The Last Firefly

Insects were a big part of my summer on Moose Hill. The mosquitoes welcomed me in June, and remain faithful companions even until now. Cicadas, crickets and katydids provided a sonic canvas for the lyrical paintings of the birds. Butterflies and bumblebees entertained the eye. Fireflies signaled high summer on a solstice ramble.

Children of all ages are thrilled to see the bright yellow flash of a firefly. So many of us fondly remember running through the green grass of childhood summer evenings to capture lightning bugs, keeping them in mayonnaise jars by the bedside, watching the powdery flashes before drifting off to dreamy sleep. Imagine the wonder of early humans, peering into the utter darkness of a mysterious world and suddenly seeing spots of otherworldly brightness moving through the brush. Imagine how it would feel to kill the last firefly.

Stephen M. Meyer is a professor at MIT and is dying of cancer. Meyer, 54, had four to eight weeks to live when the Boston Globe Magazine asked him to write an article. It is likely the last article he will write. Using speech recognition software because his hands are paralyzed, he wanted to leave the world a message about how, by killing the small creatures among us, we - as individuals - may be destroying the world as we know it.

His article, “A Misguided Zap,” appeared in the September 3, 2006 edition of The Boston Globe Magazine. He points out that, in our zeal to avoid a few mosquito bites, we set out bug zappers to lure insects with light only to fry them on a grid of high voltage. In a summer, one of these deathtraps may kill 10,000 insects, but only a couple of dozen of them would be biting insects. The vast majority of the incinerated beings are harmless, maybe beautiful, even beneficial, rare or endangered.

I’ve always considered automatic lawn sprinklers to be somewhat wasteful and decadent. Now, Meyer warns of a new convenience for those with equally abundant money and self-interest: Automatic insecticides sprayers. Like clockwork, plastic dispensers will pop up to emit mists of pyrethroids. One wonders if the sales pitch focuses on the collateral damage to harmless insects, fish, amphibians and other animals up the food chain.

About 10 years ago, one of my home improvement customers asked me to hang a bug zapper in her backyard. Even then I suspected that these contraptions did more with their satisfying sound of crisply frying bugs to make us feel protected than they did in actually ridding the yard of the target enemy. Like using a cluster bomb in a crowded neighborhood to kill a single terrorist, their murder seemed indiscriminant. Even this ostensibly educated, aware, sensitive, progressive homeowner was not interested in my gentle suggestion to consider the consequences of living with this device. I will never hang another, no matter what the pay. At this point, the idea of a monkey wrench in the zapper is feeling pretty good.

As heroic as Meyer’s last message may be, the timing is unfortunate indeed. Just this weekend, a local nine-year-old boy died of mosquito-borne eastern equine encephalitis. Surely, his warnings will fall on mostly deaf ears. As in the war on terror, in our rush to protect ourselves and our loved ones, we will pull out the big guns first and ask questions later. When the dust and fog settle, I only hope we pause to consider what we have done.