Today I saw a monarch butterfly. It was the only one I have seen this summer, and I am sad. I have been preserving all the milkweed that has been coming up as a weed in my gardens. An insignificant gesture, but for me it is a little prayer. I’ve loved these butterflies ever since I was a boy and my father told me about their migratory journey. In those days there were three kinds of butterflies that frequented our suburban yard—little white ones, little yellow ones, and the monarchs. They fluttered about in great numbers, and I never thought they could ever disappear.
I can report that there are fireflies in NYC. I often think that cities are an unexpected saving grace. We have less pesticide use and less monocrop areas. We've got some serious bees and wasps, all kinds of birds including herons, ospreys, hawks, and recently the crows have returned after a long absence. There's a project I follow on IG called the Billion Oyster Project. They've been working on restoring the oyster reefs in the harbor. They have been reporting success as well as other species returning, like sea horses. There is love and hope. And never count the Earth herself out of the story.
Truly beautiful! They are sacred. When I moved into my current home there was nothing in the front or back yard but concrete, a patch of forlorn looking grass, and a lilac tree that had been repeatedly strimmed. It had a single spire. The garden was barren apart from slugs. Three years later and it is filled with insects and butterflies (red admiral, cabbage white, fritillary etc.) and we've even had a hedgehog and a frog. Birds visit to eat the insects too. It's not a large garden, but I've filled it with flowers, dug up the concrete at the front, and put down large raised beds on the concrete at the side for vegetables. I can't change the world, but I can do something about my own space. Around us, land is being gobbled up for building gargantuan warehouses and residential estates - not brown land, but arable! It is a depressing, worrying sight.
Jul 30, 2022·edited Jul 30, 2022Liked by Charles Eisenstein
The solution is to literally stop doing anything about it. Governments need to stop looking at mosquitos as a problem.
In Mexico, they have a mosquito abatement program that consists of fliers posted around town indicating how to cut tires into thirds, lay each piece down to allow water to pool, then place pieces of paper on the water which mosquitos may then lay their eggs. Remove and replace the pieces of paper twice a week.
Mexico also has no forestry service to speak of, but when you fly over, you'll notice a patchwork which precludes the need for one. Each fire can only burn an acre or a few acres at the most before it hits last years, or the fire the year before. They practically burn out before anyone notices them.
About a dozen years ago I moved from California to a somewhat swampy area slightly inland from the gulf coast of Florida. There were no butterflies evident anywhere. My yard, like every yard in the neighborhood, consisted of grass and an old tree that had clogged my septic tank with its roots. After dispatching the tree and grinding the roots, I proceeded to haul in well over 40 truckloads of FREE mulch. While I was waiting for all that mulch to turn to compost, I searched online for a list of native species, invasive species (many which are edible as well, and yes, I broke the law. Call me crazy. Call me a radical, but I now have well over a few hundred pounds of food growing in my yard.) as well as anything else that would thrive in this climate zone.
I also carried a pair of clippers in the glove compartment of my car, and whenever I saw anything blooming on the side of a road, vacant lot, etc. I would stop and take a cutting or ten, plant them in anything that would hold dirt until they were ready to be transplanted into the compost.
Fastforward ten years and my yard is alive with caterpillars, butterflies of all shapes, colors, and sizes. There are cocoons popping up everywhere. along with frogs, mosquitos, lizards, snakes, armadillos, possums, raccoons, deer, foxes, etc. etc.
This year has been exceptionally hot, so half of my flowering plants are not flowering at all, but because I have such a wide variety of plants, I still have plenty of butterflies. One of my neighbors decided to do the same thing, and we've since begun swapping plants, seeds, cuttings etc.
I just discovered that the county has a program whereby I can call and request that the pond behind my property be stocked with "mosquito fish" which can eat their weight in mosquitos every day. Perhaps this may be enough for them to at least stop spraying around this area.
When I walk every morning, I pick up garbage. It makes me sad that people throw their garbage on the ground without a thought. But the garbage is very illuminating as well: soda cans, beer cans, plastic bottles, Styrofoam to-go cups and containers, straws, candy wrappers, fast food bags, etc. Our values are completely upside down and backwards. We value the most vapid and empty things and give no thought to the things that are the most valuable, like all of the wondrous life and beauty of this planet. All of the money in the world will not buy us beauty, meaning, or fulfillment. Our current way of life is bankrupt. May we find the way back to beauty and the sacredness of life.
