Margaret Renkl is one of my favorite writers. She lives in Nashville, TN and often writes about her hometown in both observations about what’s happening in her backyard as well as local and state politics. I am most familiar with her opinion pieces that appear regularly in the New York Times, but I have just started listening to an audio recording of her book, A Crowd of Crows, which has been described as “a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year.” I highly recommend the book and following her in the NYT as well.

Today’s opinion piece, entitled “How to Count Butterflies” describes in Renkl’s gentle prose her joy in walking in her fall garden and seeing the butterflies who are to be found feasting upon the various native plants she has carefully chosen to propagate to encourage butterflies and other beneficial insects to stay and hopefully reproduce.

Most of us can recognize monarch feasting on native milkweed as seen in the photo below.

Butterflies, like so much of our native insects, are in a precipitous decline, due to lose of habitat and global warming. I am a terrible observer of what’s going on about me, but even I can remember times past when there were a lot more insects and butterflies buzzing or flitting around us, but Renkl, a careful observer and documentarian, is a much more reliant narrator.

She closed today’s piece with the following: “Like so much of the still-living world, the butterflies in my pollinator garden are a reminder of what I most need to remember. That we must find some way to keep faith in the future. That we must find some way to save them.” And I might add, ourselves.

We can’t give up hope, but we must do all that we can to save and protect our natural world.

Are you like us and enjoy watching Richard Attenborough‘s Planet Earth series? Recently Sue and I started rewatching Planet Earth II, which was first streamed in 2023. The documentary series is beautifully filmed and well worth watching, both seasons, but the second series continuously reminds us that we are en route to losing so much of our natural world.

In the first season, Attenborough admitted that for many years he was a skeptic about climate warming, but more recently, he has come to understand that our planet is facing an existential climate warming crisis. In fact, he says he believes that we might not have more than 20 years to deal with our climate catastrophe or suffer irreparable consequences.

The polar regions, which act as our planet’s air conditioner, are warming faster than other regions in the world. Ice cover reflects heat; water absorbs it; it really is as simple as that. Every year, because of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more and more of the ice cover in both the Arctic and Antarctic is melting; and it may not be too long into the future before the Arctic Ocean is no longer frozen over in the winter. Greenland and the continent of Antartica are melting faster and faster each year as well. Ocean rising looks inevitable, threatening many American cities like New York, Norfolk, Miami, and New Orleans to mention only a few. Already many coastal cities flood after every rain, and a hurricane could completely inundate and decimate one or more of them.

As many of you know over the past decade we have enjoyed visiting San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where we were introduced to bird watching and the work of the Audubon Society of Mexico. You really never forget the first time you see a Vermillion Flycatcher sitting on a Saguaro cactus or a Caracara soaring in a Mexican blue sky. But even in San Miguel, these birds are less common because of overdevelopment and climate change.

When you visit your favorite park, do you ever think to yourself, “There don’t seem to be as many birds as there were when I was a child?” Well, it’s true. “The North American bird populatidon is down by 2.9 billion or 40% of all breeding adults, with devastating losses among birds in every biome. Forests alone have lost 1 billion birds. Grassland bird populations collectively have declined by 53%, or another 720 million birds.” You only need to be a frequent walker in your local city park or feed birds in your backyard to notice the decline. Pollinators and other insects are declining even worse.

Many governments world wide, though, continue to act like there is no climate change. Unfortunately, our government, after decades leading the fight to save the environment, has done a complete volte-face or reversal dealing with this issue. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill, now law, has placed our country totally in thrall to the fossil fuel industry. In addition to taking away health care and basic nutrition from millions of poor Americans, It threatens to destroy the small progress we have made in the last couple of decades dealing with climate change.

Over the last century the US government has subsidize the fossil industry to the tune of trillions of dollars, far more than what we have recently done for the green industry. This administration seeks to return to that old burn baby burn paradigm to the detriment of all of our futures. Why? What good, for example, does it do to cripple the EV industry here in America? If our car industry is not allowed and encouraged to compete with China in the manufacturing of EVs, the entire industry will die. The future of transportation is not with the gas combustion engine. China is about to eat our lunch.

I am at best a mediocre environmentalist and a half-assed recycler. I don’t think twice about booking a flight across country or to Europe or Latin America. Fortunately though we still have managed, almost without planning, to reduce our carbon footprint, at least in part. We live in a high-rise apartment in densely populated downtown Denver. For three or four years after we retired and moved to Denver, we did without a car, but during the pandemic we decided that with all of our medical appointments and grocery shopping, etc., we needed a car. We at first bought a hybrid, but after a couple of years passed it on to our daughter, Bryn.

