TODAY I RESCUED a damsel in distress.
A beautiful specimen of the Acraea Horta butterfly — native to South Africa and Zimbabwe — was floating, nearly lifeless in the deep end of a swimming pool. She was definitely in over her head.
I ran into the little lady — the females are identified easily since they have one set of translucent wings — while doing my daily laps. At first, I thought she had already met her Maker as she helplessly bobbed with the waves. I gently placed my hand under the water and slowly scooped the small creature out and placed her on the bricks bordering the pool.
She lay there, immobile, but then showed a hint of life left with a twitch of her antennae. I have encountered many a bee while swimming and learned through trial and error that they need not only to be transported to dry land, they also require a kind of CPR. To be sure, you can’t press on their thorax or abdomen to expel water from their tiny lungs, since they have no lungs. And they wear their skeleton on the outside, so any force applied would result in a very crunchy experience. It goes without saying that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is inadvisable.
But what they do need is to dry their wings. This presents the diminutive beings with a conundrum. They are essentially paralyzed because their wings are so waterlogged they cannot extend them to dissipate the liquid residue.
So with today’s patient, I applied my form of insect resuscitation, pursing my lips and exhaling a steady stream of breath on its aerial appendices. At first, she didn’t seem to react, and then I detected movement again in the antennae. With each breath, I saw a bit more animation, until the wings began to flutter just slightly. After a dozen or so times, the wings extended out to their farthest range.
It was a touching moment. We seemed, Madame Butterfly and I, to be communicating in a kind of sign language.
Me: “Whoosh.”
Mme. Butterfly: “Again, please.”
Me: “Whoosh.”
Mme. Butterfly: “And now a little to the left, thanks.”
The prognosis for a full recovery looked good, but she was still too soaked to achieve liftoff. My better half, Sherry, was reading poolside and so I called for her to take over. The creature rested comfortably upon Sherry’s hand for a while, drying in the warm South African sun. After just a few minutes, the butterfly was able to flutter by, soaring once again. And I swear I could hear strains of Puccini’s “Un bel dì, vedremo” in my head. Indeed, Madame Butterfly, one fine day we’ll see.
Of course this was a very happy, feel-good moment. It reminded me of all those random-act-of-kindness YouTube videos in which a baby deer that has fallen through the ice into some frigid lake waters is rescued by a group of fishermen, or a baby elephant that is struggling to climb the muddy bank of a crocodile-infested river is tenderly scooped up by a guy with a backhoe, or a beached dolphin that is entangled in a fishing net is emancipated by some beach goers, who then lovingly nudge the grateful fellow back into the waters.
All so heart warming and such a resolute reaffirmation that deep down, humans are good.
Our paradoxical role in nature
WE, AS HUMANS, relish our role as the superior species. The Abrahamic faiths — Islam, Christianity, Judaism — all believe in the collection of stories known as Genesis, specifically Chapter 1, Verse 26, where it is written that our job is to:
“…rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Janism all subscribe to the concept of Karma, that what goes around comes around. And since their collective belief also includes reincarnation and the possibility that any one of us can return to the physical world as any one of the millions of other species on the planet, best to be nice to all creatures big and small, if even for selfish — dare I say future selfish — reasons.
Taoism teaches harmony with all living things.
Confucianism applies the concept of “stewardship,” but not as aggressively as the Abrahamic opinion of “dominion.” Many African cultures are in line with Confucianism, that humans have a role as caretakers. The Shona of Zimbabwe tell stories of humans undergoing metamorphosis, becoming other animals, which, perhaps, aligns with reincarnation.
Some, such as the Bantu peoples of West-Central Africa, believe that all animals have a “life force.”
The first people that settled the Americas take the “life force” idea a bit further with animism, the thought that all living things and even natural inorganic things such as rivers and rocks — possess spirits. The role of humans is to unify with, rather than master over, those other spirits.
Yet none of these religions or beliefs espouse exploitation of other species and certainly none advocate the desecration of the very habitat that all creatures great and small — including humans — need to survive.
