The Madame Butterfly Effect

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.

*A female Acraea Horta or Garden Acraea butterfly, native to Zimbabwe and South Africa. The females have one set of translucent wings.*

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.” ↩︎

Springing into Fall

*Our panoramic view of Cape Town, with the Company Garden in the foreground*
*and the Table Mountain range being swallowed by a bank of clouds on the horizon.*

TODAY IS THE 21st OF MARCH. The Vernal Equinox.

For the 87 percent of the world’s population inhabiting the Northern Hemisphere, this is the start of Spring.

But we are in South Africa, along with 800 million or so other humans living below the equator. And while the days and nights may be equal in length in both hemispheres (equinox is a portmanteau derived from two Latin words for “equal night”), it is the first day of Autumn in these parts. I’m still trying to get my head around this.

The climate over the past few weeks has been stultifying, no different than a late summer heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere. And today, as though on meteorologic cue, you can feel the crisp morning breeze signaling the change of seasons.

IT IS SATURDAY HERE IN Cape Town. Regardless of season, this means in a few hours we will hear the drummers drumming and the singers singing in the Company Garden park across the street. These are congregations of kids, organized by age, intoning African folk songs.

They are good. The harmonies are tight. Their voices are clear and strong and carry for quite a distance, echoing through the surrounding concrete buildings.

*Hadeda Ibis, the noisiest bird in Africa.*

Others voices — much less pleasant — also reverberate through the park and environs. One is the Egyptian Goose, which apparently is closer in species to a duck. They quack more than honk. They are highly territorial and begin complaining the minute any other creature — human, avian, mammalian — infringes upon their perceived space.

Their noisy objections are rhythmic, like a metronome, and quite persistent, with a beep-beep-beep that can last for several minutes before they finally, thankfully, give it a rest.

But they have nothing on the Hadeda Ibis, a large, somewhat plump bird with a long tapered beak, which squawks in a tone and volume reminiscent of those “ayuga” car horns, which, by comparison, seem mild and pleasant to this raucous creature.

These guys are considered the noisiest bird on the continent. No argument from me on that description.

A pair of these birds has been foraging on the lawns near the pool at our complex, pulling up the occasional grub or worm. They are not only loud, they are confident, showing no signs of shyness as they peck the soil and waddle within an arm’s length of humans.

Ayuga!

THE COMPANY GARDEN, by the way, is so named because it is where the Dutch East India Company cultivated this plot of land nearly four centuries ago to grow vegetables and fruits to refresh the ships en route between Amsterdam and Jakarta. In those early days, they had yet to appreciate the value of leafy greens and citrus fruit providing the necessary Vitamin C to prevent scurvy. Healthful benefits aside, the sailors, no doubt, welcomed any change in cuisine from a steady diet of hard tack and salted fish.

This cultivation endeavor, in what was then known as Kaapstadt, commenced in 1652. Not quite as old as the mythical Garden of Eden, but, on the other hand, still in existence to this day, albeit in a ceremonial rather than utilitarian capacity. Also, at least to my knowledge, no one here has been evicted for tasting any fruit arbitrarily deemed forbidden.

The view from our eighth story apartment is panoramic and mercurial. Although it is clear at the moment, it is bound to change. It reminds me of the old saying in Maine: If you don’t like the weather, just wait 20 minutes.

The pale blue sky is at the moment unobstructed and inert, but low hanging, lenticular clouds will at some point in the day begin to seep through the crevices of the sandstone ridge on the horizon, draping over the iconic Table Mountain like a table cloth. It’s a mesmerizing show, not unlike the fog rolling through and hugging the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

The slow-motion change in the landscape is like one of those high definition nature videos looping on a flat screen in the waiting room of most dentists’ offices these days. Only here, the view is the real thing, and there is no shrill whirring of a high-speed drill bit chewing away at some suffering patient’s corroded enamel to audibly and annoyingly interrupt the reverie of the scene.

Here, the view is a paradoxically bucolic urban setting, with just a few noisy birds as the soundtrack.

Walls, bridges, and baboons

The wind-swept sand dunes of the Colorado Desert in California.

We may think we’re Great, but, alas, we’re still Apes

ON A DRIVE FROM Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California, I was captivated by the ever-changing, surreal topography. But two human-made structures punctuated the natural landscape in a way that got me to thinking about how much our species has in common with baboons.

Yes, baboons. But first, a bit about the scenery.

Sherry imitates a towering saguaro cactus
in the Arizona desert.

On Interstate 8, it seems the moment you traverse the border at the Colorado River, the saguaro cacti disappear. It’s as though these succulents, with their iconic outstretched arms reaching for the sky, are a proprietary brand of the Copper State.

Not to be outdone, the Golden State immediately presents you with the quintessential sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, sculpted by the wind into smooth giant hills, resembling mounds of poured sugar. Except for the occasional Joshua tree, yucca plant, or creosote bush struggling to survive, the dreamy-yet-desolate terrain seems right out of Lawrence of Arabia. You might expect to see the titular character bouncing astride a loping camel, kicking sand in the air with its hooves. The distant silhouette of the Chocolate Mountains adds to the backdrop, as though painted on a movie-set canvas.

