“Burn the land, boil the sea”
“You can’t take the sky from me”

Firefly Series Theme Song (Ballad of Serenity, Sonny Rhodes)

I’ll start by mentioning that I don’t know much about fireflies, neither their biology, behavior, nor habitat. Like most, I know that fireflies are known for their glowing abdomens that are used in their summer mating rituals. But many details about fireflies I include will be what I researched online. Nonetheless, given what I have to say, this might be just as well. I doubt you know much about fireflies either.

For humans, the symbolism of a firefly seems to transcend the insect itself. I can think of both an Alan Jackson song and a science fiction series that go by the name of ‘Firefly,’ but neither have anything to do with a glowing insect. The Alan Jackson song is about a man coming to terms with his own aging while the scifi series concerns a ‘firefly’ spaceship navigating small and rural planets dominated by the central colonies. What fireflies mean to us in terms of youthful innocence, hope, and loss could probably motivate a book.

As I said above, fireflies are insects that are especially active on summer nights. Or at least that is when they fly about and emit glowing lights from their rears that can be seen from some distance. This is to attract mates. What we know as humans is that these insects captivate our interest, especially as children. Summer is a happy time for children, and sometimes on summer nights children chase the bugs and try to catch them and put them into transparent bottles so they can watch them glow. You can probably imagine what you would think if you were someplace searching for a mate only to be caught by someone and stuck in a jar. You would probably be confused and unhappy. But this is what we do to fireflies.

I too have fonder memories of fireflies than they do of me. I remember growing up looking across miles of open farm fields early on a summer night. I remember seeing countless glowing tiny yellow orbs blinking on and off across the open darkness. It was as if every star in the sky had descended to earth to dance in a place you had never heard of. Then I looked up to see that the real stars had appeared out of the twighlight to join and eventually replace the imposters in their splendor. If I had known what I do now, I would have studied this scene. I would have tried to remember just how it looked. I’d have taken notes or even tried to take a picture. Because what I know now is that this is a sight to the extent I saw it I will probably never see again.

Apparently, firefly populations are in decline worldwide. According to firefly.org, the probable cause is habitat destruction and light polution. They prefer wood litter in forests and next to water. As I’ve talked about in many other posts, humans prefer an orderly environment which creates poor habitat for just about everything. They clean up litter, brush, and damp areas while mowing plants. Also, outdoor lighting has become more and more popular even in rural areas. Fireflies are far from the only critters to find their reliance on darkness to be hindered by human’s fear of it.

I said before that fireflies are sometimes related to the theme of loss by humans. No doubt, this is primarily the loss of our own youthful innocence. But we humans have lost more than our youth. I doubt that human children have any impact on firefly populations whatsoever, but many of the bugs are crushed or are forgotten in jars to suffocate, thirst, or starve. Killing insects is a common human pastime, but it’s ironic that one of the few insects we adore we kill all the same. It reminds me initially of many human preservationists who sometimes seem intent on coddling ecosystems to death through misguided protection. But this act of destruction as an unintentional side effect also reminds me of a book I read as a child, “Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer” by a Canadian named Andy Russell.

Andy Russell’s book is filled with stories, page after page of yarns pulled from various parts of his life like a man wandering down random trails wondering where it will take him. One could easily read it to the end and marvel at the lack of plot, focus, or direction weaving through his chapters of stories. But he ends his book with one last story. He tells of a large trout in an idyllic pure stream that he chased unsuccessfully through a summer of his youth. Then he finally caught the trout and, filled with victorious adrenaline, he bludgeoned the fish to death with a stick. He soon felt the pangs of regret seeing that the challenge that captivated him so long would never live again.

Now the theme of his long book lay open. It was not only the trout that was gone, he wrote, but the trout’s home the stream was now dead, murky, and polluted. Throughout his life, he had watched what could have been the sustainable use of wild areas descend into waste. In fact, the entire world in which Andy Russell had lived, which he had painstakingly described with story after story was now gone. It had been conquered by humans, chased down and put in a jar to starve, bashed to death with a stick, and wiped off the face of the earth with an efficiency that made the results look like an afterthought. Like the sea of fireflies from my youth, his world will never be again.