Not to sound overly optimistic, but I can imagine that a trend like this is less difficult to reverse than, say, climate change.
The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.
As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales than the climate.)
You are so right. Insects are mass breeders, and it's common for the numbers of any given species to veer wildly from year to year. We may or may not be seeing a serious setback for insects in general, but given a chance, they will bounce back within a few short generations. And so will their predators, albeit over a longer stretch of time.
For what it's worth, nature seems remarkably unperturbed up here a little north of Germany. Some counts up, some counts down. Two years ago, we had mice everywhere, this year hardly any. But then a recent infestation of butterflies, and the bats are doing extraordinarily well this summer, as are the spiders apparently - hardly indicative of any extreme dearth of insects.
The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.
As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales than the climate.)