The Monarchs are Dying – Long Live the Monarchs: A Lament for the Butterflies

The Monarchs are Dying – Long Live the Monarchs: A Lament for the Butterflies

By Don Curren

The summer of 2021 was a good one for butterflies in Toronto.

At least it was in my corner of the city.

I saw my first butterfly of that season on April 7.

I know because on that day, I posted a photo on Facebook which was entitled “First Butterfly of the Season, Rosetta McClain Gardens, East End, Toronto” and depicted a Mourning Cloak butterfly resting on a bench at that public garden perched on the top of the Scarborough Bluffs.

After that, butterfly sightings came fast and furious. Or perhaps more accurately, fast and fluttering.

There were a number of Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, around the city, and literally in my own backyard. I was fortunate enough to catch a photo of one which I glimpsed visiting a lilac a few inches away from my head in our back garden on May 31.

 

And then a plethora of Monarchs, perhaps the butterfly most beloved by Canadians.

Overall, it seemed a pretty good season for butterflies. Or maybe, I was just noticing them more frequently, possibly due to the overall sensory deprivation associated with COVID lockdowns.

  

As the summer of 2022 began, I found myself looking forward the annual appearance of butterflies as a pleasant respite from the worrisome world of human beings.

But as April dissolved into May and May vanished into June, I was disappointed.

For a long period early in the summer, I saw precisely zero butterflies.

I asked friends and acquaintances, and most of them said their own experiences were similar – people weren’t seeing many butterflies, or none at all.

I believe I saw one sometime in June. One.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised when I heard in July the International Union for the Conservation of Nature had added the monarch, perhaps the most frequently spotted butterfly in Southern Ontario, to its "red list" of threatened species and categorized it as "endangered" for the first time, putting it two steps from extinct.

It had already been designated endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

The ICUN said habitat loss and climate change have led to a steep decline in monarch butterfly populations. The group estimated the population of monarch butterflies in North America has declined between 22% and 72% over 10 years, depending on how it was measured.

Not a surprising development, given homo sapiens’ demonstrated propensity for obliterating other species in the last several centuries.

But deeply unsettling, nonetheless. In fact, I felt a pang of combined anger and despair at the news.

It may seem myopic to be more affected by the news of one particular species endangered status than any others at a time when flora and fauna and entire ecosystems are being decimated.

But it’s hard not to be alarmed at the potential disappearance of a creature so beautiful and so extraordinary.

Monarchs are famous for their annual migration from Canada and the Northern US to Mexico. It’s a testament to the extraordinary power of evolution, that it created something so small and vulnerable that nonetheless routinely flies thousands of miles in epic, multigenerational migrations.

And now, we pushed them to the brink of oblivion.

My despair about the Monarch’s condition was painfully reinforced by something I spotted a few days later while stuck in traffic on the eastbound lanes of the Queen Elizabeth Way just west of Toronto: a single butterfly, which looked like a Monarch, bobbing around aimlessly above the narrow, paved median between the eastbound and westbound lanes.

It looked lost, surrounded by hundreds of cars and assailed by their toxic emissions, no fellow butterflies in sight and little vegetation to be seen. Certainly, no flowers to light on – at most a few scraggly weeds poking through cracks in the pavement.

I only saw it for a few seconds as I rolled by at 10 or 15 kilometres an hour, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye, looking hopelessly lost in an alien and inhospitable domain.

It was a real-life visual meme that captured the desperate situation of the Monarch and my own despair about it in one indelible image.

I felt another wave of anger and despair.

I think it emanated in part from something called “biophilia.”

Biophilia refers to a love of life and living things that some believe is innate in humans.

The term was first used by German-born American psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), where he described biophilia as “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive.”

The term was later used by American biologist Edward O. Wilson in his work Biophilia (1984), which proposed the tendency of humans to  to affiliate with nature and other life-forms has, in part, a genetic basis.

Whatever its origins, my anecdotal observations suggest biophilia is a fact.

People are endlessly fascinating by other life forms. That’s reflected in the appetite for travel to natural environments and facilities such as zoos and animal parks, the pervasive interest in nature documentaries from people such as Richard Attenborough and David Suzuki and, most notably, in the deep-seated love people have for cats, dogs, rodents, lizards, or whatever species they embrace as pets - or more accurately, “animal companions.”

