At the entrance to the Jonesborough wastewater treatment plant on Britt Drive, a “butterfly garden” was being laid out that particular day and “doubtless,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase, the butterfly “thought it meet of him” to flutter by to acknowledge the planting and show thanks for it.

We enjoy butterflies and think of them as a staple of spring and summer. Yet with the disappearance of flowering hayfields and meadows, their feeding and breeding places, many butterflies are in decline.

We can help assure their continued survival, individually and through efforts such as the Town’s, to plant nectar-producing plants.

In Jonesborough’s new natural-flora “garden,” the spicebush will have company from other swallowtail butterflies, and from sulphurs, whites and buckeye, skippers and the Monarch, hairstreaks and dusky wings and others. They will find a variety of flowers native to Tennessee, such as still grow in woods and open spaces, cardinal flower and great blue lobelia, red milkweed and mountain mint, butterfly weed and sweet Joe-Pye weed among them. There are other flowers, such as horse mint and crimson bee balm and the Tennessee coneflower which no longer are common in the “wild” and others, such as moth and common mullein, attractive to moths.

Our love of butterflies is based on more than their beauty. They are among the insects on which thousands of plants depend for pollination. Through particular shapes of flowers, scent or color, or particularly deep nectaries accessible only to a long proboscis, plants have evolved cooperative relations with their special pollinators.

The moth visiting a flower during the night distinguishes its fragrance from other flowers’ aroma mix, its own foraging efficiency thus maximized and pollen transfer for sexual reproduction of the plant thus assured.

The relations are finely tuned, the plant shedding its attractant scent output at highest levels only when its flowers are ready for pollination and their agent is active.

Thus, we see bees and butterflies tending to flowers that offer their perfume during the day and moths to those whose fragrance is strong at night. A majority of flowering plants must have butterflies, bees, beetles or other pollinators to reproduce. Their mysterious partnerships, by the uncounted thousands, undergird the productivity of nature.

Yet the connections are fragile. One partner’s loss endangers or may doom the other, and the inter-dependence affects us all. A “welded chain of causal events,” says Dr. E. O. Wilson “leads directly to our species. If plants, including many food and forage crops, must have insects to exist, then human beings must have insects to exist.” Our urgent challenge is to reverse the dangerous trend that now sends more than hundred fellow creatures sliding to extinction each single day.

Planting a “butterfly garden” is an act of hope and help. Jonesborough should be commended for it.

In Knoxville and other towns in the region, when the Corps held public hearings last fall on proposed modifications to this (Nationwide Permit 21) system, thousands of industry-organized coal supporters shouted down and threatened citizens who wished to speak out against the practice of mountaintop removal. The streamlined, nationwide permit, in existence since 1982 and reissued every five years since, had been intended to be used only when environmental effects were “minimal.” Yet as the dynamite-blasting way of coal mining grew exponentially, it inflicted a heavy toll. Thousands of stream miles were permanently buried, thousands more polluted through acid drainage, silt, selenium and other toxic chemicals. Hundreds of fish species, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated, were being harmed by the pollution and loss of streams and forest habitat.

In 1999, a federal court sided with citizen groups which accused federal agencies of violating the Clean Water Act by granting permits sanctioning stream burial. The citizen suit and court’s affirmative ruling hinged on a little-known clause in the Act’s regulations. The Army Corps, responsible for permit approval for most construction projects that involve alterations to wetlands and streams could let clean “fill” material be placed in waterways for certain purposes, but the regulations disallowed the dumping of (mining or other) waste into these.

Under the Bush administration, which had appointed a coal industry lobbyist to head the minerals management division at Interior, those regulations were to change. As the Washington Post reported in 2004, following a “specific pledge” by the new administrator to “fix federal rules on water and spoil placement,” May 2002 saw the fill rule officially revised to make disposal of various wastes in water bodies, in particular mountaintop removal overburden, a legal activity. Predictably, coal extraction via mountaintop removal expanded in the region. According to the Lindquist-Environmental Appalachian Fellowship, a religious environmental group, even Tennessee had almost 20 active or planned such mining sites by 2008 (and almost eighty more potential sites identified for future permit application). Predictable also was further, pervasive and long lasting damage to the region’s natural resources, its scenic landscape, and its mountain communities.

With the nationwide permits suspended, coal companies must now apply for individual permits in which local topography, water and other resources are considered in publicly accessible, transparent process. The individual-permit mandate represents another, encouraging step by the current administration to limit this damaging form of coal mining. It should further, one might hope, end altogether the Bush era policy of letting streams be legally buried under the waste from formerly green mountain peaks.

The Congressional bill sponsored by Senator Lamar Alexander (Appalachia Restoration Act), too, should come to pass as another, positive step in this direction.

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