Video recommendation: University of Cologne - "Dr Mark Benecke // Time is up: Heat, floods, species loss"
🌐 https://youtu.be/MubKjrWCg5w
The video was published on YouTube on 27 June 2025.
As part of the kick-off event for the "Sustainability Days 2025", the Sustainability Working Group was able to attract a very special speaker: Dr Mark Benecke, who is known as a criminal biologist, specialist in forensic entomology, author and actor.
Mark has once again posted an update from his "Time is up" lecture series, which I have been following closely for several years. In this case, I think it was the University of Cologne that posted it. Mark's lectures are exceptionally valuable for my own environmental protection work and for keeping my knowledge up to date, as he always makes all his statements based on measurement data and cites the sources. This means that everyone can see for themselves that everything is correct and draw their own conclusions. And it's all about measurements, not opinions. Admittedly, I also like that per se.
He emphasises that the current developments in heat, floods and species extinction can no longer be dismissed as "normal" weather phenomena, but have a dramatic impact on life on Earth. Particularly striking: in Spain, France and other southern regions, temperature deviations of over 14 degrees Celsius were measured in spring 2025 - a value that exceeds even the forecasts of climate models. Mark illustrates how much and how quickly temperatures are rising, using examples such as surface temperatures of up to 70°C in Texas and China, which were already measured in 2024 and 2025.
He describes his personal observations on the decline in species: "There used to be nights on the Rhine when there were so many mayflies that you could no longer see your own hand. Today, even the species that can cope with heat and environmental changes have declined sharply.
And then there are the personal anecdotes, you might say these measurements are anecdotal. But I empathise with him and I assure you, every anecdote takes me back to my childhood thirty or forty years ago. Thirty years is nothing in biology. And yet everything was different then.
You found woodlice under every stone. The woodlice no longer exist.
Earthworms came out of the ground as soon as it rained. Maybe that's why they were called earthworms. And what fat arseholes there sometimes were. Today, both no longer exist. Neither the rain nor the worms.
And with the flies, mosquitoes and all the other insects buzzing around in the air, those were the days. After a two-hour drive on the motorway, you could hardly see anything because the windscreen wipers and wiper fluid couldn't keep up with scraping the dead insects off the windscreen.
Even when cycling, you'd better keep your mouth tightly shut, otherwise you'd immediately get a non-vegan protein bomb between your teeth.
The bit between the teeth could also quickly become unpleasant. Sweet things like cakes, biscuits, lemonade and juices had to be quickly defended against wasps, and not just outdoors. Even if only delicate daisies were in bloom, you were better off not walking barefoot on the grass. I might have disregarded that once and well, I can't blame the wasp, bumblebee or bee for stinging.
As soon as you haven't thoroughly wiped up a spilt sweet drink, at least one colony of ants has taken over overnight. My parents can tell you a thing or two about it. Memories come flooding back. Memories of one of my dad's coolest birthday parties. And it was summer.
We carried the bar upstairs from our parents' hobby room in the basement. It was a spontaneous action, I remember it like it was yesterday. The bar counter consists of three elements. A long L-shaped leg, a short L-shaped piece and the centre corner as a connecting element. Wood. 20th century wood. Solid, real, really heavy. The piece is at least as heavy as the invited party guests were impressed. Would we have carried the bar upstairs if we had been aware of its weight beforehand? I harbour serious doubts.
The party was a roaring success. The irritating voice in my head tells me that I mixed 84 cocktails that evening. I'll have to ask my mum if that adds up. She might know, after all, she's the one who put the dishwasher away at night to prevent worse things from happening. You can't imagine what the bar and terrace looked like the next morning: black.
The bar was covered in millions and millions of ants. Streets of ants next to streets of ants, crossing and overlapping each other. The spectacle continued and it felt like it stretched across half the terrace before getting lost in the grass on both sides. Unimaginable today. Just as unimaginable today as actually finding a piece of wooden furniture at Ikea. That's sad.
For my younger readers, wood is not a plastic shell stuffed with chipboard from illegally cleared jungle trees, glue and who knows what else. Wood as such is actually an excellent natural material. However, like everything else that humans touch, the use of wood as a raw material has got completely out of control.
The demand for ever more, ever cheaper pieces of furniture is too great. Where there used to be local forestry and trade at fair conditions for forest farmers and wood processors - I happen to know a large company of this kind and its owner in Baden-Württemberg personally - there are now a few to one people fighting for the top spot. And in times of "fast furniture", this can only be contested if, for example, the last primeval forests of Europe in the Carpathians are cut down for the European market.
Although the Carpathians remind me more of the billions of shipping boxes that are constantly being produced for Amazon. I'll give you three guesses what they're made from. Recycling? No, certainly not. Recycling is the biggest greenwashing lie the industry has ever come up with.
Oh dear. I've just opened a can of worms...
The shipping boxes for Amazon are produced by various cardboard manufacturers who specialise in sturdy corrugated cardboard and recyclable materials. Amazon is increasingly relying on automated packaging technologies that produce customised boxes and paper bags directly in the logistics centres. These machines measure the products and produce customised packaging to save material and reduce CO₂ emissions. Theoretically. Hundreds of these machines are now in use in Germany and Europe, producing both cardboard boxes and lightweight paper envelopes.
According to Amazon, the material of the boxes is fully recyclable. In Europe, all paper bags, cardboard envelopes and cardboard boxes used by Amazon are made from 100% recyclable materials. Disposable plastic is no longer used in the dispatch centres, with paper and cardboard being used instead. Bubble wrap has also been replaced by packing paper. The packaging can be disposed of in the waste paper bin and fed into the recycling cycle.
So much for the theory. Have you noticed the marketing trick?
I don't doubt that Amazon also wants to save on packaging material. To what extent the goal of sustainability is achieved is difficult. If every little thing is ordered individually from Amazon and has to be packaged and shipped somehow, difficult. If the famous USB stick is sent in a shoebox-sized cardboard box... very difficult.
After all, the cardboard box is recyclable.
Wait a minute. She is what? That's right. The Amazon boxes are not sustainable because recycled cardboard is used to make them, but because the cardboard used to make them can be recycled. A small but big difference. Research shows that trees over a hundred years old from the last primeval forests in Sweden are felled and processed into pulp, which then ends up in German cardboard factories. According to Greenpeace, Amazon, HelloFresh and Zalando are among the customers of these cardboard boxes.
Amazon itself claims to use sustainable and recyclable packaging, but does not provide any transparent information on the exact origin of the cellulose used for the cardboard boxes. There are no publicly available, detailed supply chain records that rule out the use of wood from old-growth forests. In my opinion, selling this as sustainable is simply fraud.
And so the circle closes. Or not. Unfortunately.
In view of the climate catastrophe that is visible everywhere, it is almost ludicrous to see that we are cutting down our last primeval forests to produce cheap shipping boxes for Amazon & Co. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with the circular economy, which we need and which Mark repeatedly refers to in his marvellous presentation. All the more reason to recommend the Time is up lecture series. The sooner a rethink takes place, the less shit it will be.
