It is said that butterflies are children of the sun and Hermann Hesse dedicated poems to them. Nabokov collected them and the Greeks called them psyche, just like the soul, because when we die the soul leaves the body as if it were a butterfly.
Without a doubt, it is the most beautiful and poetic insect of all those we know; Also the most mysterious, its pupal envelope resembles that of a mummy whose wings shadow waiting for the explosion. When it occurs, they leave the pupa behind; and with wet wings they come out ready to unleash a tornado in Texas, to put it in the manner of chaos theory, so appropriate whenever we talk about lepidopterans.
Nabokov himself knew that the flight of a butterfly is unpredictable when it comes to predicting its course in the light of day, although it becomes possible at night, when the sun sets and a spotlight of ultraviolet light is arranged to attract them. In this way, the butterflies approach the fluorescent lights and the experiment is put into practice once the moths enter a bag where they are trapped along with other insects. This is when identification is carried out. This same method was the one applied by the German biologist Josef H. Reichholf during his student days in the late 1960s.
From that magical moment, it became clear to Reichholf that he was capturing fewer and fewer butterflies. This was a warning, “an unmistakable sign about the changes that our nature was undergoing,” notes Reichholf in his book The disappearance of butterflies (Criticism), an essay that introduces us to the mystery of lepidopterans and their relationship with the environment where they live; an essential book to know the magical world of butterflies whose critical charge makes it a work of denunciation about the extermination they are suffering.
Reichholf points to the deterioration of the ecosystem as the origin of the disappearance of butterflies; a disaster caused by the use of toxic herbicides such as glyphosate, and also by the overfertilization and monocultures that arise when large areas of land – butterfly habitats – are razed for the construction of industrial farms. All this gives rise to a migratory flow of butterflies to large cities.
As Reichholf rightly says, “incredible as it may seem, the fauna and flora of cities are more natural than that of commercial plantations and forests. Because no one introduces and summons the wild plants and animals of the city.” We have reached the point that the parking lots of any industrial estate have more life to offer insects than the areas planted with corn.
In short, what Reichholf is telling us in his work is that the model of chaotic behavior that dominates the field of global economics does not work, and what is happening with the butterflies is just one of the many examples of the catastrophe. in which we are immersed.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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