As if she hadn’t got enough on her plate already, the high-powered Danish journalist and mother of three Lea Korsgaard decides to track down all Danish butterfly species in a single summer. She knows nothing about butterflies, claims to be unsure about what has sparked her unusual ambition and sets about learning a new language – of nature, lepidoptera and obsession – with a disarming lack of expertise.
The nature-quest narrative is an eccentric but surprisingly well-populated subgenre of nature writing. Midway through my own journey to find all British butterfly species in one year, I was devastated to discover that there was an earlier book on the same undertaking by Robin Page. It didn’t matter because publishing – or British publishing at least – adores an obscure hunt for a certain taxonomic category. Since my book, there’s been The Orchid Hunter (every British orchid); Cold Blood (every British reptile and amphibian); Much Ado About Mothing (rare British moths); Chasing the Ghost (every British plant); and The Glitter in the Green (hummingbirds). Apart from Dragonflight (every British dragonfly), these books share one characteristic: they are written by men. Is the desire to capture species and secure them in a narrative a peculiarly male predilection?
Korsgaard must stitch her time-consuming special interest into the ‘crazy patchwork quilt’ of a multitasking mother’s life. Her husband and three boys look on, wry, baffled and sweetly accepting of her apparent midlife crisis.
Countries with a butterfly species list the size of Britain (60) or Denmark (64) make a good setting for a digestible mission. And butterflies are a dream subject because they are so enmeshed in human history and culture. Even so, what might appear a slender piece of whimsy is enlarged by Korsgaard into a wonderfully clear and insightful history of the ideas that have pinned us in a planetary extinction crisis.
As she acquires the skills required to find increasingly scarce butterflies in the forests, lakes and dunes, her adventures are interspersed with biological, cultural and philosophical forays. The transformation from very hungry caterpillar into a ‘flying machine devoted to sex’, as the zoologist Carroll M. Williams described the life of an ‘adult’ butterfly, has long been viewed as miraculous. In fact, Korsgaard reveals, species that don’t pupate, such as ourselves, are in a minority. Thanks to metamorphosis, at each stage butterfly bodies are optimised to do precisely what that moment of existence requires.
Korsgaard’s optimisation arrives in mid-May, when she befriends a young (male) butterfly expert who brings much needed ‘military’ precision to her scattergun early efforts. So far, so masculine; but Korsgaard finds a heroine in the Edwardian lepidopterist Margaret Fountaine, who defied convention to travel the world with a younger (male) assistant, collecting 22,000 butterflies. Freud would’ve analysed this butterfly-chasing as the sublimation of sexual energy. Korsgaard finds his explanation ‘claustrophobic’, siding instead with Vladimir Nabokov, who writes about butterflies better than anyone. Although Nabokov called his own ardour for butterflies a ‘mania’, he despised Freudian interpretations. ‘All my books should be stamped Freudians, Keep Out,’ he wrote.
In today’s extinction stakes, Denmark has fared worse than Britain, losing 12 butterfly species since 1900 to our three (which is testimony to heroic conservation action by British butterfly obsessives). Much modern nature writing interrupts itself every second paragraph to wring hands about mass extinction, but Korsgaard’s approach is far superior, building a narrative around her growing understanding of why we are destroying our fellow species.
The Enlightenment began soon after scientists discovered that resurrection didn’t exist in nature: caterpillars weren’t dead when they turned into butterflies. Nature was uncoupled from the divine. ‘The bounty was divvied up: theology took God; science got nature,’ she writes. Christianity put spirit above matter and appointed us rulers of nature. Like the transformation of a caterpillar into a soaring winged insect, so western conceptions of history believed in humanity’s progress to a final glory. Korsgaard reminds us that even economists from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes believed that we would reach economic fulfilment before turning to the ‘real problems’ of human life.
The transformation of a caterpillar into a ‘flying machine devoted to sex’ has long been viewed as miraculous
Today, trapped in our historically unique consumer society, there is no ‘horizon of meaning’ and no final stage, thinks Korsgaard. Economists predict an ever rising graph of growth and we consume nature as if it will never run out.
Amid this clarity, many butterflies and their special places make all too fleeting cameos. The Camberwell Beauty, the Purple Emperor, the White Admiral; all are ticked off in a flash. These insects possess personality and interesting relations with people, but we don’t see either. An opportunity for connection is missed.
Korsgaard’s burgeoning connection with the natural world is inspiring, however, and we learn that her butterfly safari was ultimately sparked by the Danish theologian Ole Jensen, who believed Christianity disastrously overlooked the true meaning of ‘God saw that it was good’. These words ‘tell us we have a duty: before we take from nature, we must honour and admire it’, she writes. In ecstatic final scenes of butterflying with her mother, Korsgaard delivers this and more.
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