38 Comments

Well this one is so beautiful and heart-wrenching it brought me to tears.

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Thanks so much, Sue. I'm heartened by your words as well.

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Lovely way to start the morning as I look out on snow and before the usual bad news when i open the NY Times. Thank you, Bryan.

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You're most welcome, Terry. I'm thoroughly enjoying Opposable. Congrats!

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Wow, an amazing story! They are very special people, those who carefully rescue works like these. Safe travels, Bryan.

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Thanks, Rita. Yep, sanctity in every butterfly.

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Many thanks, Bryan, for another wonderful piece. It immediately brought to mind my collections of childhood, poorly mounted and soon devoured by beetles, and also, importantly, the hours and hours I spent outside in the sunshine, chasing butterflies with a net, less concerned about catching them and more interested in just happily running around. That was a gift that continues to shape me.

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As you know, John, every kid should run around with a net --- and get wet in ponds as well!

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I share these sentiments and also--thank you for sharing the beauty 🦋

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An honor to share sentiments with you, Antonia, and to read your essays on On the Commons.

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Wonderful read 🦋

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Thanks very much. (I'll head off now to explore Seven Senses.) 😀

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Thank you! It made me think of Bobbi Wilson’s story who was recently honored by Yale for her collection of spotted lanternflies. She’s 9. So glad her collection had a happy ending.

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Thanks, Janelle. Yes, I'm glad that story did indeed have a happy ending.

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Yes weryy weryy good 🥰🙃🧿

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I guess I'm in the camp that sees a tidy display of natural artwork married to life and thinks wistful thoughts about the passing of time. Are you sure your collection will be safe in Florida, a state that is openly hostile to empirical research?

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Complete nonsense -

Just because it doesn’t appear in the manner which you like doesn’t mean it is not there and maybe it will be even better than you think.

It may be all the Progressives trying to flee the misery they have made in NY, CT, MA, which twist your chain - leave your politics where you left and join to make things better.

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Fear not -- while some collections are indeed threatened, those two in Florida are the epitome of value and held in high regard. I'm confident those specimens will remain archival and valuable. But it's a good question.

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With what I just saw recently on television on a PBS program, it is further evidence we will have almost influence on our climate. On the program, the female scientist (sorry didn't get her name) said the poles of our earth which spins at 1000 mph and orbits the sun at 67,000 mph (serious speeds) had been slowly moving in one direction for as long as we have the ability to show it, but in the year 2000, the poles began shifting in the opposite direction and doing so more rapidly. What does this mean?

Of course scientists were initially baffled, but after investigating all the possible reasons for this sudden shift, concluded a couple of factors were responsible. The first was the huge increase in the drawing up of groundwater, specifically in India, and the second was the massive construction projects in China. At one point years ago, China was putting up 40 story buildings in a number of cities and created a temporary shortage of concrete. Think of the concentrated weight of a forest of 40 story buildings in a concentrated location.

At first, it doesn't seem like these two factors would influence the earth's spin until you think about how the tires on our autos are balanced with just a few ounces of weights. With the speed of the earth's spin, with water weighing 8.34 pounds per gallon and the enormous number of gallons being pulled out of the ground (which had been a balance for the earth's poles) it would be like gradually decreasing the weight of the balancing weights on your car's tires.

The effect of these two factors were calculated and the scientist said that eventually Chicago would be at the equator! Is there any way mankind can overcome this one?

While supporting a clean world, with the recent discovery above, many more species who are climate sensitive will likely perish without us being able to do a thing about it. Let's enjoy the beauty while we can.

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Sorry Ralph. NASA does not buy into your interpretation of the earth’s polar axis spin. I also find it incredulous that PBS would posit such an error. Me thinks it’s your interpretation.

https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3104/flip-flop-why-variations-in-earths-magnetic-field-arent-causing-todays-climate-change/#:~:text=Since%20the%20forces%20that%20generate,every%20300%2C000%20years%20or%20so.

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Can't speak for NASA and hope the PBS program was wrong; and no I didn't "interpret" their conclusion about the polar shift. I pretty much quoted what the PBS program said. Take it up with them.

