The Butterflies are Dying

What is your acquaintance with butterflies?

What is their importance to you?

What is their importance to the world?

How do you attempt to understand lepidoptera and other arthropods?

How have you been interpreting landscapes, and where?

Where have you been learning about butterflies?

Where have you been learning about art?

Where have you been learning about politics?

What have you been learning from the past?

What have you been learning from the present?

How are you preparing for the future?

What do you know about the butterfly effect?

What do you know about weeds and pests?

If you have a kitchen garden, you are unlikely to regard cabbage white butterflies particularly favourably.

What is your acquaintance with Pieris rapae and/or Pieris brassicae, and how did you acquire that acquaintance?

What is your acquaintance with the Brassica genus of plants? 

What do you know about child mortality? 

What do you know about overpopulation?

What do you know about childhood trauma?

Have you ever thought about human sexuality in terms of the butterfly effect, the domino effect, the snowball effect and/or the ripple effect?

Have you thought much about chaos and the chaotic and chaos theory?

Have you thought much about parasitism?

Have you thought much about mutualism? 

Have you thought much about predation?

Have you thought much about tipping points in terms of the domino effect and domino theory?

Have you been learning much about revolutionary waves?

Do you know much about waves more generally?

Do you know much about equilibrium constants?

Do you know much about thistles?

You may not bother much if pests and weeds became less prevalent, or even disappeared beyond the point of no return.

What do you know about ecological collapse?

Perhaps your view of the world, and of life, is mostly poetic rather than prosaic.

Perhaps you would rather ignore facts and live mainly in your imagination.

How, if at all, does art encourage you to think about reality and about the future?

How, if at all, does science help you to understand changes?

You may or may not know much about the Pieridae family or the Asteraceae family or the Brassicaceae or the Gainsborough family.

How do you interpret the unexpected?

What is your acquaintance with Humphrey Gainsborough?

How do you use your imagination to help solve problems?

How does history help you to understand the present better, if at all?

You may associate inventions with linear improvements.

You may associate metamorphosis with the cycle of life.

Which comes first, the egg or the cabbage? 

Which is more important, the larva or the adult, and in which contexts?

How do you compare problem solving in one context with another?

What do you know about glucosinolates and silibinin?

What do you know about siblings? 

There is much to learn from art, nature and experience, whether mainly out of interest

Solving problems tends to differ from one context to another when there are complex interactions between variables.

How do you tell whether a problem is simple or otherwise?

How do you make comparisons between situations, and artists?

How do you compare approaches to providing information in one location and another and another?

There are many ways to learn about a species and its behaviour at various stages of its life cycle.

What is your acquaintance with caterpillars? 

Perhaps you have long had an interest in Lepidopteran natural history.

Or maybe you simply enjoy watching butterflies from time to time.

How do you compare butterflies and moths?

How do you compare butterflies and humans?

How do you compare nests, cocoons and exoskeletons with the homes and clothing of people?

Perhaps you sometimes think you are a pupa, or that you are regarded as such.

What do you know about moulting?

What is your image of imago?

What do you know about mud-puddling? 

What do you know about symbiosis?

Perhaps you have developed a butterfly garden.

If so, perhaps you regard it as a sacred garden.