{"id":63582,"date":"2015-09-11T13:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T17:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=63582"},"modified":"2015-09-08T18:15:38","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T22:15:38","slug":"disappearing-but-not-forgotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=63582","title":{"rendered":"Disappearing but not Forgotten"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Musings of a Simple Country Man<\/p>\n

\"Hobie<\/a>
Hobie Morris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Hobie Morris<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

(Brookfield, NY \u2013 Sept. 2015) This true story happened about a year ago.\u00a0 My starlet beautiful wife Lois and I were slowly driving home from the church service to our remote, bucolic and off the grid home four miles into the hills from the village of Brookfield.\u00a0 It is a glorious, balmy sunny day with a vividly blue sky.\u00a0 The scenery was spectacular in the waning days of summer.<\/p>\n

Suddenly it happened.\u00a0 It\u2019s wedged against our old truck\u2019s windshield wiper blade.\u00a0 I quickly pull over and nimble Lois quickly got out and gently lifts it off the windshield and carries it across the road.\u00a0 She puts it on top of a mailbox, where it soon flutters its wings and gracefully flies off.\u00a0 We watch it settle on a fat milkweed pod along the farmer\u2019s fence line.\u00a0 This beautiful Monarch butterfly will soon begin its incredible journey of countless thousands of miles to its winter home west of Mexico City.<\/p>\n

This year we haven\u2019t seen one Monarch butterfly.\u00a0\u00a0 Each day we watched our extensive milkweed patch for their presence.\u00a0 We were deeply saddened by their absence.\u00a0 In the last 20 years the Monarch population has declined by nearly 90 percent.\u00a0 What at one time was a roaring river has now diminished to a tiny trickle of these beautiful, fragile and endangered butterflies.\u00a0 Like countless millions of war casualties all across the globe the Monarch butterfly, bees and other indispensable pollinators of our food supply are in a war they cannot win without our help.<\/p>\n

Beautiful Lois and I are committed to help pass on to future generations our living but endangered legacy that is being wantonly destroyed by apathy, ignorance and greed.\u00a0 Famous Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson has said that specie destruction has reached a critical level that rivals the catastrophic extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.\u00a0 The extinction rate, according to Wilson, is one thousand times above normal.\u00a0 Similar blue ribbon studies and scholars concur.<\/p>\n

The tragedy of this is that it\u2019s mankind who is knowingly determined to destroy forever our life sustaining biodiversity.\u00a0 The incomparable Monarch butterfly would be just one of the casualties of this war.<\/p>\n

The Monarch butterfly needs the milk weed to survive.\u00a0 A well known weed killer produced by a company associated with Agent Orange is being extensively used to the tune of 185 million pounds annually.\u00a0 One of the main ingredients in this toxic weed killer has been called by the World Health Organization a probably cancer causing agent.\u00a0 Studies by the USDA and others have concluded that most of the highly toxic weed killers could be eliminated with no cut in food production.\u00a0 The producers of these pesticides are apparently willing to exchange the milk weed and potential human health problems for massive profits.<\/p>\n

Essential to human life are the pollinators of our food supply.\u00a0 Two out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat are because of them.\u00a0 We must proactively fight against this corporate greed as have already many European nations.\u00a0 The disappearance of the Monarch butterfly would be a tragedy that must not be allowed to happen.\u00a0 One thing you can do is to urge your Congress person to put the Monarch butterfly on the Endangered Species List.\u00a0 You could also write Director Daniel Ashe of the US Fish and Wildlife Agency.<\/p>\n

My gorgeous simple country wife Lois and I were deeply saddened when we didn\u2019t see these Monarch butterflies.\u00a0 They must be protected because they are so essential and enriching to all of us.<\/p>\n

Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Musings of a Simple Country Man By Hobie Morris (Brookfield, NY \u2013 Sept. 2015) This true story happened about a year ago.\u00a0 My starlet beautiful wife Lois and I were slowly driving home from the church service to our remote, bucolic and off the grid home four miles into the hills from the village […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}