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What a moving, thorough and thoroughly heart-breaking story you have told in the article "Can they come back?" (an installment of the occasional series "Vanishing North," Oct. 9) about the disappearance of the Poweshiek skipperling butterfly from the Minnesota landscape. How touching the efforts of Cale Nordmeyer and Erik Runquist to care about these tiny creatures and want to save them.
The ways the human race has altered the Earth so carelessly, as if cutting down forests, paving over prairies, draining wetlands, using harmful chemicals in our air, soil and water, as if this would never catch up with us: Well, it has.
It has baffled me that conversations about climate change seem to focus, however late and however little, on reducing carbon emissions. And yet that is only one part of the problem. Habitat loss for countless creatures, cutting down trees needed to soak up CO2 and provide shade, all contribute not only to species extinction but also to the heat island we now call the Twin Cities. Yet major construction sites continue to eat up habitat, adding asphalt and cement by the acre.
This last year I watched a big tract of land in Champlin, where my grandson and I used to see turkeys and red-tailed hawks, get eaten up by many one-story industrial buildings and their parking lots. Farewell to the turkeys and hawks.
I hope I see a Poweshiek skipperling butterfly someday. But I tried to enjoy this morning by getting out for my walk while the big full moon was still in the sky. I love the moon — it's one of my favorite elements of nature. And I love that we can't ruin it. It's already barren.
Karen Jeffords-Brown, St. Paul