Discovering the limits of ecological resilience

In 1949, environmentalist Aldo Leopold wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”(1). Seventy years later, biologists no longer witness such wounds in solitude. Instead, millions of people on social media share evidence every day of how the behavior of a wealthy minority (2) has created unsustainable rates of biodiversity loss and climate transformation (3). Now, on page 685 of this issue, Soroye et al. demonstrate widespread declines in bumble bee species that are better explained by the frequency of climate extremes than by changes in average temperatures (4).