Four Wings and a Prayer

by Sue Halpern

  And if culpability is difficult to assign, changing these practices may be even harder. How easy it is to feel insignificant when you’re part of something so much bigger than yourself, to just go on about your business as if your particular actions had no consequences, or even as if your particular aggregate actions had no obvious consequences—if you’re a farmer in Iowa, say, or a tree cutter in Michoacán, and you know that even if you personally don’t do that thing that is destructive to monarchs or to monarch habitat or to monarch larvae, someone else, somewhere else, might. And then who will know whose fault it is that the web is coming undone?

  MILES FROM the capital we lost track of the monarchs again. We were near Acambaro and saw none, and continued to see none as we at last gave up the back roads for the highway and began to approach the outskirts of Morelia, a thriving, well preserved colonial city. No butterflies—they were off our radar screen completely, and I was disappointed. I had read accounts of monarchs’ streaming into the overwintering sites by the thousands, so many monarchs that the sky was a ribbon of orange and black, or the orange and black were a thick curtain obscuring the sky. I had been expecting to see drama on this trip—the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom kind of drama, not the Midnight Express drama of police checkpoints—but nature was not compliant. The city began to unfold, its sand-colored buildings and cobblestone streets, and the familiar hum of commerce, drawing us in. There were signs for cell-phone vendors and Pizza Hut and Ford trucks. We had returned to our own commercial moment, and it was one in which the questions “Where are the monarchs?” and “Will we see monarchs?” were beside the point. “Where’s the cash machine?” and “Is there valet parking?” were more like it.

  But not for long. After checking into the Gran Hotel and making those inquiries, Bill and I walked over to the convention center to sign in. And there were our fellow conferees, congregating in the hall, one of them talking about how, when he was driving here from Mexico City earlier in the day, there had been so many monarchs crossing the highway that traffic had come to a standstill.

  “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I suggested to Bill Calvert after hearing that.

  “Maybe,” he said in his enigmatic way. Which I took to mean, “Maybe not.” It was a pretty compelling image, those butterflies halting traffic, he seemed to be saying, but the story that our trip would tell, once it had been added to the trips he had taken before and planned to take in the future, would have more depth, more uncertainty, more truth to it. Our nothaving seen monarchs was as revealing, and ultimately as dramatic, as our seeing them would have been. And a week on the road in a messy truck with a laconic man who had studied philosophy before turning to bugs had me believing him.

  NOT THAT the people milling in that hallway were easy to dismiss; their names were among the pantheon of monarch biologists and ecologists and economists. Steve Malcolm, an Englishman now settled in at Western Michigan State University, and Myron Zalucki, an Australian, had both done pioneering work on host plants. David Barkin, an American economist who lived in Mexico, was there, as were Brooks Yeager, an assistant deputy secretary at the United States Department of Interior, and Steven Wendt, the head of the Migratory Bird Department of the Canadian Wildlife Service. Later they would be joined by Lincoln Brower, perhaps the preeminent monarch biologist in the world, as well as Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota and Orley “Chip” Taylor of the University of Kansas. To anyone with even a passing familiarity with D-Plex, the e-mail discussion group sponsored by Monarch Watch, a monarch butterfly tracking program run by Chip Taylor, all these names had resonance. So did those of Don Davis and Paul Cherubini, two amateur lepidopterists whose spirited and voluble contributions to D-Plex had gained them a certain notoriety, and who had made the trip to Morelia from Toronto and Sacramento, respectively.

  Not everyone who was anyone in this world was there: Robert Michael Pyle, the author of almost every North American butterfly field guide ever written and an expert on western (United States) monarchs, was noticeably absent, as were the aged Professor Fred Urquhart of the University of Toronto, whose original efforts had led to the August 1976 National Geographic article that set Bill Calvert on his search for the overwintering sites, and Homero Aridjis, the celebrated Mexican poet who had grown up in Michoacán, written extensively and beautifully about the monarchs, and been greatly responsible for the 1986 presidential decree protecting certain overwintering sites from logging. But Bruce Babbitt, the United States secretary of the interior, would be flying in, as would his Mexican counterpart, Julia Carabias-Lillo, the head of the Secretariat of the Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries. And there would be countless functionaries from both governments, and from Canada’s as well, and representatives of NAFTA, the trade organization that had, perhaps unwittingly, chosen the monarch butterfly as its symbol. In many ways it was a more apt symbol than anyone might have first imagined: an insect that made its way from Canada to the United States to Mexico and back again demanded, in real terms, the kind of cooperative nurturing whose benefits would really accrue only beyond the realm of commerce.

