Tea at Trianon: Hogs and Fire Ants

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Hogs and Fire Ants

From Texas Monthly:

When Solenopsis invicta, a.k.a. the red imported fire ant, was first identified in East Texas, in the seventies, stakes were high. Since hitching a ride from Brazil to Alabama in a ship’s ballast a few decades earlier, the insects had resisted all efforts to slow their long march west. Experts predicted that they would wreak untold havoc on Texas’s ecosystem.

In response, counties set up quarantine areas that quickly doubled, then tripled, in size. The Texas Department of Agriculture doused more than half a million acres with a chemical called MV-678 that was supposed to render the next generation of fire ants sterile and lazy. (It did not.) Landowners drenched fire ants in diesel oil, convinced that this was an effective method for doing away with them. (It wasn’t.) The August 1988 cover of Texas Monthly declared the fire ant “Public Enemy #1.”

“People were geeked out about this,” said Robert Puckett, an entomologist at Texas A&M University who studies fire ants. “It was the first time we had an invasive ant species sweeping the state.” But it was hardly the only invasion of an unwanted visitor.

In the decades since the fire ant’s arrival, millions of feral hogs have stampeded across Texas, tearing up farmland and spreading disease. Zebra mussels have clogged our lakes and rivers. A beautiful green beetle, the emerald ash borer, has spent the past six or so years settling down in North Texas, where it will likely devastate the ash tree population. In the Gulf, the recent population explosion of the voracious lionfish has serious ramifications for our coral reefs. Spotted lanternflies, apple snails, sirex wood wasps, spongy moths, brown marmorated stink bugs, giant African snails—the list of unwelcome arrivals goes on and on. (Read more.)