Earth Day Extreme

Many years ago my husband, a master trim carpenter, had a nasty encounter with a table saw. As his hand healed, I taught him to knit. Being the master of whatever endeavor he undertakes, he became an exquisite knitter.

When a friend found out she had cancer, she sold us the bulk of her luxurious yarn store for ten cents on the dollar. My husband, the master trim carpenter, built me an elegant honey-comb wall, ten feet high and eighteen feet long, to hold the yarn and supplies. I was OCD enough to have it all arranged by color, and I considered it my Monet. When we found extensive destruction one year in our ‘stash’ from tiny moths, we learned how to take care of them and how to keep them from coming back. They were a very specific tan moth with a wing span of only a half inch, but they lay hundreds of eggs at a time, and the larvae feed on the wool or other material in which they hatch.

We visited a beautiful Alpaca store on a recent weekend excursion and it dazzled me with not only the gorgeous products, but also their impressive prices. As I touched a delightful sweater, one of the little moths flew out from the folds. We were speaking to the owner and informed him of the damage of these little buggers, and he said maybe it was a different moth. My husband said that if you examine them, the ‘dangerous’ moths had an orange fuzz on their head.  Sure enough, the owner examined it, found the orange fuzz, and then released it.

David and I looked at each other in amazement, and gently and calmly said that the little moth could cause thousands of dollars in damage just by laying its eggs in his merchandise. The peaceful shop owner explained he would not disrupt the moth’s habitat, not even to put him outside where it was cold.

I am all for protecting the environment and our ecosystems, but my personal feeling was that this was carrying it to an extreme. What do YOU think?