Flight Behaviour

I am really enjoying this book. However, it doesn't seem, yet, to be about climate change and butterflies, and you would think the writer was a sociologist for the way she so carefully places Dellarobia, the heroine, between two worldviews, like a middle class mind in a working class life, subtly judging everyone around her. The character gives the writer (Barbara Kingsolver) such a prime opportunity to look into the business of the poorer end of her neighbourhood and examine it with the exactitude of a dissecting biologist, that I feel slightly squirmy about it. It feels snobby, but it is very well done.

The situation on the Appalachian mountain, where it has been too warm and they have had too much rain, is just like here. In the book, the worry is that the rain is going to cause a landslide. But there are other problems too, the hay the farmers cut goes mouldy, for example, and they have to buy some in from another state, adding to their cash-flow problems. (Here, there are just too many pathogens: mould, growths and fungus. The country won't look the same without the ash trees, but they are not the only plants suffering die back. My brother showed me some old laurels that he had to saw down. the Wisley website reports a list of pathogens which is enough to make your hair curl, there are so many new ones.)

As the story develops there is more to the climate change angle, and one of the characters, a professor from the Caribbean, becomes a mouthpiece for the climate change scientists, and there are whole pages of his explanations of the signs and consequences of climate change. He rather loses his personality and becomes a talking book, in my opinion. But never mind. There is a lovely scene where he is brought face to face with a journalist and lambasts her for not giving priority to the story that is important, the story that will change the world, and instead going for the feelgood story, the soft story, the story they can sex up a bit. Distractions, in other words.

 There is also a cultural rift between the ordinary folk and the scientists that we don't have in the UK. The Appalachian folk believe that God is good and will sort things out for them, and they really have no tradition of a scientific approach to anything. Science goes with expensive things like Goretex jackets and a university education.

The butterflies are extraordinary. They need to hibernate on a cool mountain, in Mexico, but if it's too cool they freeze and die. They wake up in the spring and mate. The female has to lay her eggs on some milkweed. That's the only thing the caterpillars eat. So that's in Texas or somewhere like that. Then that generation of butterflies goes north again. They go to Canada eventually I think they breed again and another generation flies south to Mexico. So the question is, how do they know when to fly and how far, 2,000 miles to a Mexican mountain?

Here is a lovely video showing the problems the butterflies face