It is just past the dunes that I-8 veers directly south and then hugs the international border with Mexico. It is here that you will be introduced to The Wall.

Structure No. 1: The Wall

DEVOID OF EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF AESTHETICS, the giant black fence of solid steel thrusts discordantly out of the terrain. To put it in today’s lingo: the wall is photobombing the vast, arid landscape. The Wall serves its utilitarian purpose, but with mixed results, as has been true of such barricades for millennia. Its xenophobic ancestry can be traced to the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and in more modern times, the Berlin Wall.

Ineffective though it may be, The Wall’s brutalist design sends an unambiguous political message: KEEP OUT.

The Wall separates the town of Jacumba Hot Springs from its sister pueblo of Jacumé, Mexico.

Continuing west on I-8, the next section of The Wall you will spot is in the diminutive town of Jacumba Hot Springs. This hamlet of 800 or so souls has the privilege of sporting one of the first incarnations of this ugly fortification, erected during the Clinton administration.

I’m not sure who had the bright idea to construct this monstrosity with steel plates left over from the Vietnam War. Maybe some political consultant thought this could be spun as a “swords to plowshares” narrative.

But the irony is just too delectable to ignore. After using this material to violently (and unsuccessfully) invade a far-off land, all in the name of democracy, the U.S. then recycles this war-machine detritus to “protect” itself from huddled masses yearning to be free… Give me your tired, your poor,¹ but not if they are your next-door neighbors, I guess.

All of this is worthy of a treatise on its own, but I’ll have to save that for a later day.

Although the wall in Jacumba is technically on the edge of town, it’s perceived by the villagers as having cleaved their lives in two, since many residents had or still have relatives in the sister pueblo of Ejido Jacumé on the Mexican side. What was once a casual 10- or 15-minute walk can now take a half day of driving — via the nearest “official” border crossing.

There’s plenty more diverse scenery to savor on this leg of the journey, including the Anza Borrego Desert and the Jacumba Wilderness itself. Also worthy of note is Smuggler’s Gulch, named in the 1880s for the cattle rustling that occurred between the U.S. and Mexico — in which direction I’m not sure. Here, in a very narrow canyon, giant sandstone boulders, many the size of a McMansion, teeter on cliffs. These car-crushing rocks appear ready to roll any minute.

Structure No. 2: The Bridge

The Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge,
rises some 440 feet, or 134 meters, from the ground.
Photo by George J. Janczyn. Used with permission².

AS YOU CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY to San Diego, you’ll ascend once again and eventually enter the Cleveland National Forest. You will then be confronted with a deep canyon that would be impossible to traverse in any vehicular manner were it not for a unique marvel of engineering.

This is the second of the two aforementioned structures that brought baboons to mind (yes, I’m getting to that). And it is officially known as the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, named in honor of the engineer who managed the project. But it is more commonly referred to as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge.

Now — full disclosure — I’m a bit biased when it comes to comparing walls to bridges³. The former is there to exclude one group of humans from another. The latter, on the other hand, intends to unite us.

At the time of its completion in 1974, the Stone Valley Creek Bridge was the highest concrete girder viaduct in the world. That is impressive. But for me, what is even more inspiring is how Greer and his team accomplished this feat utilizing such an elegant design.

The segmented cantilevered method used to hold the road bed aloft is a clever Y-shaped row of pillars. Moreover, the entire ensemble seems to at once blend in with its environs and enhance the scenery at the same time.

I can’t think of many “man-made” structures that can do that.

The backstory on this span across Stony Creek is a fitting juxtaposition to The Wall in Jacumba. Greer rerouted I-8 to save the town of Pine Valley, for which I’m sure its citizens are forever grateful.

The Wall cuts a town in two; The Bridge saves a town. You can see where this is all heading and that is why it is now time to cue the baboons.

EQ vs. IQ

I CAN’T SAY I HAD EVER HAD even a modicum of interest in learning about these distant primate cousins of ours until 2019. At the time, Sherry and I were hiking in the Table Mountain National Park at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Although the Cape feels like the edge of the world, this walk did not seem particularly remote. There’s plenty of fellow tourists and the trail is clearly marked. There is even a restaurant at the summit.

A baboon mother and child, resting in the shade in Table Mountain National Park, on the Cape of Good Hope
in South Africa

But to our surprise that day, a mother baboon with a child in tow casually crossed our path and then nonchalantly sat on a wall, seemingly oblivious to our existence. We stopped for a while to grab a video but kept our distance, out of respect.

I was inspired by that incident to read up on baboons and came across A Primate’s Memoir, by renowned primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who had spent decades living among and studying these animals in eastern Africa.

To look at them, you’d notice very few physical characteristic similar to homo sapiens. Baboons walk on all fours, have a snout that seems to be a cross between a dog and a bear, and possess enormous, menacing canines just for good measure. They have tails and sleep in trees.

