And there is so much about insects that we still dont understand, even as we are wiping them out at a frightening rate. While Goulson does not explicitly say it, the title of his book is surely borrowed from the conservationist Rachel Carsons seminal 1962 title Silent Spring, which exposed the impact of pesticides, in particular DDT, on the natural world. DDT was subsequently banned in the US in 1972 and later across the globe, but Goulson argues that conservationists then took their eye off the ball. Since Carson published her book, pesticide production has ramped up, until now there are an estimated three million tons of chemicals going into the global environment every year.Goulson author of more than 300 scientific articles, including a major study of another type of synthetic pesticide, neonicotinoid reveals the backlash he received from pesticide companies which, as with DDT a generation ago, sought to undermine his findings. While neonicotinoids, which impair the immune systems of bees, damage their fertility and disrupt their sophisticated navigational abilities, are now banned across the EU, they are still widely used in the developing world, where regulation is more lax. Meanwhile, councils across the UK continue to douse our pavements and verges in glyphosates, even after recent high-profile court cases in the US that have linked the weedkiller Roundup to cancer.Our obsession with pesticides, combined with climate change and the destruction of habitats upon which insects rely, is a toxic mix that is rapidly fuelling the insect apocalypse. But Goulson is a master communicator, and even as he outlines the scale of the destruction, he holds back from despair and never hectors. He admits that even he, a dedicated lover of insects who started off collecting caterpillars in the playground at the age of five, keeps a tub of glyphosate in the garden shed although he insists he has not used it for several years, and would not now. Above all, his infectious love of insects lifts the book and the reader out of the abyss.Each chapter begins with a profile of a particularly bizarre species: creatures beyond even the imagination of our most far-fetched science fiction. Take the emerald cockroach wasp, which disables the escape reflex of its victim and chews off its antennae before leading it in submission to its lair. The female wasp then lays her egg on the docile cockroach and leaves its growing larvae to devour it alive.Goulson is a passionate advocate of eating insects. With mass livestock farming rapidly obliterating the natural world, he argues that, to avert disaster, we must seek alternative forms of protein and join the 80 per cent of the global population who already regularly consume insects. We happily eat prawns which resemble insects, with their segmented bodies and external skeletons so why not go one further?Until the last two centuries or so, an alien looking down on earth at any time over the past 400million years would have concluded this was the kingdom of the insects. This book will make you think differently about our right of dominion over the planet. And youll never again swat a fly in anger.Joe Shute's Forecast: A Diary of the Lost Seasons is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99. Dave Goulson's Silent Earth is published by Jonathan Cape at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, visit Telegraph Books