Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
March 18, 2013
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
A recent New York Times article, entitled “Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Level in Decades,” began: “The number of monarch butterflies that completed an annual migration to their winter home in a Mexican forest sank this year to its lowest level in at least two decades, due mostly to extreme weather and changed farming practices in North America.”
It wasn’t until several paragraphs later that the concept of “changed farming practices” was more clearly defined, e.g. “an explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides.”
When such corporate-sponsored eco-terrorism is combined with the predictable, climate change-induced “drought and record-breaking heat in North America,” it should come as no surprise that species after species is impacted, threatened, and often driven into extinction.
As the Times explains, “The area of forest occupied by the butterflies, once as high at 50 acres, dwindled to 2.94 acres.”
Details of this recent decline arrive courtesy of a census conducted via “a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund and the Mexican cellphone company Telcel.”
Perhaps the World Wildlife Fund will next partner up with McDonald’s to teach us all about the connection between deforestation and cattle grazing… but I digress.
The monarch butterfly habitat is “virtually gone,” says Chip Taylor, director of the conservation group Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas. “We've lost well over 120 million acres, and probably closer to 150 million acres.”
Ramon Gonzalez of Mother Nature News adds: “As with honeybees, experts point to American farmland, which is increasingly planted with genetically modified soybean and corn engineered to withstand herbicide applications. These herbicides are wiping out milkweeds, on which monarch larvae feed, in critical feeding grounds in the American Midwest.”
Why Butterflies Matter
“The fluttering of a butterfly's wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.”
- Paul Erlich
Of course, some folks will say: It’s just a damn insect; we have more important work to focus on.
Those of you familiar with my writing might expect me to spend the rest of this article utterly dismantling that myopic perception by telling you all about the role insects play in the delicate dance of our eco-system -- but I’d rather make a bigger point, ask bigger questions:
Through our behavior, our compliance, our silence, we are all, to some degree, culpable for a human culture responsible for wiping out 150-200 animal and plant species every single day. Why do we need to know how and why any species is “important” (by human standards) before we can work up the ambition to defend them?
Let’s say one of your family members is “elderly” and experiencing a clear and rapid cognitive decline. A very strong clinical/scientific argument could be made that s/he is of no “importance” to the cycle of life on the planet.
We could legitimately and coldly argue: Time dedicated to a wrinkled and drooling old human is time that could be instead spent working to end fracking or stop-and-frisk or corporate tax breaks.
Yet, almost without fail, we single-mindedly care for that human and find time to ease their transition from this mortal coil. If asked why we behave in such a manner, we’d likely use some very un-clinical/scientific words: empathy, compassion, love.
To find virtually limitless empathy, compassion, and love for a dying human but none for monarch butterflies is textbook speciesist behavior.
Defend all earthlings
“Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly”
- Dante Alighieri
Butterflies are dying. This frighteningly and sad reality is not the result of some unstoppable force of nature or preordained theology. Butterflies are dying thanks to human decisions.
Many other species -- including our own -- are dying thanks to human decisions but we’ve seemingly reserved particular indifference for those beings we perceive as beneath us.
In the narration of the essential film, Earthlings, we’re told: “By analogy with racism and sexism, the term ‘speciesism’ is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.”
This is why we shouldn’t need to know how “important” any form of life is in order to defend it and perhaps even love it… but it sure helps to recognize what connects us all.
More from Earthlings: “Like us, (animals) are the psychological centers of a life that is uniquely their own. What these animals are due from us, how we morally ought to treat them, are questions whose answer begins with the recognition of our psychological kinship with them.”
First two steps:
If these modifications sound unlikely or even impossible to you: Try tapping into your vast imagination, seeing past the limited choices we’ve been programmed to accept, and choosing to view such adaptations as not only eminently feasible but also as undeniably necessary.
Remember: If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.
#shifthappens
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Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
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