Beautiful News
Here’s something wonderful: this week’s news about a multifaceted human cast of characters—scientists, nonprofit organizations, zoos, government agencies, and landowners—undertaking a multi-year restoration effort in coastal California, on behalf of one little insect.
The non-human cast includes the wee endangered Behren’s silverspot butterfly and its one and only host plant, the early blue violet. Other characters include introduced plants that overwhelm the delicate violets and the cattle that trample and eat them.
Climate change and luxury land development are characters in this story too.
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While an adult Behren’s silverspot butterfly can sip nectar from many types of flowers, it can develop from a spiky black caterpillar into a mystical orange fairy only if these particular violets are around to nibble on.
Here’s what the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says about the butterflies’ habitat needs:
The Behren’s silverspot butterfly occupies early successional coastal terrace prairie habitat that contains its caterpillar’s host plant, western early blue violet (Viola adunca), adult nectar sources, and suitable adult courtship areas.1
Oh my, did you see that? The butterflies need “suitable adult courtship areas”! Despite the dry government-speak, that melted me.
Yes, we need to stop grazing our cattle all over other species’ homelands. Yes, our wealthier compatriots need to better share their magnificent coastal views with wildlife.
Yes, a cadre of concerned people are working hard to fix up the butterflies’ range for them so they can come home.
But once we’ve done all that, maybe what we really need is to give them some space. Give other species a chance to do what they do. Court each other in whatever setting constitutes a “suitable adult courtship area.”
(I’m kind of glad I don’t know—I want them to have a little privacy, you know, a little mystery around their boudoirs.)
You do you, little silverspot.
The Mendocino Land Trust is leading the restoration effort. In their press release, they recognized the contributions of biophiles in support of this work.
Biophile! I love this word, one that’s new to me. I suppose it comes from E.O. Wilson’s book Biophilia, in which he asserted humanity thrives when honoring our innate drive to connect with nature.
If given the option, I’d take biophile as my job title.
I’ll read anything certified biophile and kickass writer Ben Goldfarb pens. Fortunately, he took on the plight of the silverspot for High Country News last year. It’s a great read if you’d like to know more about this rewilding project:
Every spring, Behren’s silverspot caterpillars form a tough sepia pupa, drawing leaves around themselves with silk. The metamorphosis that occurs within this chrysalis is weird and grisly: Behren’s caterpillars, like the larvae of all butterflies and moths, essentially digest themselves, melting down into a protoplasmic sludge that retains only a few precious groups of cells, known as “imaginal discs.” These cellular seeds will, weeks later, sprout into the legs, wings, antenna and other structures of an adult butterfly. Incredibly, imaginal discs retain memory: Scientists who exposed caterpillars to a certain scent and then shocked them found that adult moths later avoided that same scent.
This concept — a thorough transformation that nevertheless recalls your past — resonates with Clint Pogue, perhaps because he grew up in an insular corner of southeastern Missouri that few ever leave, only to end up in California; or perhaps because he was a botanist whose love for plants led him to lepidoptery. “I’ve changed a lot in my life,” Pogue told me. “Sometimes, to fully change, you have to break down completely to your core values or tenets — and those are your imaginal discs.”
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Beautiful Art
Isobelle Ouzman’s carved books need none of my words. They are so captivating that I struggled to pick just three to share. Browse her collection here.
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Beautiful Book
The Once and Future World by Canadian author J.B. McKinnon is one of my favorite books. It’s slim, and sad, yet somehow so … (really? can I say it?) hopeful.
MacKinnon writes in such a way—it’s deceptively simple, and so hard to do—he stays out of the way of the story he’s telling. It’s as if the meaning enters my brain without the intermediary of words.
I love the subtitle “Nature as it was, as it is, as it could be.”
MacKinnon gets at those so gracefully here. I think it’s out of print, but there appear to be used copies available at the usual online booksellers.
His recent piece “In Defense of the Rat” in Hakai Magazine is a hoot. Do yourself a favor and read it. No kidding: fix your beverage of choice and sit down for this fantastic long-read. You won’t regret it.
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Beautiful Maps
Bear with me for a second. The awesomeness of these maps cannot be conveyed without some background.
What you see here is the “checkerboard” land ownership pattern of much of the American West. Each square is one mile across (about 2 and a half square kilometers).
Here, we are looking at some land in the forested Sierra Nevada Mountains not far from Lake Tahoe, California. On the left, the land in 1975. On the right, 2017.
The light green squares are owned by the public (U.S. government). The white squares are owned privately, the vast majority by extractive corporations like industrial timber companies.
The dark green squares in the right-hand map are now legally protected for conservation and recreation.