Sue and I then bought a 2022 Chevy EV Bolt, but, being the astute bargainers we are, we didn’t get a subsidy or rebate. That didn’t matter. We just wanted a small electric car to get around town. Since buying it, we have spent about $80 a month to recharge it, but not another cent for upkeep or maintenance. And every time I drive it, I feel just a little bit better about helping the environment. EVs will not singlehandedly fix the climate crisis, nor are they for everyone, but in ten years, we and the rest of the world are going to be driving Chinese, Korean, or Japanese electric cars because the American automobile industry will be defunct or on its last legs, trying to sell gas burning cars that no one wants or needs .

By nature, I am an optimist and always have been throughout my life. I’ve always felt that life is good and that positive thinking is the best way to face life.  Fortunately, I have not suffered many tragedies or insurmountable setbacks, so it has been easy to remain optimistic.

More and more, faced with the political and cultural turmoil in our country, maintaining that optimism has become harder and harder. We are barely five months into the Trump presidency and it seems that the forces of autocracy, greed, and graft are riding high.

This week our imbecilic but powerful president has tried to normalize the presence of our military in American streets to maintain “law and order.”  Such actions by the English monarchy in the 18th century was one of the main reasons leading up to the American revolution. We wanted no king then, and we certainly don’t need one now.

Trump and his minions have complete control of the executive and legislative branches of the government, and we can only hope that the third branch, the judiciary will save us and the world, from this madness. This president and his MAGA minions are completely within their rights to enact laws that set forth their retrograde agenda.  (They won the election!) They can promulgate a budget that will bankrupt this country and make the superrich in this country even richer, while making the rest of us poorer and sicker.

One aspect of this complete takeover and decimation of our government which is most incomprehensible to me is the war on science and education–how can any 21st century educated person doubt and question the scientific method and the pursuit of knowledge in order to understand our world and what we have done to it over these last two hundred years of the Industrial Revolution.

All of this was brought to mind recently as I began reading a story in the New York Times about the Atlantic Hurricane season which began on June 1. We are completely unprepared for it because of the decimation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by DOGE–the so called Department of Government Efficiency.  Elon Much may be gone, but his henchmen and the damage that they have and will inflict on the government and the nation remains.

NOAA has lost more than twenty percent of its personnel, and the vast majority of that lose is made up of senior scientists and experienced  administrators.  Local offices around the country have been closed or have had to reduce their hours of operation for lack of budget and personnel.  This year, NOAA’s fleet of hurricane hunters are likely to be grounded or inoperable because of budget cuts rather than patrolling the storm clouds above the Atlantic and Gulf.

Twenty years ago, we had to wait for tropical storms to actually form before we could begin to study them and predict where they might strike and with what intensity.  But because of modern computers and science, coupled with experienced and talented administration and staffing, we can now predict with incredible accuracy the first indication, development, path, and intensity of hurricanes.

Explosively developing super storms used to happen only once a decade in the recent past, but because of climate warming, they are now almost a yearly occurrence, and they are inflicting an incredible amount of infrastructural damage, but because of accurate early warnings, storm death tolls are usually small. This could all change with the emasculation of NOAA and the National Hurricane Center, many more lives might be lost.

It is much the same story with our National Institutes of Science and Medicine. Researchers and scientists have been fired, retired or resigned.  Grants are not being dispersed to our major universities to study disease and epidemics–work that takes good minds, sound research, and dedication.  Thanks to the charlatans who now run these agencies, the American population has lost confidence in vaccines; we could see thousands of people die because of this, many of them children. Measles is one of the more virulent and deadly of diseases, but as a society we now seem to be saying—who cares? The parents of children who die from this an other childhood diseases will care.

And yet our biggest cultural worry is that a “trans girl”  might be allowed to compete in girl’s high school sports or use a woman’s bathroom. Is that really the most important issue of out times?

But back to the US soldiers and marines patrolling our streets. It now seems that this government only worries about “illegal aliens” in sanctuary cities; if they are working on farms or in the hotel and tourist industry, then they are OK.  This campaign against undocumented immigrants is madness.  We need these immigrants to take care of our old people and mind our children. We need them to build the millions of houses and apartments we so desperately lack. Who’s going to build and repair our roads, bridges and other infrastructure?

We don’t have to spend billions of dollars to round up peaceable, hard working, law-abiding people with storm troopers.  We can spend that money and effort on enacting better immigration laws and creating the administrative structures to deal with people who are seeking a chance to live and raise their children in a better place.