TRANSCRIPT
Recently, I was living in the countryside, and one day it rained really, really hard. It rained all night before, and it rained all morning. The ground around the road near where I live became very soggy. As I was walking on the road, there was a bizarre phenomenon that I observed. All these orange spotted salamanders were coming onto the road. I think to escape the sogginess of the ground, perhaps, or perhaps it was some signal for them to migrate because a lot of them seemed to be migrating across the road in one direction or the other.
At first, I was like, okay, maybe I can try to push them off the road because I know there’s cars coming up and down the road. And then I started seeing squished salamanders. Yes, they were being run over by cars all over the place. So right after that, I was like, every salamander I’m gonna see, I’m gonna take him, find the direction he was going in, and take him and throw him off the other side of the road. Help him get as far away from the road as possible so he won’t get run over.
Well, what this brought up for me after I’d rescued about 10 salamanders is something that happened to me as a child. Something that was actually very wonderful for me, very confusing, very painful also. Starting when I was three years old, I became a butterfly collector, moth collector too. I remember it started when there was a neighbor of ours who I heard was a butterfly collector, and he had them on a wall in his bedroom. So my parents brought me into his house once when he invited me in, and I saw this wall of butterflies. In the middle was a luna moth. I’d never seen a luna moth, green with beautiful green tails, and I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life. Just three years old, and it made some impression on me. I said to myself deep in my soul, I want this for my life. I want to learn about these creatures. And so I became a butterfly collector. I got a little net, and I started capturing them.
Now, what I’ll say is I know this offends some people, especially people who love life, and I get it because later in my life, I couldn’t do this anymore. And I’ll jump ahead for one moment. What happened to me is when I started connecting with how much I’d been harmed in my childhood, how cruel my parents had been to me, how they killed whole parts of me, well, to protect their own denial, how they were replicating their traumas on me, how they were acting out their unresolved rage at their parents on me, and how I had to shut down. Parts of me had to literally emotionally die because of it. Well, when I started reclaiming myself, especially when I started grieving, when I started bringing those feelings up and feeling them and feeling the pain that I once felt and going through the transformative process from the caterpillar into the butterfly of crying, sobbing, what happened to me as I reclaimed my feelings and my true self is I just couldn’t kill things anymore. I didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t kill butterflies. I could take pictures of them. I could love them. But I became someone who said I’ve learned enough, I’ve done enough.
I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m being super defensive because sometimes as a child when people criticized me, “How can you kill? You’re a murderer of butterflies! How can you kill something so beautiful?” I did feel defensive. And part of what I was defending is that I loved nature. I learned about these butterflies. I learned how they flew. I learned what they ate. I learned what their eggs looked like. I learned what their caterpillars looked like, what plants they fed on. I learned what their cocoons looked like. I learned how long they stayed in the cocoon. I used to raise monarchs all the time. I probably released a hundred, and I knew pretty much every single species of butterflies in the Finger Lakes region and the western New York region. I knew them. I knew all the moths, all these beautiful moths.
I remember some butterfly would fly by, and some kid would say, “Oh look, there’s a monarch!” And I’d say, “Well, no, actually that’s a great spangled fritillary. It looks similar, but it’s more round. The monarch is more long.” Even to the point that I remember this as a kid. I’d be walking along, and I’d see a shadow of a butterfly, and sometimes I could recognize what species that was from its flight pattern of its shadow, even though the butterfly and the sun were behind me. I remember saying, “Oh look at that, that’s a white admiral! I can see!” Or “That’s a morning cloak! I know what that is!” The morning cloak being my favorite butterfly of all. It’s one of the first butterflies of the year. It’s dark brown with purple spots.
Well, the reason I bring this up in relationship to those salamanders I was rescuing from the road is that as I grew older, and as I started driving, as I started taking my bicycle before I ever had a car, I would bicycle off on the highways to visit my friends on the roads around town. I started seeing butterflies along the side of the road, dead and broken butterflies, often butterflies that weren’t even dead. And this became much more extreme as I started traveling the world as a hitchhiker. As I would walk the sides of highways, 20, 30 countries around the world, and the incredible numbers of dead butterflies or dying butterflies that I saw, beautiful species. I’m thinking especially when I was hitchhiking in the Amazon in South America, and every 20 feet was another dead or broken gorgeous butterfly. Sometimes I would even take pictures of them just to document them once I got a camera later in life in my 40s.
Well, what I realized, and I since read this, is just my little observation knows it to be true at some level that every day in the history of the world, cars kill more butterflies than all butterfly collectors in the history, the five thousand year history of butterfly collecting have ever killed. For every collection, one day of cars just driving down the road smacking butterflies kills more. So the irony being all those people, most of those people who told me, “You kill butterflies! You’re a cruel person! That’s evil! That’s wrong!” They themselves, with their little cars, probably very likely in their career of driving a car, killed 10 times more butterflies than I ever killed in all my years of collecting.
And I think of, yeah, I had a car for a few years, and I do know I pay attention to it, of the butterflies that I killed. And I did kill some when I drove along. I remember picking them out of the grill of my car and thinking, “God, how easy it is to kill these creatures and to think nothing of it.” And all those people who are killing butterflies, they’re driving along in the daytime or at night, killing. I’ve even been in cars with people who killed a luna moth, and they’re like bounced off the side of the car. Literally, they thought about it for a second, but they felt nothing. And yet if they had to kill it themselves with their hands, it might break their heart.
And I think of how the world is. People being so destructive unconsciously, literally out of their awareness, or very much not even knowing, running over these salamanders on the road, these beautiful creatures of life, really beautiful creatures, and not even knowing that they’re doing it. Not even knowing that they’re there. Not driving slowly, not looking what’s going on in the road in front of them, speeding along because they want to get to McDonald’s that much faster.
And then I heard the next statistic that actually I don’t have. Well, I have some observation of this, but you don’t see this so much. But then it’s of all the cars that have killed all the butterflies in history, that actually pesticides, insecticides, but pesticides and fertilizers for our farming all over the world have actually killed more butterflies than every single car in the world has killed. I’ve even heard it said that all the cars throughout history have not killed as many butterflies as one day of pesticides has killed. I think of one specific species…
That I loved. That I caught one of, when I think I was six years old, in Western New York, called a Baltimore checker spot. A red, black, a little bit of white on this butterfly. Kind of small, a beautiful butterfly. And I caught one, and I saw some when I was a little boy in upstate New York. And then I never saw any more after that.
And it’s part of their range, technically, according to my little butterfly book that I had. And I wondered what happened to them. And over time, over 10, 15 years of never seeing another one again, I recognized that pesticides did them in. They cleared out the lands. They cleared out the natural plants, the weeds, the natural flowers. They cleared out the forests where they lived for farming, and they treated all this land with chemicals. And suddenly, there were no more.
And it breaks my heart to see what’s happening to them in the bigger picture, in our world that’s destroying nature day by day by day.