“Collecting is for most collectors,” writes curator Stephen Calloway, “just a reasonably absorbing and largely harmless pastime, looked upon by an uncomprehending world as a kind of gentle madness.“ This is how the gentle hobby of collecting butterflies is seen to the non-collector, or so thought author Peter Laufer before he started writing The Dangerous World of Butterflies. Laufer had spent years gaining expertise and accolades for his political work, but at a CSPAN-televised book signing he joked that he was done writing about terrorism and war: his next book would be about flowers and butterflies. At a smaller, more intimate event, the humorous comment probably would have been forgotten, but today’s interconnected world means his comment made it to the ends of the Earth. One end it reached was a butterfly reserve in Nicaragua, who offered to show Laufer what butterflies were all about.
Thanks to that offer, the politically-minded journalist opened his eyes to a world that was anything but the relaxing and gentle world of butterflies and flowers. Certainly, the butterflies themselves are gentle by their own nature — they don’t carry disease harmful to humans, they don’t bite, they don’t infest our homes — but the world they inhabit, incomprehensible to the butterflies themselves, is a dangerous one in which to be a butterfly. The things humans desire has created a world hostile to butterflies, although some are working to change it.
Butterfly collectors are a large focus of the book, and much of this is because there is a direct visceral connection to their hobby and the death of a butterfly: in order to keep a butterfly in a collection, it must be killed first. This is only a very small part of the problem, though — because the bigger issue is where the butterflies come from. Butterfly habitats are being over-logged or over-developed. Poisons to control mosquitoes and disease also decimate butterfly populations. The rarer the butterfly, the more endangered, the more expensive its dried body becomes to collectors, and poachers become a greater threat to the butterfly population. Yes, butterfly poachers. Although some were definitely poachers in everybody’s common idea of the criminal, flaunting laws for their own financial gain, others are a bit fuzzier, like entomologists collecting extra specimens or being too far over the line into a wildlife preserve. Those entomologists and their universities are, in fact, owners of some of the largest collections of dead butterflies in the world, storekeepers of butterfly mausoleums, but the work of entomologists is the help an environmentalist needs to give an endangered butterfly its best chance to avoid extinction. An alternative to poachers are the butterfly breeders, who, to ensure the perfect condition of their commodity, capture and kill the butterflies as soon as they emerge from their chrysalis, before they can fly too much and risk damaging their stained-glass wings. This quick kill is a bit too much for the subset of the butterfly collector who has taken their cues from the birdwatchers and is satisfied to document, rather than kill, a butterfly. Each player, from the farmer to the collector to the poacher to the environmentalist, has their own wants and needs in mind, and the butterfly has a place in it all.
Laufer points out that the butterfly has a minimal impact on nature: it has a minor role in pollinating; most are poisonous to an extent and are not a huge food source to other animals; caterpillars eat plants, but generally not enough to even kill the plant. Humans, however, have found a value in the butterfly that supercedes the functions of nature — we desire the butterfly for its beauty. The butterfly has ingrained itself into our culture, whether you’ve had “butterflies in your stomach” or hear mention of “the butterfly effect”, it appears in our art and our fashion, so it may seem that butterflies have done good job of making themselves an integral part of our world, regardless if we keep specimens pinned within shadowboxes for display, walk among thousands of captive-bred blutterflies in a zoo exhibit, or release them into the sky as a wedding finale. The book does venture a bit into politicizing, commenting at length on the environmental impact of the Mexico border fence on butterfly habitats, and poking fun at the creationist leanings of a butterfly exhibitor, but you can’t fault Laufer for writing about what he knows. Those sections do not break the book, though, because the major points are made in digging down that one layer, seeing underneath the beautiful veneer of a butterfly’s place in our world, and taking stock in just how humans take control of the butterfly’s world and manipulate it for our own wants and desires. The dangerous world of a butterfly is, in fact, the world of humans.
The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists
by Peter Laufer, PhD
ISBN: 978-1-59921-555-6
Hardcover, 270pgs, $24.95