All in a day’s work
SO HERE WE ARE, with all these lofty pronouncements regarding our beneficent-caretaker role, doing the exact opposite, voraciously and indiscriminately chewing through the planet and everything in its path like a swarm of locusts. The bitter irony is that even a lowly parasite knows more than the self-proclaimed smartest species on the planet: that you don’t kill off a host unless you have another host nearby. And despite what the Billionaire Bros say, Mars ain’t a “Planet B.” Not in our lifetime and unlikely in any lifetime.
Here on our one and only planet, just today — this day in which I’m basking in the glory of my good deed — humans were responsible for:
— 150 to 200 species going extinct
—The loss of 45,479 acres of rain forest
— The degradation of 676,373 acres of topsoil, which is literally blowing away because of irresponsible tilling, forest clear-cutting, and over grazing. (An excellent book on this topic is Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations).1
— The deaths of 34,520 people, who succumbed to air and water pollution, or died from heat caused by global warming, or from diseases that are proliferating as a result of human-provoked climate change. Toxic chemical exposure from factories belching and spewing noxious gases, liquids, and fumes took its toll, as well.2
Yes, all in a day’s work.
It’s easy for each of us to hide in the anonymity of the vast number of 8 billion people. People — other people, not us — do crazy things, selfish things. And then we have non-people, big corporations that can throw millions, even billions of dollars toward legal fees to defend their rights to pollute the environment. And then they will spend millions more on marketing to green-wash their corporate persona.
So who is responsible if no one is responsible?
This is what economists call the “Tragedy of the Commons,” the concept that humans are too selfish to share common resources responsibly. 3
All this got me to thinking about my personal role. I’d like to think I’m not one of those egregious offenders. But I’m here, I’m consuming resources. In fact, I come from the most privileged of society — the so called “Developed Nations,” the “Western World,” which consumes 3.5 times the global average.
So I thought I would do a little calculating4 to figure out how I did in the past 24 hours. Here’s my personal balance sheet for the day:
| SAVED | DESTROYED |
| 1 butterfly | 0.000000066 species |
| 0.87 square feet of rain forest | |
| 12.9 square feet of topsoil | |
| 0.0000151 human lives |
I don’t think I’m coming out as a net-positive contributor to the well-being of the planet in this exercise.
Actions, reactions, and unintended consequences
WAY BACK IN THE 1960s, mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running a computer simulation to determine how tornadoes formed. He noticed that even the slightest variation in the model could drastically change the outcome. This became known as the “butterfly effect,” that one tiny data point, as tiny as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, has unforeseen and unintended consequences.
In her brilliant and beautifully written novel The God of Small Things, author Arundhati Roy pursues a similar theme: that the smallest, most mundane, prosaic actions of everyday life can add up to very big things.
So, all the excitement of my “heroic deed” today and my subsequent reflections that forced me to be truthful about it all, got me to thinking that this could be the start of the “Madame Butterfly Effect. “
Those tiny wings flapping today had an effect on me that caused me to sit down to write and post this essay and that might have an effect on others and who knows where this could lead? I know a data scientist who also is a pretty good assistant butterfly-rescuer. I might ask her to model this. All the small things could add up to something serious.
But if not, well, hey, I did save a butterfly today. Pretty cool, huh?
FOOTNOTES
- Links to books I have read will take you to goodreads.org, a nonprofit website that links independent book sellers. ↩︎
- The daily figures provided are based on scientific reports from the WHO and World Resources Institute, via a Google Ai search. ↩︎
- The Tragedy of the Commons was first proposed in the 1800s as a way to prove that land should be in private ownership to “protect” this resource for the greater good. Political scientist Elinor Olstrom proved just the opposite, that communities can come together without private or even government intervention, to preserve common assets. She won a Nobel Prize for her work. ↩︎
- Calculation for my personal daily “contributions” to the destruction of the planet are based on on a simple formula of the global numbers provided, divided by 8 billion, then multiplied by 3.5, the factor that I cited for people in the “developed nations.” ↩︎
IRON-AGE EPILOG 