And to be sure, baboons do not make things, like walls and bridges. So what do we have in common?

Baboons are very social creatures, notes Sapulsky. They live in groups ranging from a few to fifty. They “work” a four-hour day, which is all the time they need to forage for food. They sleep another 10 hours. And that provides them with a full 10 hours to interact with one another.

And interact they do. They make friends; they make enemies. They establish hierarchy that can be inherited. If you are the offspring of the alpha male, you have it made. There are prom kings and queens, and wallflowers. They woo, they mate, they raise their offspring.

They can be snobby. They might bully. They can be empathetic. They can plot and form alliances to outmaneuver rivals. They seek revenge, often very viciously. They are not above kidnapping.⁴

Sounds a lot like a Netflix eight-episode dramatic series. It should not be surprising, then, that baboons seem to reflect so much of human behavior, since we still share 94% of the same DNA.⁵

We have certainly progressed intellectually far beyond the capacity of any of our ancient ancestors. We have self-awareness, sophisticated language, arts and sciences. We build not only walls and bridges but amazing technology. But let’s face it: our emotional intelligence, or EQ in modern parlance, hasn’t evolved at the same pace. That stuff has gotta be buried very deep in that 94% DNA we have in common.

As the old saying goes, we’re just apes with nukes. And that’s never been truer — or a scarier thought — than it is today.

Curiosity, the cat, and the Doomsday Clock

FROM THE MOMENT OUR ANCESTORS descended from the trees, we have been testing the law of unintended consequences. We discovered fire, brought it into our caves, where, along with warming our hands, we inhaled smoke and developed lung cancer. We hunted megafauna to extinction. We created factories and vehicles that burn fossil fuels that are cooking our planet, which, by the way, is our one and only ride through space.⁶

The list of things we have tried that have backfired is seemingly endless.

The Wall hasn’t stopped people from attempting to cross the border. It has, however, created a thriving underground economy — literally. Tunneling under the wall is a big business. And coyotes — guides who charge a fee to smuggle people across the border — are making money, sometimes simply scamming destitute El Norte-bound travelers out of their last pesos.

For the most part, we’ve tested this law of unintended consequences in the physical world. We more or less understand this tangible realm. We can sense it. We can feel it. We can grasp it not only intellectually but emotionally.

But the virtual world is different. Whereas in the physical world, the intended purpose of a bridge is obviously distinct from a wall, in the virtual world, things get blurry in a hurry.

Our past meets our future: A prehistoric human hand connecting with a robot hand. Image, appropriately enough, is AI-generated.

In the 1990s I was working in Silicon Valley at the very infancy of the Internet. In those days, the buzz phrase du jour was “democratization of information.” Everyone would have an equal voice and be able to project that voice to the world. That bridge quickly became a wall when corporate interests privatized the internet, rewarding our worst instincts to drive their ad-based revenue models. And that’s where our baboon behavior just became amplified. Bullying, hate crimes, tribalism.

Emotionally, we just can’t keep up. Technology is advancing at a logarithmic pace, but the areas of the human brain that deal with emotion — the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, limbic system, hippocampus — continue to evolve linearly at, well, a snail’s pace.

In the brave new world, the scale at which our endeavors are likely to backfire is exponential.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are being promised new and greater opportunities without any idea of what the scope of the consequences will be. It reminds me of the story about the moment just before the first test of an atomic weapon, when Enrico Fermi mused that there was a greater-than-zero chance the explosion would ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. ⁷

And yet, we did it anyway.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but humans somehow keep on ticking.

Yes, we have somehow survived — so far. But there’s something else ticking, coming from the Doomsday Clock, which is now at a mere 89 seconds before midnight, its most dire setting since the metaphorical instrument was created in 1947. To put this into perspective, the clock stood at 7 minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Eighty-nine seconds before midnight. Will you look at the time? It’s getting late. And on that note, sleep tight.

FOOTNOTES

Paraphrased from the poem, The Collosus, by Emma Lazarus. The poem is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. ↩︎
Creative Commons License 4.0. ↩︎
My reverence for bridges was further instilled by my father, a civil engineer who designed and oversaw construction of numerous spans in his career. I remember as a child driving to Long Island and crossing the newly opened Verazzanno-Narrows in 1965, then the longest suspension bridge in the world,³ as dear old Dad regaled his offspring with myriad facts about the engineering marvel holding our rattling little Rambler station wagon some 228 feet (70 meters) above the water. ↩︎
Sapulsky cautions against anthropomorphism, using terms such as kidnapping to describe baboon behavior. ↩︎
Even higher with chimpanzees: 96%. ↩︎
Humans would not survive the massive doses of radiation they would sustain in a journey to Mars. The proposals by megabillionaire oligarchs to inhabit other planets is pure folly with today’s technology. ↩︎
Fermi jokingly offered to take bets, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wagering that such a catastrophe would occur, because if it did, collecting one’s payout in a planet engulfed in flames might be a tad difficult. ↩︎