The Extinction of Meaning
What good is an endangered butterfly if it doesn’t tweet or turn a profit?
One of the most imperiled animals in North America isn’t big and furry like a polar bear. It has neither the charisma of an ivory-billed woodpecker nor the elegance of a prairie fringed orchid. It has incited no eco-wars like those over the gray wolf or the spotted owl. It is not even a tool in the machinery now gearing up to weaken the Endangered Species Act. No, this endangered animal is only a butterfly named Poweshiek skipperling.
Saffron-yellow with frosty-white rays, and no bigger than your thumbnail, the skipperling once flew in untold numbers across prairies from Michigan to Manitoba. Even so, few Americans or Canadians have ever heard of it, let alone seen it. And even though it is already protected under the Endangered Species Act, the Poweshiek skipperling is so imperiled that many of us who have watched it dance across the grasslands probably won’t have the chance to say goodbye.
I first met the skipperling in southern Michigan on July 13, 2003. Rather than float or flutter from plant to plant, skipperlings dart and skip. And when one alighted on a flower bud in a wet prairie fen, I dropped to my belly and snapped a quick photo. Since then the Poweshiek skipperling has vanished from more than 90 percent of its…
