“I should like to arrive in front of the young painters of the year 2000 on the wings of a butterfly.” In 1946, when the great French post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard wrote those words, perhaps inferring that his paintings, like the luminous, jewel-like surfaces of butterflies’ wings might inspire flights of poetic imagination and shimmering color in the artists of the future, there were plenty of butterflies soaring amidst the gardens, fields and forests of the planet. Today, the delightful fluttering forms of these beautiful iconic insects have dramatically diminished in numbers. Casualties of climate changes induced by fossil fuel driven global capitalism, butterflies and other insects may be facing extinction along with a plethora of other endangered species, including Homo sapiens. According to a recent study from Germany, insect abundance has fallen by 75 percent over the last 27 years. The once ubiquitous bumblebee has also been added to the endangered list along with butterflies.
The plight of the butterflies and wild bumblebees is symptomatic of a wider crisis in American agriculture that threatens the survival of the bumblebee’s more prominent domesticated cousin, the honeybee. These and numerous other insects began disappearing after World War Two when industrial agriculture got underway in earnest. The number of commercial honeybee hives, for example, declined from around six million during the war to approximately 2.6 million by 2005 and in 2006 the number fell below two million for the first time in memory. The media called the phenomenon CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder), a crisis that necessitated the advent of “migratory beekeeping, the $200 million a year practice big corporate growers rely on to ensure pollination of their crops. Bees must now be trucked around the country to pollinate the nearly 100 varieties of fruit and vegetable crops that depend on them for reproduction, about 80 percent of the food we eat. Of all the insects, the honeybee is the most important pollinator, having evolved for more than 100 million years along with flowering plants in a symbiotic relationship which is crucial to vegetable, fruit and flower production. The value of the crops that depend on the honeybee exceeds $15 billion a year. At least 35 states have been affected by CCD so far and in some areas of the country, 80 percent of the honeybees have vanished. If losses continue at the current pace, scientists predict that honeybees in America will be extinct by 2035.
“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on earth, but it appears there has been some kind of horrific decline,” says professor Dave Coulson of Sussex University, UK, who has been part of the team studying the problem. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon,” he says. Topping the list of suspected causes is the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides as part of the industrial-scale, factory farming methods that push crop yields far beyond natural limits. The rapid transformation from an agrarian to an industrial petrochemical-based food system has taken its toll on butterflies as well.
While butterflies are not essential pollinators like wild bumblebees and honeybees, they do produce caterpillars which are essential bird food. The rapid decline of butterflies has seriously affected bird populations throughout the nation. In Delaware, for instance, 41 percent of forest birds are endangered as well as 40 percent of native plants.
A Terrible Wreckage of Life
Homo sapiens now live in a geological period known as the Anthropocene, a geological time period when human beings are having a greater impact on the environment than the planet’s biophysical forces can cope with. In short, from an ecological perspective, mankind and his technology have upset the natural balance of nature. Human agency in the Anthropocene has caused “a terrible wreckage of life,” says anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in her compelling essay, When All You Love is Being Trashed. According to Rose, technology obsessed, globalist consumer culture is causing a “cascade of extinctions” and is destroying Bir’Yun, a magical term that refers to the “brilliant shimmer of life” Rose learned about while living with the Aboriginal people in the Victoria River region of Australia’s Northern Territory. In her essay, professor Rose cites the work of fellow anthropologist Howard Morphy in explaining the meaning of Bir’Yun, as the primal aesthetic that pervades all aspects of Aboriginal art and life.
“Bir’Yun is the shimmer,” she writes, “the brilliance of life, and the artists say, it is a kind of motion…characteristic of a lively pulsating world, not a mechanistic one…Brilliance actually grabs you. Brilliance allows you, or brings you, into the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world…” Rose’s colleague Howard Morphy describes the phenomenon when applied to art as “the flash of light—the sensation of light that one gets and carries in one’s mind’s eye.” There’s much more to the idea than what’s revealed briefly here, but suffice it to say that art infused with the spirit of Bir’Yun is just what the doctor ordered to assuage the anomie of neoliberalism and its evil paradigm of everlasting growth, rabid consumerism and perpetual war.
Thanks for your post, Stewart. I have photographed with local folk devoted to preserving pollinators. Some recent good news is that the honeybee population is way up, but that change is harming native pollinators. Nature is best at balancing things, and your post rightly points out how big agriculture has been interfering with nature.