If you are interested in why the West came to be scarred in this way,
recently wrote an engaging post on the curious backstory.Here’s how it marks the land in real life—in this satellite view of northern Idaho, the white squares are one-mile-wide clearcuts, filled with snow:
And here’s the way it looks in the coastal forests of northern California:
And in the temperate rainforests of western Oregon:
Remember, each of those squares is a mile across. 640 acres. 259 hectares. Ouch.
Here again is the current map of land ownership from near Lake Tahoe. The added dark green squares represent parcels that were purchased or otherwise preserved by a land trust in the past couple of decades. In the Western U.S., land trusts are usually nonprofit organizations that hold land2 for various conservation purposes.
On the ground, these will now look like sections of forest that are no longer available for logging.3 The forest can start to fill in and heal. And, recreationists will eventually be able to access those squares that they couldn’t get to before.
Landscape connectivity is a term that connotes the importance of interconnected habitat for wildlife. Many can’t survive without enormous, unbroken swathes of territory.
I’d propose landscape connectivity is also vital for humans. (In On the Commons,
writes widely on this and other topics relevant to wide open spaces and how we can find a way to exist with and within them.)When I used to field-check timber sales, the government biologists would tell me they no longer bothered to protect habitat in the government-owned squares, as each section of fairly healthy forest was surrounded on four sides by a flayed landscape. “Rare species habitat is gone in the checkerboard,” I was told. “They don’t do well in fragmented forests.”
Look, I know these biologists had enough on their hands trying to prevent overzealous logging in areas that still had intact habitat for endangered species. At this point, they’d just given up on the checkerboard lands.
In places, this checkerboard pattern stretches across a strip 120 miles wide. West-wide, that’s perhaps 100 million acres of public land that may no longer be valuable habitat for our at-risk species.
Protection of the privately owned alternate squares, like the map above shows, might give those government biologists a reason to protect the forests on the adjacent publicly owned sections.
“Filling in the checkerboard” is a way to right one egregious wrong from America’s early expansionist history. This kind of public effort is well worth any support we can provide.
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Beautiful Deep-Dive
Gray wolves are in the news again with the decision by Colorado voters to restore them to the state after they were extirpated there about 100 years ago. The citizens’ ballot initiative, passed in 2020, directed the state wildlife agency to reintroduce wolves by the end of 2023. Accordingly, last December, wildlife officials captured 10 wild wolves in Oregon and released them in Colorado.
All the wolves from Oregon have been collared with radio transmitters. Thus we know that in the first month since their release, they’ve roamed through a 60-mile wide zone in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. They’ll no doubt range farther as they adjust to their new habitats. Ten to fifteen more wolves will be sent to Colorado by the Colville Tribe of eastern Washington later in 2024.
Here are some resources for an enjoyable deep-dive if you’ve ever wondered what the deal is with wolves and why it seems everyone is alternately overjoyed or infuriated by their reintroduction:
University of Colorado wildlife ecologist Joanna Lambert with the nuts and bolts:
After an 80-year absence, gray wolves have returned to Colorado − here’s how the reintroduction of this apex predator will affect prey and plants (The Conversation)
How wolves can restore landscapes and help us fight climate change:
Partnering with Gray Wolves to Solve Our Conservation Crises (Substack)
Why certain political and agricultural interests oppose wolf recovery so vociferously:
Killing Wolves to Own the Libs? or try this link (The New Yorker)
Real talk on where wolf recovery stands, how far they have to go, and why there’s nothing to fear:
Weekly Anthropocene interview with Amaroq Weiss, America’s foremost wolf advocate (Substack)
I love the structure of a 5-part newsletter. I’m taking a leaf from
’s 5 Quick Things and ’s Moleskine Notebooks, both of which I always open. I never fail to find at least two or three items of interest in each (and usually more). I hope something here resonated with you and left you feeling just a little bit better about our beautiful world.Sometimes land trusts buy land (or have it donated) “in fee,” so they own it outright. Sometimes, a private party will keep ownership of the property but will sign over development, logging, or mining rights to the land trust by placing a conservation easement on it. This is a binding, permanent legal limitation on the title of the land such that no future owner can ever take the actions banned by the easement. And if they do, the land trust can take them to court to acquire damages in the dollar amount of whatever value the owner destroyed.
In forested land, a conservation easement would typically forbid commercial logging. Sometimes, restoration logging is pursued, maybe tree planting, maybe selective grazing for restoration purposes. It just depends on how the owner was using the land before and what it would take to restore it to functional habitat.
wolves making a comeback 🥺🫶🏼❤️
‘Adult courtship area’.., I am thinking about this... the space to be free to court beauty, wellspring of creativity that gives birth to butterflies. I think we humans need this too. And, maybe if our society had the heart to honour this maybe we would embrace the butterflies 🙏🏻🦋