Why Butterflies...?

We generally think of insects as adversaries. Yet they're also our allies: much of our food crops require pollination by insects to bear fruit. And if something is wrong with the environment, you'll see it in the insects. As a more visible insect, butterflies make good indicators of how an area is doing. A major reason we don't use insects instead of pesticides is that we're creeped-out by them. As a less scary insect, butterflies make good ambassadors of the crawly side of nature.

Nature belongs to everybody. As the smartest, most powerful sentient beings on the planet, we have an obligation to take care of our home, the earth. To do that, we need to know more about it.

The first thing to learn is that the pieces of the earth inter-connect. It's a big system; where do we start? Best to start with something you like. Endangered species are exciting but they're somewhat distant from us. You're not likely to touch a snow leopard's thick pelt, or sign hello to one of the last few hundred mountain gorillas. To raise a falcon or even just a common raccoon, you're required to have a license. On the other hand, anybody can raise a butterfly.

Start with that, and you'll soon learn about flowers, plants. Plants will lead you to soil; weather; the water cycle. Ultimately, we all rely on these things.

Butterflies go just about everywhere except into your house. (If you let them, they'd go there too.) Whether you live in the city or the countryside, there they are. They can be robust, withstanding freezing atop the clouds they ride. They can be fragile, their wings leaving bits of colored dust on your fingertips. Their colors and symmetry appeal to just about everybody; it's an instinct. But it's not just their beauty or their ubiquity that makes them significant.

Pesticides are poisonous to people. DDT was meant to help, by wiping out malaria-carrying mosquitos and crop pests. We didn't know back then that poisons build up in the body of creatures higher up on the food chain, us included. Contaminated foods often become hazardous because we concentrate it in our body fat. Pesticide poisoning is often a subtle thing. The signs of DDT were tremors, dizziness and fatigue, miscarriages and birth defects. And long before use of the pesticide DDT nearly cost us the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon, it was wiping out our butterflies.

We breathe the air, we eat the things grown in sunlight, we drink the water. Nature belongs to us, yet we also belong to nature. Sometimes what we do is hazardous to our environment. We have to try to control ourselves, and try to repair the damage that modern life has wrought on the environment. When we take care of the environment, we can't help but to also take care of ourselves.

Many people have given up on conservation and the environment because they feel it's hopeless. They don't know what to do. They can't stop oil spills and air pollution because they can't stop the flow of cars on the highways. They can't stop pollution in rivers because they can't stop factories. We should never stop trying, and we should never forget why it matters. Someday, we may find a better way than car and factories. In the meantime, to keep up hope, we should start with the smaller endeavours.

Some people are disillusioned because we've turned our attentions overseas-- to bamboo habitat in China and grasslands in Africa, for example. They think that we're unrealistic because we only seem to want to save what's "beautiful", or that we're trying to keep from taking a good hard look at our own immediate habitats. But the efforts to save these places has not been a waste.

The principles of ecology that we learned from pandas in the Qin Lin mountains and lions of the Oshokoti savannahs are the same principles that apply to that little woodlot a couple of blocks from where you live. We uncovered the astonishing story of monarch migration by tagging little wings, not unlike tagging the ears of tigers and pandas. That migration leads to the rainforests of Mexico, where logging and snowstorms have recently (in 2001) devastated their numbers. And, in time, the saving of the Mexican rainforests is one fight we can win.

The surprise is that it starts in your home town. You may not have much say about logging or the weather in Mexico, but you DO have control over what happens in your own backyard. You can help raise awareness of the environment by talking about butterflies, and decorating things with monarch emblems. You can plant milkweed on empty lots.

Rearing monarchs gives a sense of how each one exists for such a short window of time- each annual migration is accomplished by several generations. You can catch and tag and release them (in late August) if you live east of the Rockies. If you hunt them with a net in the wild, you might come across someone else's tag, in which case you can report it.

Watching a butterfly in flight is pleasant, relaxing. You can plant nectar-bearing flowers in a butterfly garden for somebody special to enjoy. Your scout troop or 4H group or neighborhood garden club can plant them for senior citizens you've never met, who might also have an interest in gardening. Why butterflies? because butterflies prove that, like Walt Disney said, it's a small world after all.

--Talzhemir
May 1, 2002