There have been fewer Monarchs in my yard this summer. The Milkweed is thriving, but no eggs or caterpillars to give it that value or make it part of the cycle of life. I wonder at times, do we have the potential to wake up and take action, what can our brain handle with so many stimuli coming at us on a daily basis, and can we care about these sacred things when we rarely stop and notice them? On a more positive note, the lightening bugs were dancing all over my yard this summer and I danced with them, with awe and astonishment and wonder. I stop. I notice. I belong. Thank you for acknowledging all the living beings with wings and lights and mystery.
This gets to the heart of one of the most common failings of mankind--that "someone must do something about it." Unfortunately, what this means is that SOMEONE ELSE must do something.
The problem mentioned in the article cannot be solved by waiting for the world to recognize it and take action against it. It cannot be cured by collective force. Instead the healing must begin with the understanding of individuals that they must take action ON THEIR OWN without waiting for others to move and even if no one else participates.
"If you know what is right to do and you do not do it, to you it is sin." -- James 4: 17
Personally, this means that while my neighbors spray their yards with all kinds of herbicides and pesticides to grow nice-looking lawns, I refuse to do so. Visually, my yard cannot compete with theirs, but I can go into it (and my garden) and find butterflies, ladybugs, toads, preying mantises, etc., which live there because I refuse to use chemicals to control my local environment. I prefer a sea of bright yellow dandelion blooms growing in profusion naturally over a sterile expanse of grass which cannot exist without unnatural manipulation to the detriment of everything else.
Everyone can act proactively and preemptively in this manner.
like the quote from the film 'aluna' as the kogi protest the destruction of yet another sacred river mouth: "if you knew she could feel, you would not be doing it."
Just remember that the aholes that are pushing change for carbon reductions have regularly ignored other pollution, like glysophate, other pesticides, and industrial run off.
But you won't open your eyes to see that this carbon obsession and global warming is the thing that they use to distract us while they allow for real pollution.
I just spent three weeks in my childhood home of Appalachia where I remember spending every evening catching lightning bugs (maybe I was too good at it!) And honeysuckle is the scent of my childhood, that pervaded PawPaw alley behind my house where bats circled the streetlights for a quick bite. I saw one this time, driving at night on a deserted road.
I have a milkweed thicket in my Santa Cruz home where, after 30 months of divorce negotiations, it was down to the last week. At the same time, 40 blue chrysalis were hanging from the ridges of the house I'd bought and hoped to keep for our daughters. Too distracted to do anything else, I spent hours watching the Monarchs emerge, wet and vibrant, patiently dry and take their first flights.
I'm still thinking to get my first tatoo, at 65, of a monarch. I hear they're coming back in the Western migration! I'd also like a lightning bug and maybe a dandelion seed blowing in the wind. These are all my icons of hope.
I, too, saw monarch this morning. Luckily, there have been a few visiting throughout the summer (which started in May here). Fireflies, are a rare thing. In the 43 years since I arrived here (Minnesota) at the age of 17, I have seen only 3.
I have a very poor view of our species. Virtue is far less present than virulence. But I take hope that nature will outlast us. This hope was boosted when, at the outset of Covid, the lions came into the streets in Africa and lay down without fear. And when the dolphins swam through the canals of Venice because the polluted waters had turned to clear.
Call me cruel, but I hope that nature keeps taking us down until we, as a species, learn that our place is not at the top. Except in hubris.
There is no possible case to be made that industrial modernity is worth the loss of the monarch butterfly. None. It's a stain on this culture which can never be erased no matter how brief or long is the time it has remaining.
That said, none of us are prescient. One way to look at the mass extinction event we are within is that all these beautiful creatures—monarchs and fireflies and rosebushes and rainbow trout and snow leopards and on and on—are only here because previous mass extinctions overturned the biological order and set the stage for them. Extinctions on earth are a kind of reshuffling of the biological deck. It may be there are creatures even more beautiful than the ones we know waiting beyond all this ruin, and in some real sense requiring it.
