I’ve been here long enough to think something is awry in the local environment. I don’t have the expertise and time to scientifically measure the changes in local insect and wildlife populations. But I have been going up the same trails for 40 years and have a few scary observations.
One trail I refer to as the Butterfly Trail, officially known as a jeep road “behind the sign” at the top of Smuggler Road at the intersection adjacent to the observation deck. It was not that long ago that I had to step carefully, grinding my way up from the fork in Smuggler Road to the upper meadow about seven or so minutes above the deck. There were so many butterflies with so many names I didn’t know that it was important not to step on them.
There were not just the common yellow and whites but black ones with purple-tinged wing ends, green and yellow ones, yellow and blacks, and little blue butterflies. I stop in the middle of a run to catch one. Now I run ever more slowly on two titanium knees, plenty of time to see who is there to be seen.
Alas, hardly anyone. It’s steeper there and a bit less casual an ascent than the Smuggler Road. I also note that the sphynx moth my wife calls a “bumblebird” is basically AWOL from the front of my house and from the beautiful array of flowers at the Clark’s Market plaza.
These tiny moths look like miniature hummingbirds when in flight, darting from flower to flower with quickness beyond my cell camera’s capability: stop, focus, frame and gone. Also missing from the lineup are the once-too-common nightly howl sessions from coyote packs up Hunter Creek and, most ominously, bugs. Yes, bugs, the kind that used to fly in a door left open in summer.
Flies. Mosquitoes. Moths.
Not that I would repopulate them indoors, but an amateur like myself still worries that the birds and butterflies we love to see, which feed off the bottom of the food chain, no longer have those pesky critters that were once in abundance. Column writers are expected to have an explanation for things. I think I have a better understanding of why we have a housing shortage than why we have a bug shortage.
Yes, the climate is changing even in the rarefied precincts of Aspen that much has been measured and matches my experience. The snow I shovel out front is heavier, wetter and shorter in duration than in the old days when June softball games were regularly “snowed out.” May is snowier and fall is warmer and longer.
That makes sense on a larger scale. With the atmosphere holding about 7% more moisture, we are seeing more severe rainstorms around the world and better, if soggier snow accumulation here. About all of this I can do not much as an individual beyond recycling, reusing and composting.
We seem to be so fractured politically that calling on others to make lifestyle changes is passe and seldom done for fear of being labeled as “woke” or a scold or deviant not attuned to the mantra of YOLO. There are a million excuses, foremost of which is the determined denialist political posturing that substitutes terms like “fake news” and “hoax” for inconvenient truths. Sure, go get that powerhouse, gas-guzzling truck; you deserve to pamper yourself, and there are no consequences.
Except there are. It is said that the old plant trees in whose shade they shall not rest. There are generations to come who will need shade, less heat, more birds and bees and baby butterflies.
About the last collective-action tool at our disposal is the vote in November. Choose wisely..