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About 1,610,000 results (0.84 seconds)

Shrinking India is pushing the North Polehttps://www.tribuneindia.com › Features

Jun 5, 2016 — Groundwater levels on the Indian subcontinent have been so badly depleted by climate change, intensive irrigation and population growth that it ...

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Also NASA backs the "manmade" global warming hoax. Really think they are going to drop that excuse for raising taxes to something as simple as the PBS explanation? Our current govt. leaders have continued to push this narrative despite the emails of the "scientists" studying climate at the Mecca of climate science at East Anglia University in England being hacked by the Russians and released by Wikileaks saying the numbers the scientists were looking for to proclaim human liability for global warming were not coming out like they needed, so they "cooked" (pun intended) the books to assign blame to human activity. Sorry, but anymore, NASA has become a "trust but verify" institution. They also selectively show photos of shrinking ice in some areas while neglecting to show expansion in other areas.

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How wonderful to find a collection that takes you back 70 years. Joyful? Poignant? Exciting?

Thank you for taking us on the journey with you. 💚

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You're most welcome, Heather. Thanks for reading. I do indeed find joy, excitement and poignancy in these specimens -- each oddly an embodiment on life on the wing.

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Tears, indeed. We continue to savage all in the name of progress and profit, reversing it seems impossible. The ivory trade to Asia or the relentless depopulating of the unregulated oceans are but two examples.

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Thanks, John. I do indeed believe that the task is perhaps impossible, but I guess we keep trying. I often turn to this quote from Václav Havel in 1993.

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

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Bryan,

Thank you for the great article and the wonderful memories of the beautiful butterflies and moths I remember in our garden as a child. At the end of winter I most looked forward to the swallowtails and monarchs, and of course the awesome Polyphemus moths we would find in the woods. As to your point as to how we can bring them back, there is a lot we can do. The active weather manipulation and chemicals we are dispersing into the air all around the globe are killing all of our planets biodiversity. We can start there-no tinfoil hats here. You can research this for yourself at geoengineeringwatch.org. Maybe you can join the fight by at least educating others and your readers to bring awareness to this ongoing disaster.

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Thanks, Christopher. I'll check it out!

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Sad that as I sit here in Florida surrounded by a lot of feeding dragonflies ( probably why we don't have mosquitoes on the coast) and watch as my beautiful area is turned into a condo farm. I'm in Daytona, and the rate that they are destroying our beautiful swampland amazes me. Can't do this in NYS, where I'm originally from. Actually almost owned a beautiful piece of cattail swamp up there, the one I grew up in, hunter ducks in, trapped muskrat in, learned to fly fish in, and know if I go back up there, that swamp will be there forever. Literally. But here, for some odd reason, they consider the swamp a place to build condos as fast as possible. 900 humans a day. I moved here to a sleepy little coastal town, and now I'm in the middle of the biggest building boom this state has ever seen. Ah well, progress, right?

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Yes, Florida is in some ways in a class all its own. So many wonderful areas, and yet so much depletion, which seems relentless.

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I'm not sure how they justify it. The new condos, right around the corner from me, selling for two to three hundred k, and in a few of the buildings they've had to move people out of the first floor units because Florida. Hello? How could otherwise intelligent people design, then build, then get approval from others apparently smarter than them, put buildings below the level of our famous floods? This isn't rocket science. It's not.

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It is sad. Happening everywhere. In the mountainous west, building is also booming. Many of the wild habitat being developed is for summer homes that will sit empty half the year.

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This has inspired me to go ahead and write the book I have been thinking about. I am 74 and we moved around a lot as I was growing up. But I have been thinking back on the 1950s and the difference I see between now and then. The world was a beautiful play ground and we never gave a thought to the damage we causing. When I caught fireflies and put them in a bottle to set by my bed as I slept. In the morning they were dead and we just threw them away. I lived in Florida in the early 50s when it was still mostly wild and clean. We lived in one of the many new houses that were being built to accommodate all of the humans coming there. And the butterflies and birds that we often saw but see no more. The title of my book came to me while reading this. There Used To Be Butterflies.

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Thanks, Mary. I'll suggest as inspiration Michael McCarthy's "The Moth Snowstorm," which will make you weep.

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Maureen

Maybe a deeper dive next time before commenting.

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