So mourn this, but know you will not live to see the full story. Earth has been wounded before, even seemingly mortally wounded, yet she does not die. These losses may yet be the seed of something greater still.
I read recently that the monarchs are back in larger numbers than ever on the West Coast along with different hypotheses about why that is. Totally unexpected. Nature is sacred and also so much smarter than we are!
In May my mother would take her six children to a woods near to our farm in Wisconsin. It was carpeted with spring ephemerals - various flowers that bloomed a few weeks in May along with morel mushrooms. The transcendent beauty would place us in a hush us as we walked. This was over fifty years ago. My brother who still lives nearby informs me the flowers are no more, replaced by a green uniform carpet of garlic mustard an invasive species from Europe that is nearly universal in the woods of that area. I will ask my brother if summer lightning bugs are still happening.
I took on a derelict homestead in Nova Scotia in 2010, and the day I got the garden started I stayed digging til after dark...
As I was persuading myself to stop, a flash! around my knees, again another flash
A firefly! it circled me - I was filled with delight. It really felt sacred, the acknowledgement.
Just one firefly though?
I read up about the firefly life cycle
And their reduction across North America
Due to habitat loss
Then I did my best to create habitat for them. They need undisturbed mulched grassy areas and trees to lay their glow eggs. These become glow worms - and stay that way for one to two years. Finally they take off as fireflies just for one short summer, in which they need to find a partner and a good place to lay the next generation.
The other big problem for fireflies is outdoor electrical lighting - it messes up their courtship and makes it hard to find a mate.
So I only had dim timed lights to show stairs, otherwise kept the property dark, only star and moonlight.
And it seemed like it worked!
As they definitely did increase
The first year I was there I only saw the ONE. Next year FOUR. Then Sixteen
In the last years when Covid kept me locked down elsewhere, tenants said they are all over the hill, forest and garden...
"There were a lot - first we saw one and very soon another and another and then there were MANY it was like stars in the sky, so beautiful.
Now I'll have to research the firefly habitat and how to create one on our property; we have a few but it seems more like they are passing through than staying .. so glad you brought this up. A great project for the girls and I."
So now they are creating habitat at their place across the county. It works.
I had to sell the acreage -
I hope the new owners leave the plants. All that bee and butterfly food, and that those who are there cherish the fireflies.
I can report that there are fireflies in NYC. I often think that cities are an unexpected saving grace. We have less pesticide use and less monocrop areas. We've got some serious bees and wasps, all kinds of birds including herons, ospreys, hawks, and recently the crows have returned after a long absence. There's a project I follow on IG called the Billion Oyster Project. They've been working on restoring the oyster reefs in the harbor. They have been reporting success as well as other species returning, like sea horses. There is love and hope. And never count the Earth herself out of the story.
Truly beautiful! They are sacred. When I moved into my current home there was nothing in the front or back yard but concrete, a patch of forlorn looking grass, and a lilac tree that had been repeatedly strimmed. It had a single spire. The garden was barren apart from slugs. Three years later and it is filled with insects and butterflies (red admiral, cabbage white, fritillary etc.) and we've even had a hedgehog and a frog. Birds visit to eat the insects too. It's not a large garden, but I've filled it with flowers, dug up the concrete at the front, and put down large raised beds on the concrete at the side for vegetables. I can't change the world, but I can do something about my own space. Around us, land is being gobbled up for building gargantuan warehouses and residential estates - not brown land, but arable! It is a depressing, worrying sight.
The solution is to literally stop doing anything about it. Governments need to stop looking at mosquitos as a problem.
In Mexico, they have a mosquito abatement program that consists of fliers posted around town indicating how to cut tires into thirds, lay each piece down to allow water to pool, then place pieces of paper on the water which mosquitos may then lay their eggs. Remove and replace the pieces of paper twice a week.
Mexico also has no forestry service to speak of, but when you fly over, you'll notice a patchwork which precludes the need for one. Each fire can only burn an acre or a few acres at the most before it hits last years, or the fire the year before. They practically burn out before anyone notices them.
