Mole crabs and lightning bugs

This is not directly related to pediatrics, but it is in a roundabout way because it is about the world our children are growing up in and inheriting from us.

My friend Eric gave me a book called Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World.  Solastalgia is variously defined as “the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape” and “missing a loved place that still exists but to which the old birds and plants and animals no longer come.”

As I read through this collection of essays, I thought a lot about how I do not experience this much. We live in the Blue Ridge Mountains and often see white tailed deer, turkeys, and the occasional black bear outside our windows. We have skinks, lizards, and snakes. We have hummingbirds, goldfinches, pileated woodpeckers, and lots of other birds and at night we can lie in bed and listen to the whip-poor-wills sing. I fish for native brook trout in streams which emanate from mountain hollows with nothing upstream to spoil the water.

But several small things have gnawed at me. I love the beach and, in the past, whenever we would dig in the sand, we would uncover mole crabs which would quickly try to burrow back down into the sand as fast as we were digging them up. I don’t remember seeing any the last time we were at the beach just over a year ago. And while ghost crabs are still around, there don’t seem to be as many scampering around on the sand as there used to be. Or maybe it is just that we have happened to be at the wrong place on recent beach visits.

But I spend most of my time not at the beach and have always loved lightning bugs. I have fond memories of chasing them around at dusk and right after dark with our bare feet getting a little wet from the beginning of what would become the morning dew. A few years ago, I introduced our oldest grandchild to lightning bugs and loved watching her excitement as she spotted them. But for the past few years there have not been as many around. Maybe it is because the only significant patch of open grass was around the water tower adjacent to our wooded land and it was covered as part of a project to make the water tower more secure. Maybe if I lived among fields and grass there would be more?

This was in the back of my mind as I read these essays until I got to the final one entitled “Fireflies.” This essay confirmed my suspicion that there just aren’t as many lightning bugs (aka fireflies) around as there used to be. And it makes me sad to think that children are missing out on that experience.

Maybe future generations won’t miss mole crabs and lightning bugs just like I don’t miss passenger pigeons and American chestnut trees. How can you miss something you never knew? But I think our lives are poorer for not having had those experiences.