Milkweed, Monarchs & Grief

For a long time after I stopped living at the entry of a monarch butterfly sanctuary and working in monarch conservation, I stayed silent on the subject. I slowed down, turned inward, and spent time tending to my grief over these losses and others. In the past, I’d pushed aside the mixture of anger, sadness and regret that is grief by moving forward and taking action. I’ve since come to see the urge to act as one way we as a culture avoid our more difficult feelings.

I also started to see monarch butterfly conservation, including my own role in it, as a perfect example of taking action to avoid grief, in this case our anguish over the seemingly irrevocable loss of our familiar natural world. Instead of taking the time to make space to acknowledge what we’ve already lost, people leap to action, whether it’s the appropriate action or not.

In this case, the action that’s been widely broadcast from a range of monarch butterfly conservation organizations is “plant milkweed to help the monarch migration.” This messaging is so persistent that people started planting milkweed here where I live in Mexico in the middle of the monarch butterfly flyway. Where we are, just 300 miles north of their overwintering grounds, monarchs should just be passing through rather than stopping to lay eggs and join a sedentary population. Nonetheless, placards in a local pollinator garden in my town encouraged locals to include milkweed in their monarch waystations.

I held my tongue on the issue until I felt capable of speaking from a more whole-hearted place. First, I wrote about the issue in a two-part series for my local paper.

https://www.lokkal.com/sma/magazine/2024/september/milkweed.php

https://www.lokkal.com/sma/magazine/2024/september/milkwee.php

Those articles led to me facilitating a conversation between the president of the organization behind the pollinator garden and a soil scientist I knew from working in monarch butterfly conservation in Mexico. I recorded our conversation about the harm of planting milkweed here and created this video:

Tonight I’m joining the Audubon Society at an informational table at a talk on the monarch migration by journalist Monika Maeckle (see pamphlet below). I hope that we can continue to re-educate people about what kinds of actions are helpful for the monarch migration in our bioregion.  

And as the sorrows of the world continue to mount, I continue thinking about grief, wondering how we can create collective spaces to help each other hold these difficult feelings. That way, when we do take action, we’re able to formulate ones that are informed by the full range of our feelings.