June 19, 2012

Bugs

   How many types of Bugs are there in the world?  I have a poster on my wall that has pictures of flies, bees, beetles, dragonflies and other traditional biological bugs.  I take lots of photos - i especially like flowers and they are filled with bugs.  The photos of the bugs rarely come out - because the motion of keeping the bug in flight doesn't allow the camera optics to focus.  Imagine a fly trying to use a camera.
   Sometimes it bugs me to watch people squash bugs.  I mean, i'm the type of person who would sit there and watch the spider build his web, and then thank him for his service before removing the web when cleaning the house.  I honor all living things and have a pet spider that likes my vibes, sitting just to the left of my mouse.  I remember making torches from sticks and webs as a kid - spiders clean up a lot of small dendritus.
   Sometimes, i think that we get reincarnated as bugs as an intermediate level on our journey between human and human.  But because of the size difference, i think that a bugs life period probably averages 60 - 80 bug years, which may be a week or two of our time.  That would place bugs two orders of magnitude down from us - so figure about a hundredfold difference.  This is an example of a fractal - the bug view of gaia, versus the human view of Gaia.
   Now certain Bugs at this point might say 'Eh, What's up doc? : bugs don't think about the world in terms of physics and math.  How would anybody that's human know what a bugs thinks?'  Mebbe by watching behavior, but we are too busy swatting at them.  Sure - dead meat draws flies and that can be annoying, but when you look at the interpersonal relationship that bugs must have with Gaia - heck how many bugs are in a tablespoon of dirt.
    Wait - now that's a different bug - microbes.  Nasty bugs (or so we have had drilled into us by the brainwashing medical profession that wants everything sterile - absolutely no bugs.)  Except they create staff and other real nasties, by not allowing the beneficial bugs in where they belong.  Toxins act indiscriminately on all bugs and kill the good with the bad.  Hmmm - sounds like a human philosophy - all bugs are evil and bad and need to be pesticided.
    A few years back i worked with 9th and 10th grade high school students in a program that we called Bug Zone - in fact i may have been doing Bug Zone work when i first started blogging.  Bug Zone was a five week course on aquatic macroinvertebrates - the nymphs in the streams and rivers that turn into the butterflies and dragonflies that we all love every summer.  
   Bug Zone was sponsored by the BLM, as a math and science learning program.  We hired a professional etymologist to come in and talk at the zoo every Saturday morning in May - five weeks.  He showed photos of bugs, demonstrated how tools for magnification and identification worked, talked about stream habitat and water chemistry and biology and all the eewie gooey stuff that we kids like.  Then we went out and caught the bugs in nets, following specific protocols.
   We had several volunteers from the community, like Donna and Claude, who were adult conduits to real knowledge.  These folks were recently retired from professions like accounting and had no knowledge of bugs at all on a formal level; these docents had the interest and the time to spare - plus they liked youth.  The kids were self-selected from area high schools - there was a physical limit of 24 persons in the group.  I recently found the video camera films of the event - we documented things well.
   So, i forgot where i was going with the post - but here i am now, in the moment and i guess i kinda like bugs.  Perhaps we can rethink our attitudes toward these little critters and watch them as they deal with life on a different fractal scale than the one we look at things from.  We need peace, or the bugs will inherit the earth, just like the mammals inherited the earth from the dinosaurs.  Ain't fiction grand?  Eh. What's up, doc?
Namaste'

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