#bugs
I have been racking my brain trying to find this children's comic book series about a teenaged moth/butterfly-based superhero I can't remember the name of. I lent the hardcover issues obsessively from the library in kindergarten and all I can remember is that it took place in a whole society of humanoid bug people. Sadly I don't believe it was DC or Marvel, so unless someone else knows exactly what I'm talking about it's gonna be a tough search.
image source - SCOTLAND: the big picture
rewilding -- you may have heard of it. Letting native species (or similar enough ones) do their thing. Bringing back locally-extinct species. letting life, Live
but part of nature is also death. Decay. Rot. Blood, gore. Fungus. Maggots. Death breaks apart the Body and lets its nutrients, borrowed during life, re-enter the cycles and nourish more life.
I've heard of a term, I think it was re-dead-ing, but cannot find the post... I do see, now, Death Gives Life , referring to the same thing.
we (broadly) are disgusted by the presence of death. 'Dead stock' -- dead animals, dead plants, so on -- are often removed from the scenery in places like the UK1. This is often done in the name of disease control, with the idea that dead bodies in nature cause disease1 even though the work of scavengers & decomposers clear up the germs2 , -- main concern is, if the animal was very sick before it dies, its carcass may carry that disease. But that is not a corpse problem, that is an animal health problem, which lays in problems like artificially high & concentrated populations (e.g. deer, chronic wasting disease). Just keep them away from waterways and livestock, probably3.
The carcass(of tree and animal alike) is a node of concentrated nutrients. When left in place, those nutrients return from the ecology from which they came. When the carcass is taken away, those nutrients are gone elsewhere3. And now, detached from the life that has mechanisms to eat-rot2, we humans have to do something with it. Like with manure, compartmentalizing these "wastes" away from growing life turns them into a problem4.
Fallen trees & rotting meat are the homes for so many species, sometimes species only raising their young at particular stages or specializing to particular parts -- fur, bones, meat, bark2. disallowing the dead & rotting from resting where they lay where we can see&smell them, is disallowing these species to find a place to live.
image source - ARK Rewilding Netherlands
& it's not just bugs. Think vultures, Think scavenger-mammals2 ; Not only these, but predators fill up on already-dead meat, allowing endangered prey like the capercaillie to nest successfully3.
and "cleaning up" this "ugly thing" that is the dead may deprive animals of their chance to mourn1. Not all animals do -- many don't care much, many eat their own babies -- but some do and they should be given that chance.
greenwashed environmentalism thrives on the beauty of nature, operating in very narrow definitions of beauty and what is correct ... mud, rot, death, disease, bugs, stench, shit, these are all fundamental aspects of the inbuilt reciprocity+interconnectedness of being alive, and things we reject at the peril of so much.
image source - How death gives life
to all dead things: we, the living, love you, and thank you for giving back to the natural community at the end of your time with us. If only such ideas were not so opposed in the current era.
1 ) King, S. How death gives life. Rewilding Britain, 2023.
2 ) Beekers, B.; Meertens, H.; Reiniers, K.; Helmer, W.; Colijn, E.; Krawczynski, R.; and Meissner, R.; trans. Righart, A.; and Allen, D. Circle of life: A new way to support Europe's scavengers. Rewilding Europe & ARK Nature, 2017.
3 ) Ferraro, K. M.; and Hirst, C. Missing carcasses, lost nutrients: Quantifying nutrient losses from deer culling practices in Scotland. Ecological Solutions and Evidence 5(3), 2024.
4 ) Moore Lappé, F.; and Collins, J. World Hunger: 10 Myths. 2015.
Life is digestion. Life is decay. Life is rot.