About a dozen years ago I moved from California to a somewhat swampy area slightly inland from the gulf coast of Florida. There were no butterflies evident anywhere. My yard, like every yard in the neighborhood, consisted of grass and an old tree that had clogged my septic tank with its roots. After dispatching the tree and grinding the roots, I proceeded to haul in well over 40 truckloads of FREE mulch. While I was waiting for all that mulch to turn to compost, I searched online for a list of native species, invasive species (many which are edible as well, and yes, I broke the law. Call me crazy. Call me a radical, but I now have well over a few hundred pounds of food growing in my yard.) as well as anything else that would thrive in this climate zone.
I also carried a pair of clippers in the glove compartment of my car, and whenever I saw anything blooming on the side of a road, vacant lot, etc. I would stop and take a cutting or ten, plant them in anything that would hold dirt until they were ready to be transplanted into the compost.
Fastforward ten years and my yard is alive with caterpillars, butterflies of all shapes, colors, and sizes. There are cocoons popping up everywhere. along with frogs, mosquitos, lizards, snakes, armadillos, possums, raccoons, deer, foxes, etc. etc.
This year has been exceptionally hot, so half of my flowering plants are not flowering at all, but because I have such a wide variety of plants, I still have plenty of butterflies. One of my neighbors decided to do the same thing, and we've since begun swapping plants, seeds, cuttings etc.
I just discovered that the county has a program whereby I can call and request that the pond behind my property be stocked with "mosquito fish" which can eat their weight in mosquitos every day. Perhaps this may be enough for them to at least stop spraying around this area.
When I walk every morning, I pick up garbage. It makes me sad that people throw their garbage on the ground without a thought. But the garbage is very illuminating as well: soda cans, beer cans, plastic bottles, Styrofoam to-go cups and containers, straws, candy wrappers, fast food bags, etc. Our values are completely upside down and backwards. We value the most vapid and empty things and give no thought to the things that are the most valuable, like all of the wondrous life and beauty of this planet. All of the money in the world will not buy us beauty, meaning, or fulfillment. Our current way of life is bankrupt. May we find the way back to beauty and the sacredness of life.
There have been fewer Monarchs in my yard this summer. The Milkweed is thriving, but no eggs or caterpillars to give it that value or make it part of the cycle of life. I wonder at times, do we have the potential to wake up and take action, what can our brain handle with so many stimuli coming at us on a daily basis, and can we care about these sacred things when we rarely stop and notice them? On a more positive note, the lightening bugs were dancing all over my yard this summer and I danced with them, with awe and astonishment and wonder. I stop. I notice. I belong. Thank you for acknowledging all the living beings with wings and lights and mystery.
This gets to the heart of one of the most common failings of mankind--that "someone must do something about it." Unfortunately, what this means is that SOMEONE ELSE must do something.
The problem mentioned in the article cannot be solved by waiting for the world to recognize it and take action against it. It cannot be cured by collective force. Instead the healing must begin with the understanding of individuals that they must take action ON THEIR OWN without waiting for others to move and even if no one else participates.
"If you know what is right to do and you do not do it, to you it is sin." -- James 4: 17
Personally, this means that while my neighbors spray their yards with all kinds of herbicides and pesticides to grow nice-looking lawns, I refuse to do so. Visually, my yard cannot compete with theirs, but I can go into it (and my garden) and find butterflies, ladybugs, toads, preying mantises, etc., which live there because I refuse to use chemicals to control my local environment. I prefer a sea of bright yellow dandelion blooms growing in profusion naturally over a sterile expanse of grass which cannot exist without unnatural manipulation to the detriment of everything else.
Everyone can act proactively and preemptively in this manner.
like the quote from the film 'aluna' as the kogi protest the destruction of yet another sacred river mouth: "if you knew she could feel, you would not be doing it."
Just remember that the aholes that are pushing change for carbon reductions have regularly ignored other pollution, like glysophate, other pesticides, and industrial run off.
But you won't open your eyes to see that this carbon obsession and global warming is the thing that they use to distract us while they allow for real pollution.
I just spent three weeks in my childhood home of Appalachia where I remember spending every evening catching lightning bugs (maybe I was too good at it!) And honeysuckle is the scent of my childhood, that pervaded PawPaw alley behind my house where bats circled the streetlights for a quick bite. I saw one this time, driving at night on a deserted road.
