Collateral Damage and the Baby with the Bathwater...

Dang. My camera isn't good for macro work. It comes out blurry.

Anyway...I woke up this morning and the first thing I saw was this butterfly. Alamos is extrordinary. Just when you think you've seen it all, you see another of nature's little miracles. A few days ago I saw a hummingbird moth, just an inch long. I was convinced it was a baby hummingbird, or a bee hummingbird blown off course...a species only seen in Cuba.

I was sad a few days ago because I woke up, walked outside and saw a hundred butterfies on the ground, flapping thier wings for the last time. Now they look like this:

I remembered that they sprayed for mosquitos the night before. It's a way of preventing dengue fever...a painful and dangerous disease that becomes a local epidemic if the mosquito population gets out of control.

My one year old baby played on the same ground where the butterflies now lay. If the spray was so efficient at killing the butterflies, I wonder how good it is for him. I feel like somebody is taking too many liberties with his life and mine. I mean, Rachael Carson wrote Silent Spring more than 45 years ago, and we still have to deal with this?

Sadder, my son and I were enjoying sitting out in the yard these days, warming up in the sun. He liked to point at the butterflies in flight. What baby wouldn't? It is a great introduction to the many unexpected wonders he can look forward to in life. Now he points to the butterflies on the ground, and he'll eat them if I don't keep an eye on him every second.

There must be a better way to control the mosquito population. That matter is way outside of my field. I bet Stephanie Meyer has some ideas. She has a good imagination.

I've long believed that human imagination is proportional to the number of species in nature. As an artist interested in creativity, I believe nature is by far the most available and the most sophisticated model one could look to. It doesn't matter much if you call it God's creativity or Nature's creativity. It IS. Simply marvel. Any artist who can remotely approach the incredible imagination of nature's wondrous diversity is doing pretty well.

I submit the above paragraph as THE link between biological and cultural diversity....the first principle of a biocultural outlook.

Honeybees are insects. Without them we can not feed even half of the world's six billion people.

So...if it seems silly to mourn insects, ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.