In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.
Along the way there are exquisite creatures, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.
Meet Lucinda Monarch.
Lucinda Monarch
Lucinda Monarch flies along a winding river bed, then veers into the surrounding meadow amidst its flowers, goldenrod, asters, coneflowers and common milkweed, gliding not deftly with the efficient, seemingly effortless changes of direction as a bird does, instead meandering, slowly, her thin tiny wings fluttering, lifting her along on a curving, wobbling path through the air. If you’re familiar with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons and Woodstock’s flightpath, Lucinda’s isn’t as convoluted as that — not quite anyway.
Lucinda’s name in Spanish means “light.” Attracted to many of the flowers in this meadow, she’ll feed on their nectar which nourishes and sustains her. She doesn’t realize that while seeking out nectar, she’s pollinating plants, an essential role she shares with bees, wasps, lacewings and other insects. Pollinators transport pollen from one plant to another, fertilizing and enabling them to reproduce. These insects are responsible for cross-fertilizing a third of the world’s food supply.
And at this moment, Lucinda lands on a milkweed plant.
Her antennae and legs — sensitive to a plant’s chemical balance — identify whether or not it is milkweed. Milkweed is the host plant of monarchs; it is an essential stop for them.
Milkweed contains a milky latex sap, which is poisonous to most animals. But not to monarchs. Eating milkweed provides monarchs not only nutrition but protection. They store its toxic compounds — its cardenolides — in their bodies and that gives them their orange coloring, a signal to predators that they are noxious and, therefore, prey to be avoided. Monarchs only place their eggs on milkweed as that is all their larvae will eat, storing its nutrients and its poison. As caterpillars and from the moment they emerge from their chrysalides as butterflies, they will have their protective coloring on full display.
Today, Lucinda is interested in eating and perching — but not in depositing eggs. She can’t and there is a special reason why.
On this beautiful autumn day, she’s healthy, content, and nourished. She’s strong. She needs to be because the time of year is shifting. Temperatures are cooling. The days are getting shorter. The milkweed she eats is aging, and her plant nectar sources are diminishing.
Lucinda and the other monarchs who have been born in August or September are unique, born differently from their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents. Her generation realizes this. They were aware they are different even back when they were little caterpillars.
She is part of a special generation — the migratory generation. Each year, the 4th age group of monarchs is the migratory generation. The three previous generations emerged from their chrysalides sexually mature. They’d mate, the females would find milkweed to eat and to secure their eggs on. The lifespan of Lucinda’s parents and the two generations before them was about six weeks. Lucinda and her peers will have a lifespan of up to nine months. They emerged from their chrysalides in a state of reproductive diapause — suspended sexual development — and are unable to mate and reproduce until spring. Until that time, all their life energy is focused toward storing body fats and developing flight muscles for something truly incredible — the upcoming journey.3
When the angle of the sun reaches 57° off the horizon, and when the days consecutively shorten, the monarchs of Lucinda’s generation realize it’s time to go…4 They get it. They know. A week ago, Lucinda and all of the monarchs in her area left southern Canada. They’re now in Minnesota.
This tiny creature, who weighs less than a dime and flies funny pumping paper-thin wings, is beginning a migration along with all the other monarchs across the portion of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. They are traveling from their summer breeding grounds heading south and southwest in search of the overwintering grounds where they can survive the cold.
They are traveling into Central Mexico.
Lucinda’s journey will take her 3,000 miles. Three thousand miles… to a destination neither she nor any of them has ever been before.
They will fly as many as 50 to 100 miles in a day. With wings thin and fragile, monarchs will brave gusting winds, rain, whatever weather manifests on their way, over thousands of miles…
How do they know the route? They’re starting out from different places spread throughout a vast region thousands of miles wide. How do they find a destination not one of them has ever seen and recognize it as the destination? Scientists at the University of Kansas discovered in 2009 that monarchs orient themselves using a special internal circadian clock located not in their brain but in their antennae. As they head south following the sun, they orient themselves in a time-compensated manner adjusting their course based on the shifting position of the sun in the sky.6
Each day they find refuge in stopover places with nectar sources and shelter from the elements. Heading south toward Texas they will meet other butterflies and merge forming larger groups called kaleidoscopes or swarms. These are big and small groups, but they don’t really buddy-up, they just travel and rest together for the evenings in trees and shrubs. If one of them were to be separated from the group, it would know how to complete the journey on its own.
This morning Lucinda got a late start. The evening was cold. Butterflies aren’t able to fly if their core body temperature is below 55°, so she had to warm up for awhile in the sunlight. Yesterday she only flew for a half day because it rained. Monarchs can’t fly in the rain, and she had to wait in a bush until her wings dried. Monarchs are not only careful travelers but they are also great planners. They exert a great deal of energy on their journey but as long as there are sufficient plants along the way with nectar to sustain them, they will arrive in Mexico weighing a bit more than when they started their migration.7
The monarchs that survive the trek will reach their destination in Central Mexico around November 1st, aggregating in the forests of tall oyamel fir trees on twelve south-southwest facing mountain slopes at altitudes between 6,900 and 13,500 feet — the only altitudes where these trees grow. Here they will find water, shelter to protect them from predators, and cool temperatures which will slow down their metabolism enabling them to conserve enough energy to survive the winter.