As real and intense as our biophilia is, it doesn’t seem to have prevented us from exterminating countless species over the centuries.

There’s a tragic disconnect between our feelings for nature and living creatures and how our behavior affects them. We lavish attention and money on our cats and dogs, but, collectively, we inflict endless suffering on non-domesticated species that happen to be in our way.

If anything, affinity for nature and natural things seems to be getting more intense. Interest in bird watching, for example seems to be soaring.

It may just in part be a reaction to the pandemic, when wandering alone in a park or ravine, binoculars in hand as you hoped to spot a Cardinal or a Blue Jay, was one of the relatively few pastimes that could be practiced safely beyond the confines of one’s home.

Or maybe, like characters in a post-apocalyptic novel by Philip K. Dick, our biophilia is become more painfully and poignantly intense as our continued despoilation of the planet makes many of our fellow creatures rarer and more precious.

It would be a tragic irony if we exterminated the Monarchs despite our deep affection for them.

Not only because of their beauty and singularity, but also because they play a key role in the ecosystems they inhabit.

According to the US National Park Service, Monarchs pollinate many types of wildflowers and are also an important food source for birds, small animals, and other insects.

Above and beyond their ecological contributions and their extraordinary, fragile beauty, there is the fundamental immorality of thoughtlessly destroying another species, as eloquently conveyed in a quote by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in his book On the Basis of Morality.

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality,” Schopenhauer wrote.

My own mood of despair over the plight of the Monarch began to lift somewhat in the days and weeks after that “memetic” moment on the QEW.

One reason was that I didn’t appear to be alone. After talking to friends and acquaintances tweeting about it about it, I found many people shared my concern, and some were taking steps to come to the aid of the butterflies, including planting milkweed, the plant most favored by Monarchs.

 

It was somehow consoling that other people had noticed the paucity of Monarchs and other butterflies and were also worried about it.

Another factor helping alleviate the despair was that, as the summer progressed, more butterflies appeared.

Not a lot – and distressingly no Swallowtails – but enough to dispel some of the aura of loss and finality that haunted me earlier in the summer.

And enough Monarchs to enable me to get a couple of decent shots of them.

 

In mid September I spent an afternoon at the Lynne Shores Conservation Area near Whitby, Ontario, and saw in the vicinity of nine or 10 Monarchs.

There was another thing that played into the partial dissolution of my despair over butterflies.

It was a Guardian interview with Mike Davis, a legendary American activist and writer who stopped treatment at age 76 for esophageal cancer this summer and began palliative care, giving him an estimated six to nine months to live.

Davis refuses to despair – both about his own situation, and about the potential environmental cataclysm unleashed by anthropogenic climate change.

“Despair is useless,” he said in the Guardian interview. 

Davis advocates active resistance to the forces driving climate change in the Guardian piece.

“Organize as massively as possible,” he says, and specifically advocates “non-violent civil disobedience.”

“Instead of just fighting over environmental legislation in Congress, ending up in a bill that’s as much a subsidy to the auto industry and to fossil fuel as anything else: start sitting-in in the board rooms and offices of the big polluters, all these meetings where the Kochs and other oil producers sit down with Republican politicians,” Davis continues.

I won’t likely be storming board rooms and offices, but I will be seeking out avenues for donating money and time to help save the Monarchs.

In a recent book, Old Gods and New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory, Davis quotes from the UN Human Development Report of 2007-08, which said “the world’s poor and future generations cannot afford the complacency and prevarication that continue to characterize international negotiations on climate change.”

That’s perhaps even more true for the other species unfortunate enough to share the planet with us.

A continued failure to act “would be a moral failure on a scale unprecedented in history,” the UN document says, according to Davis.

Taking a despairing, “realistic” view of the situation would be liking turning to stone after seeing the Medusa, Davis writes.

Turning to stone, even just metaphorically, is of no help to Monarchs, Swallowtails, birds, bees, and all the myriad other species we’re pushing to the brink of extinction.

It’s better to get past our despair, turn our anger toward constructive ends, and hope that 2023 will be a better year for butterflies, in Toronto and everywhere else.