Learning in the Garden

 I was watching TV yesterday when Dorothy showed me a caterpillar that I had brought in from the garden on a lettuce leaf. I was glad to see him before we ate him. I took him back outside and let him loose, a future butterfly.

Asclepias syriaca

Some years ago we bought a milkweed plant at a nursery, our concession to environmental responsibility providing habitat for butterfly larvae. Because it spreads by rhizomes, it developed into a healthy patch of dozens of plants standing six feet tall.

If I were a farmer, I would regard milkweed as a problem to be controlled along with many other plants that compete with agricultural crops. Habitat loss and the use of herbicides has reduced the Monarch butterfly population by 90% in the past 20 years. I'm not a farmer. I am cheering for the butterflies. However, I confess to a conflict of interest: I like to eat food without bugs, grown efficiently and purchased at a reasonable price. So I compromise. I encourage my patch of milkweed to feed caterpillars, but I will control its dispersal to farmland by removing the seed pods before the seeds escape with the wind. Give and take: respect, restraint and reciprocity.

You are smiling at my naivety. I don't blame you. My ritual obeisance to Nature makes little difference. We champion the butterflies because they are beautiful. More than 450 insect species feed on Milkweed. They may not all be beautiful, but the ecosystem would be broken without them in ways that we cannot begin to understand. That's the problem with humans. We are sure we know what we are doing, but we don't, so we manage things until they break. 

Not too late to learn.

***************
How much of earth's biomass is affected by humans: Greenpeace.