The monarchs have been migrating annually along this route for the past two million years. As a pollinator, this journey and their place, their role in the ecosystem is a critically important one.
But monarchs are not faring well. Their population is in precipitous decline.8
The main factor causing the monarch’s demise is the loss of its milkweed, particularly in the Midwest.
Farmers have traditionally tried to eradicate milkweed, which was widely considered a pest-plant, but milkweed survived in agricultural areas as it recovers well to plowing. In recent years, several factors have combined to assure milkweed’s decline. The number of small farms has sharply fallen over the past 75 years resulting in cropland consolidation into fewer, vastly larger farms. These larger operations cultivate in the Industrial Agriculture model, which has assumed predominance since World War II and emphasizes monocrop production and maximizing tillable crop acreage. This has resulted in the elimination of hedgerows and other border areas between farms, and the scaling back of divider crops, bordering woodlands and wild areas — all of which contained grasses, nectar plants and milkweed. Urbanization has also consumed millions of acres of former wildlife habitat. On top of that, global warming is increasingly causing droughts and severe weather throughout this region, harming what milkweed remains.
Becca Cudmore writes in Working Together for Monarchs, “In 2014, Iowa State University estimated that 98% of the milkweed that once grew where Iowa farmland now exists is gone. 80% of all Midwestern milkweeds have been eradicated as well. According to The Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, that percentage closely mirrors the drop in monarch egg production in the Midwest. And in 2014 when University of Guelph researchers in Canada compared the various life threats to the monarch, they found that milkweed loss had the greatest effect on recent declines.”9 The corn belt is a key area for monarch breeding in the summer months as well as an important stopping point for migrating monarchs who rest in the oak and pine trees and feed from flowering plants like the goldenrod and wild bergamot in the meadows below.
Making matters even more dire for monarchs, genetically engineered crops (GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms) arrived on the scene in 1996. These crop seeds are genetically engineered to be impervious to Roundup, which is an herbicide sprayed on the fields. The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, kills what are deemed unwanted weeds and pests. Farmers embraced this new technology because it promised to make farming easier and increase crop yields. Included in the wide spectrum of plants and soil life that Roundup poisons and kills is milkweed. This has all but wiped out the plant on soybean and corn farms throughout the Midwest thereby reducing monarch butterfly habitat by more than 163 million acres.10 Other herbicides including dicamba, Enlist Duo, and neonicotinoid pesticides are lethal to monarch caterpillars as well.11 Jonathan Lundgren, a senior research entomologist working for the USDA, and his research team found neonicotinoid pesticide “in places where it doesn’t belong.” They discovered that the tissue of “60% of the milkweed in their South Dakota study area was contaminated by the pesticide, which even at low levels causes monarch larvae to grow much more slowly and reach much smaller size.”12
Lucinda is going for it. She has traveled over 3,000 miles and now flies through the mountains of Central Mexico, upwards, her tiny wings pumping way.
She ascends, reaching an altitude of 7,000 feet.
On November 1st, Lucinda arrives at a forest of oyamel fir trees. There are tens of thousands of monarchs arriving with her — a huge swarm. The humidity in the forest is perfect. Kylee Baumle notes in The Monarch – Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly that this area is not too warm for her to be at risk of drying out and not too wet to foster disease.13 Lucinda has never seen this place before, but she is certain that this is her intended destination.
Fewer than 5% of monarch eggs survive to become butterflies. Tens of thousands of adult monarchs don’t survive their migration. But Lucinda has. This little creature has travelled 3,000 miles.
No matter where they start their migration, monarchs begin to arrive in the oyamel forest around the same day every year. November 1st.
The Mexican national holiday, Día de los Muertos — or Day of the Dead — begins on October 31st. This is when families gather together to honor and remember loved ones who have passed. It has been celebrated by the indigenous peoples of the land that includes today’s Mexico since around 1800 B.C.
In her beautiful book, The Monarch – Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly,14 Kylee Baumle writes, “Because of the arrival of the monarchs during this special time, many people believe that these butterflies are the souls of their loved ones coming back to pay them a visit…
“On Day of the Dead, it is said, the gates of heaven open at midnight on October 31st and the spirits of the children who have died come down to reunite with their families for 24 hours. Then, on November 2nd, the souls of the departed adults join them.”
When spring arrives, Lucinda and the other monarchs will return from Mexico and fly north through southern Texas. They will have emerged from reproductive diapause and mated, and they are now in search of healthy milkweed to lay their eggs on — an essential final fervent search before their lives come to a close.
“Populations of the iconic and beloved monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) have dropped an astonishing 96.5% over the past few decades, from an estimated 1 billion in 1997 to just 35 million in early 2014” writes John R. Platt in Scientific American.16 The yearly count of monarchs overwintering in Mexico in March 2018 confirms their continuing rapid decline, occupying just 6.2 forest acres, down from 7.275 acres the year before.17
Sarah Foltz Jordan, a Pollinator Conservation Specialist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation18 provides habitat restoration support to hundreds of farmers and farm agency professionals across the Upper Midwest. The Monarch Joint Venture program19 is also doing everything it can to help save the monarchs, but a 2016 study determined that there is a “substantial probability” of the quasi-extinction of the monarch population east of the Rockies within the next 20 years.20 The term “quasi-extinction” means a population decline to a number low enough where the recovery of the species is unlikely.
