The Orgy in Your Backyward

University of Wyoming Professor Jeffrey A. Lockwood celebrates the cicadas. His essay in The New York Times concludes:

We would do well, I believe, to begin to think of periodical cicadas as moving, living national parks. Maybe the Department of [the] Interior should declare a new category: national events. These would be wondrous natural happenings that define the character of our nation, occasions that warrant our attention, or processes that merit celebration. These events would honor the ways in which we are connected to the earth, recognizing that we are embedded in a marvelous natural world.

As candidates, I’d propose the migration of monarch butterflies from Mexico to Canada that unites our continent, the flickering of fireflies that turns suburban hedges into enchanted forests, the bugling of elk in the Rockies that is as primordial a sound as one could ever hear, and the turning of leaves in the New England autumn that reminds us of the cycle of life and death in which, for all of our medical technology, we are still a part.

And I nominate the exuberant arrival of the periodical cicadas as the inaugural national event. Rather than a few million of us visiting Yosemite or Yellowstone this summer, a few trillion cicadas will come to visit us. They will remind us that the world is yet to be tamed and that wonder is our birthright. Even staid scientists are entranced by these creatures — why else would the genus have been named Magicicada?

NewMexiKen notes that Professor Lockwood does not reside where he has to deal with these trillions of pests.