Fw: origins & conflicts (from Bob Pyle)

[Hank Brodkin]

Robert Pyle has given me permission to forward this.
See what a real gentleman sounds like!

Hank Brodkin

----- Original Message ----- 
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 7:26 PM
Subject: origins & conflicts


All,

   I warmly appreciate Harry and others writing the birding magazine to put
things in a more historically accurate context.  But let's all remember too
that "butterflying" really took wing through the work of  Scudder, W. J. 
Holland,
Clarence Weed, Gene Stratton Porter, A. B. Klots, and others before,
during, and after them.  It's true that I wrote the first U.S. books with
"butterfly watching" in their titles, and explicitly pushed "butterflying"
as a companion activity to collecting for those who didn't want to net or
collect; but I had many precedents, both here and abroad, especially in
England.  So did Xerces: remember that the modern U.S. Lep. conservation
dialogue began in this country in the J. Lep. Soc., with pieces by George
Rawson, Bill Sieker, and Fred Rindge (my first, in 1967, was rejected by
JLS (with reason!) and was ultimately revised and published by John Masters
in the Bull. Minn. Ent.). Xerces didn't come along along until 1971; the 
4JBCs in
'75, until NABA took them over in 1992.  All these things have complex,
interconnected histories and lots and lots of participants.  Ron G. is
entirely right about unnecessary, artificial conflicts.  It is my hope that
Dr. Glassberg will ultimately see the wisdom of fruitful and mutually
respectful collaboration, and cease his balkanization of butterfly study.
So we dream on.

Bob P.


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