Her thin tiny wings fluttering, lifting her along on a curving, wobbly path in the warming spring air, Lucinda descended from the forest of oyamel fir trees in the mountains of Central Mexico returning north. She found milkweed in southern Texas, and she laid her eggs there before dying.
While the number of farm families planting pesticide free milkweed corridors is growing, industrial agriculture farmers are using more Roundup than ever before as well as newer and even more lethal pesticides and herbicides. In 2018, the population of eastern monarchs, which range from the Rocky Mountains all the way across to the east coast and from the central U.S. up into Canada, has diminished further. Today, massed together, monarchs would only cover an area the size of 16 football fields. In the forest of oyamel fir trees they occupied 14.7% less acreage than they did just a year before.21
Lucinda’s offspring have an ability to perceive things we can’t begin to understand. They’re returning to Canadian meadows they’ve never seen — and they’ll realize when they arrive that’s their home. Their next migratory generation will know that their destination is thousands of miles to the south, at well over a mile altitude in mountains forested by trees that don’t exist anywhere else, on a November 1st. If monarchs are capable of perceiving all of that, then perhaps, somehow, in some way, they can sense this:
Tens of thousands of us are aware of your plight, we are taking action to try and save you. Farmers are creating butterfly corridors, homeowners are creating butterfly friendly gardens, planting forage plants and milkweed in their yards. Scientists and townspeople in the mountains of Central Mexico are planting a new forest of oyamel fir trees at higher altitude so when the planet warms you can overwinter at the temperature you need to survive.22
We’re taking on Big Ag as well — and they’re going to pay, and pay handsomely, for what they’ve done to you and yours, and for a few other reasons as well. They are going to stop killing virtually every plant, animal, and microbe that lives in or above ground in fields far and wide, poisoning your milkweed, wiping out millions upon millions of you, and turning your migratory pathways into evermore perilous passages.
To survive, Lucinda and each one of the monarchs need help from even more compassionate farmers and compassionate people.
Help from people like you.
Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright ©2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.
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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.
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1 Butterfly on orange milkweed photo: © Dave/Adobe Stock
2 Butterfly caterpillar photo: © withthesehands/Shutterstock
3 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017 pg. 36
4 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017 pg. 37
5 Butterflies in meadow photo: © Glass and Nature/Shutterstock
6 The Annenberg Learner, Which Way to Mexico? Exploring the Mysteries of Monarch Navigation
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/sl/38/0.html
7 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017 pg. 38
8 The Environmental Defense Fund A Future for Monarchs - Bringing the Iconic Butterfly Back From the Brink https://www.edf.org/card/future-monarchs
9 Becca Cudmore, Working Together for Monarchs, World Wildlife Magazine, Sum. 2017 https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2017/articles/working-together-for-monarchs
10 John R. Platt, Monarch Butterflies Could Gain Endangered Species Protection, Scientific American, Extinction Countdown, Jan. 5, 2015 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/monarch-butterflies-could-gain-endangered-species-protection/
11 Center For Food Safety, Annual Monarch Count Shows Butterfly Still Threatened, Mar. 5, 2018 https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/5283/annual-monarch-count-shows-butterfly-still-threatened
12 Maria L La Ganga, Government Rejects Scientist’s Claim it Tried to Cover Up his Pesticide Research, The Guardian, Feb. 29, 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/29/scientist-usda-negative-pesticide-research-neonicotinoids-environment
13 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017 pg. 42
14 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017 pg. 44
15 Butterfly close up photo: © Kylee Baumle
16 John R. Platt, Monarch Butterflies Could Gain Endangered Species Protection, Scientific American, Extinction Countdown, Jan. 5, 2015 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/monarch-butterflies-could-gain-endangered-species-protection/
17 Center For Food Safety, Monarch Butterfly Migration Could Collapse, Scientists Warn, Mar. 6, 2018 https://www.ecowatch.com/monarch-butterfly-population-migration-2543505935.html
18 The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
In 2016, their monarch project, a joint venture between Xerces, Monarch Joint Venture, the University of Minnesota Monarch Lab and (Paligraph ) Prairie Institute.
19 Monarch Joint Venture https://monarchjointventure.org/
20 Brice X. Semmens et all, Quasi-extinction Risk and Population Targets for the Eastern, Migratory Population of Monarch Butterflies (Danaus Plexippus), Scientific Reports 6, Article 23265 (March 21, 2016) https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23265
21 Environmental Action, Working to Save Monarch Butterflies, Environmental Action Blog, Jun 12, 2018, https://environmental-action.org/blog/working-to-save-monarch-butterflies/
22 Kate Linthicum, To Save the Monarch Butterfly, Mexican Scientists are Moving a Forest 1,000 Feet up a Mountain, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 9, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-col1-mexico-monarch-butterfly-20190409-htmlstory.html