I have a milkweed thicket in my Santa Cruz home where, after 30 months of divorce negotiations, it was down to the last week. At the same time, 40 blue chrysalis were hanging from the ridges of the house I'd bought and hoped to keep for our daughters. Too distracted to do anything else, I spent hours watching the Monarchs emerge, wet and vibrant, patiently dry and take their first flights.
I'm still thinking to get my first tatoo, at 65, of a monarch. I hear they're coming back in the Western migration! I'd also like a lightning bug and maybe a dandelion seed blowing in the wind. These are all my icons of hope.
I, too, saw monarch this morning. Luckily, there have been a few visiting throughout the summer (which started in May here). Fireflies, are a rare thing. In the 43 years since I arrived here (Minnesota) at the age of 17, I have seen only 3.
I have a very poor view of our species. Virtue is far less present than virulence. But I take hope that nature will outlast us. This hope was boosted when, at the outset of Covid, the lions came into the streets in Africa and lay down without fear. And when the dolphins swam through the canals of Venice because the polluted waters had turned to clear.
Call me cruel, but I hope that nature keeps taking us down until we, as a species, learn that our place is not at the top. Except in hubris.
There is no possible case to be made that industrial modernity is worth the loss of the monarch butterfly. None. It's a stain on this culture which can never be erased no matter how brief or long is the time it has remaining.
That said, none of us are prescient. One way to look at the mass extinction event we are within is that all these beautiful creatures—monarchs and fireflies and rosebushes and rainbow trout and snow leopards and on and on—are only here because previous mass extinctions overturned the biological order and set the stage for them. Extinctions on earth are a kind of reshuffling of the biological deck. It may be there are creatures even more beautiful than the ones we know waiting beyond all this ruin, and in some real sense requiring it.
So mourn this, but know you will not live to see the full story. Earth has been wounded before, even seemingly mortally wounded, yet she does not die. These losses may yet be the seed of something greater still.
I read recently that the monarchs are back in larger numbers than ever on the West Coast along with different hypotheses about why that is. Totally unexpected. Nature is sacred and also so much smarter than we are!
In May my mother would take her six children to a woods near to our farm in Wisconsin. It was carpeted with spring ephemerals - various flowers that bloomed a few weeks in May along with morel mushrooms. The transcendent beauty would place us in a hush us as we walked. This was over fifty years ago. My brother who still lives nearby informs me the flowers are no more, replaced by a green uniform carpet of garlic mustard an invasive species from Europe that is nearly universal in the woods of that area. I will ask my brother if summer lightning bugs are still happening.
I took on a derelict homestead in Nova Scotia in 2010, and the day I got the garden started I stayed digging til after dark...
As I was persuading myself to stop, a flash! around my knees, again another flash
A firefly! it circled me - I was filled with delight. It really felt sacred, the acknowledgement.
Just one firefly though?
I read up about the firefly life cycle
And their reduction across North America
Due to habitat loss
Then I did my best to create habitat for them. They need undisturbed mulched grassy areas and trees to lay their glow eggs. These become glow worms - and stay that way for one to two years. Finally they take off as fireflies just for one short summer, in which they need to find a partner and a good place to lay the next generation.
The other big problem for fireflies is outdoor electrical lighting - it messes up their courtship and makes it hard to find a mate.
So I only had dim timed lights to show stairs, otherwise kept the property dark, only star and moonlight.
And it seemed like it worked!
As they definitely did increase
The first year I was there I only saw the ONE. Next year FOUR. Then Sixteen
In the last years when Covid kept me locked down elsewhere, tenants said they are all over the hill, forest and garden...
"There were a lot - first we saw one and very soon another and another and then there were MANY it was like stars in the sky, so beautiful.
Now I'll have to research the firefly habitat and how to create one on our property; we have a few but it seems more like they are passing through than staying .. so glad you brought this up. A great project for the girls and I."
So now they are creating habitat at their place across the county. It works.
I had to sell the acreage -
I hope the new owners leave the plants. All that bee and butterfly food, and that those who are there cherish the fireflies.
Lots of lightning bugs and occasional monarchs in my garden in NJ. :)