Around this time last year, my wife noticed some black spots on the parsley and dill growing in our garden at home. I didn’t think much of it – the dots looked like bird droppings to me – but my wife got pretty excited: They’re eggs, she said – most likely of the black swallowtail butterfly.
I’ve since learned that the black swallowtail is a common butterfly in the Northeast. But “common” doesn’t mean that it’s ordinary. It’s quite beautiful, in fact: a large butterfly, with black wings featuring yellow spots along the edges, and a bright blue band on the hindwings. They draw your attention, and maybe your imagination, too – probably because butterflies, with their remarkable and quite visible life cycle, seem to represent transformation, rebirth and hope.
Anyway, there were those tiny dots on our parsley and dill last year, and my wife decided immediately to protect them from their natural predators – wasps and rodents and birds. So, thanks to Amazon, there was soon a little mesh box on our screened porch, with harvested stalks of greens for the dots to feed upon. And we watched them, day by day, as the tiny eggs became a pair of miniscule caterpillars, and then, very quickly, big and beautiful caterpillars, with a bright green base color and transverse black bands containing yellow spots. And then the skin split, and suddenly there were two tiny green bags hanging on that parsley stalk – the chrysalis – which in a couple of days became butterflies.
I took a video of my wife releasing those butterflies into the wild. I know, they’re just bugs, but it was a pretty magical moment, I’ve got to tell you. And I’m talking about it today because I need to share why it mattered to me.
It mattered because the threat to butterflies is one of the countless ways that our world – beautiful and diverse and sustaining – is now being placed at risk. Several butterfly species are facing significant threats to their survival, including the migratory monarch butterfly and the Karner blue butterfly, which we know hereabouts because the Albany Pine Bush is one of the Karner blue’s breeding grounds. But even the more common species are imperiled, because over-development is destroying the butterflies’ natural habitats, and pesticide use is poisoning them, and climate change is wiping out their food sources.
Fortunately, an increasing share of people are turning to more natural approaches to caring for the land around them, including yards and gardens. People are planting native plants and using earth-friendly landscaping practices. On our property, we’ve planted milkweed, for example, because it’s the only host plant for monarch caterpillars. And in the fall, we leave lots of unraked leaves on our property, because they not only enrich the soil as they decompose, but also provide a home for overwintering insects – which in this season become food for birds.
These are tiny steps, but it is in this sort of action that we can each do our part to counter the huge and damaging impact of the current administration on our land – an administration that is gutting key provisions of environmental protection laws, and rolling back efforts to combat dangerous climate change.
But I’m not only talking about environmental protection, obviously. It is in the actions of citizens across the country – some very small, but each of us in our own areas of influence – that we can best combat the Trump administration’s attacks on social justice, economic equality, scientific advancement, education and even fundamental decency.
The most eloquent statement about this in my lifetime, I’d say, came 59 years ago, in June of 1966, when the United States senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy, spoke in Cape Town, South Africa, in what came to be known as his “Ripples of Hope” speech. It was two years to the day before his death – and some of the words he spoke that day are reproduced at his gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. Listen to them now, please:
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” Kennedy said. He went on, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.”
Today, that is how we must counter Trumpism: through countless acts, however tiny individually, but massive in total.
On my screened porch this year, there are two large mesh boxes, not just one; and there are a dozen fast-growing caterpillars that soon will be gorgeous butterflies flitting off into the sky. They’re just insects, and a handful of them don’t matter much in the world. But to me they represent ripples of hope – and it is not too much to imagine that from such acts as these, each of us doing our part, we might recover from these difficult days.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
