Butterflies, Vanishing

I'VE KNOWN two serious butterfly "collectors". I didn't like either one very much, although both had very impressive monarch butterfly collections. I knew one when I was about ten, and another when I was about fifty. They both spent a lot of time walking around with butterfly nets, catching them, killing them, mounting them. I strongly suspected, and still suspect, that there is an element of cruelty involved with this "hobby", however weak or strong. One of them ended up spending a lot of time in prison, and the other died relatively young, party because of drug use. Impressive though the mounted collections were, I never saw much point in it, never liked the killing. It has been known for a long time that the insect population is decreasing in the United States and Europe, and robably all over the world. Butterflies, teh ost popular insect, are vanishing at an alarming rate,and a new study indicates that the monarch butterfly population has diminished by about twenty two percent over the past two decades alone. Of more than five hndred species of butterflies in the United States, just under four hndred of them were studied extensively in this particular study, which involved thousands of volunteers, Remembering the size of the two dead butterfly collections, and the sheer number of monarh butterflies pinned and mounted, I can't help but wonder what impact it would be having on the monacrh population today had these two collections never been collected. Little, likely. The three main reasons for the drastic decline in most insect species are climate ahcnge, habitat loss, and insecticides. Evidendly, as of now by far the most harmful are insecticides-pesticides, which kill more insects and reduce the Earth's insect population much more than climate change and habitat loss. We know what we need to do. The good news is that we are perfectly capable of doing it. The bad news is that we aren't doing it, and the situation is becoming serious, disastrous. Insects aren't the only animal species disappearing from the world. The frog population has declinind rapidly, and over the past fifty years at least a billion birds have vanished from the skies of these United States. Meanwhile, the human population has doubled in less than fifty years, and is still growing. Maybe its time for the human population to level off, or decrease somewhat. When humans improve their abililty to live in habitats in space and on other planets, then, the human population can take off for real, if so desired. The way it looks now we're gonna have to get rid of plastics, insecticides, and other cheicals, and we are going to have to restore more wildlife habitat, everywhere. We need to begin doing this in earnest, and not lazily leave the task to our children and grandchildren. This is also true of climate change, obviously. We the living must start to solve the problem seriously, now. If we leave it to the unborn, may the devil take us. That is why it is and has long been so damned frustrating when millions of Americans refuse to accept climte reality, and keep electing people who deny climate change, and promise to make it worse. Namely, conservatives, Republicans, Trump, MAGA. That is suicide, and we the remaining sane must stop it.