Puddock Hill Journal #16: We can pretend all we want, but actions have consequences.
Here in the Brandywine Valley, where this spring and summer it seems to rain every two days, the vistas are shining emerald green, the trees are lush with leaves, and the meadows are an impenetrable army of vegetation. Frogs and fish and turtles bring life to full ponds.
You could too easily forget, for a brief minute, that all is not right with the world.
Heat records are falling, glaciers receding, rivers drying—the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Po, the Rhine, the Yangtze, the Yellow. The American Southwest parches. Europe burns.
On July 21, 2022, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature “added the migrating monarch butterfly for the first time to its ‘red list’ of threatened species and categorized it as ‘endangered’ — two steps from extinct,” according to NPR. In the past three decades, the monarch population in the eastern United States has declined between 85% and 95%. Despite a small recovery last year, the numbers are even worse in the West.