Bringing back the buzz with Dave Goulson
#2 | May 2026
Published May 2026
Bringing back the buzz with Dave Goulson
Current estimates suggest that Europe may have lost as much as 90% of its insects over the last century. Dave Goulson is a professor of biology at the University of Sussex and one of Europe’s leading experts on insect ecology. He has spent the better part of three decades studying bee populations, the drivers of insect decline, and the relationship between the way we farm and the health of the ecosystems that farming depends on.
His latest book, Eat the Planet Well, published this month, turns that lens onto our plates, examining the environmental and health costs embedded in the food we buy, and offering a clear-eyed guide to navigating a system that is, as he puts it, not one anyone would have designed from scratch.
In this episode of What The Field?!, we spoke to Dave about how insects underpin the food chain most of us take for granted, and about why the prognosis — despite everything — is not entirely bleak. There is, he argues, a great deal that individuals and communities can do, and insect populations, unlike pandas or rhinos, can recover quickly when given the conditions to do so.
Written by Emilia Aguirre
Emilia Aguirre is our Awareness & Advocacy specialist — which means she spends her days asking the uncomfortable questions about how our food is grown, priced, labeled, and sold. She hosts What The Field?!, a podcast packed with stories from the ground, hard-hitting research, and conversations with the people shaping the future of food (whether they like it or not).