Fire and Knowledge

The immense diversity of the insects and flowering plants combined is no accident. The two empires are united by intricate symbioses. The insects consume every anatomical part of the plants, while dwelling on them in every nook and cranny. A large fraction of the plant species depend on insects for pollination and reproduction. Ultimately they owe them their very lives, because insects turn the soil around their roots and decompose dead issue into nutrients required for continued growth.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction around the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and other terrestrial habitats of the world…. The land would return to approximately its condition in early Paleozoic times, covered by mats of recumbent wind-pollinated vegetation, sprinkled with clumps of small trees and bushes here and there, largely devoid of animal life.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 133