinking about by an author named Chelsea Batavia. She lives in Washington State. The lanternflies have not made it there yet, but I told her the whole story.
Oh boy, what a mess. Chelsea now works in government. She is representing her own views here, not the state of Washington. But back when she was a PhD student studying ecosystem management and environmental ethics, she got interested in moral dilemmas in conservation. Because, you know, mostly people who care about conservation are trying to do the right thing.
But sometimes they face conflicting moral demands. You know, it's challenging. Should we be killing barred owls to save spotted owls? This is something that happened in the Pacific Northwest starting in 2013. And the images of the bodies of invasive barred owls that had been killed in the name of conservation, they made people uncomfortable. And Chelsea gets that.
You know, like I have a kind of a strong intuitive response to like, no, we shouldn't be killing anything. Don't we say that we care about nature? Don't we say we care about wildlife? And killing is bad. Like that's the first thing you learn. Exactly. It's like thou shall not kill.
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