  “FACE IT,” one of the biologists said to me later that night, when a bunch of us went out for dinner. “The idea that a monarch butterfly is going to get these countries to act in a less than self-interested way is a completely naive point of view. This whole thing is about money. A lot of it is going to get thrown around here.” I took his point and kept my eyes open, and what was interesting, I soon saw, was how the basic truth of ecology—that everything is connected—was being leveraged by government types and representatives of NGOs and even some of the scientists to promote economic change in Mexico. So if by day two it seemed strange to ride the elevators of Morelia’s Gran Hotel and hear endless conversations about isotope fingerprinting and nectar densities, it was even more disconcerting to observe a tiny insect’s moving grown men and women to attempt, even on a modest scale, human social engineering. Or at least to talk about it.

  “This is an area of great biological wealth and dire poverty,” Julia Carabias told the hundreds of conference participants, speaking of the impoverished places, not far from where they sat, where the butterflies spend the winter. In the audience was a busload of people from those villages, campesinos in western wear with weathered faces who had been shipped in either (depending on how cynical you were) to state their own case against conservation efforts that would not also aid them or to justify those very efforts. “There is intense use of the soil. This turns into a very difficult problem. There are many conflicts of interest. The focus can’t just be about the protection of the forest. We must preserve but develop the area so that living conditions are adequate.”

  Carabias, a very beautiful and charismatic woman, sat down to terrific applause. Everyone knew that what she was saying was rhetoric, but there was something about her presence that was reassuring. She appeared to be sincere, sympathetic, uncorrupt. For the most part, during her address the campesinos were sitting straight up in their chairs. She was talking about them, stating their case. I may have been projecting, but to me they looked hopeful.

  And then Carabias went back to Mexico City, leaving the real work of the conference to her underlings, who had few of her charms, and the hopefulness began to dissipate like the bubbles in a half-capped bottle of soda. On the third day, when a small, gap-toothed campesino stood up during a question-and-answer session and said, “The support you have given us, putting us in a good hotel, frankly tires us,” he was articulating a more general sentiment about substance and illusion. He wouldn’t have minded staying in such place, in other words, if something useful was going to come out of it. (Bill Calvert, too, seemed just startled to find himself in such luxe accommodations, and anxious to get back to his truck.)

  AS JULIA CARABIAS intimated, the Mexican situation was complicated. Because the bulk of the eastern United States’ population of monarch butterflies and some of its western monarchs congregate in so small an ar
ea in Mexico, they are especially vulnerable to changes in that habitat. That was a given. The problem was not that the butterflies would face extinction if they lost this habitat; it was that their migration could be wiped out. Monarchs would survive in other places—on the West Coast of the United States, in Mexico and Florida, where there are resident, nonmigratory populations, in the tropics, in Hawaii, in Australia—but this phenomenal adaptation, this instance of a butterfly that behaved, in its seasonal long-distance commuting, like a bird, would be gone. Still, in a way it was a hard case to make convincingly, since it was not about species extinction per se. As Bill Calvert said, what it came down to, really, was a matter of aesthetics.

  Meanwhile, there were people in those forested areas for whom aesthetics were as much a luxury as the little soaps and shampoos in the rooms at the Gran Hotel. “It is not fair that the forest farmers should pay the whole price for conservation,” one of their representatives, Silvano Aureoles, told the group. “It is most important to know what people need.”

  “Sustainable forestry,” the American secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt, said emphatically when questioned later on this point. “This is an absolutely classic example of the paradox of finding ways of living on the land for sustainability.”

  Still later, a Mexican peasant named Homero Gomez put it this way: “There is high illiteracy, high population growth, extreme poverty. The forest problems won’t be diminished if these aren’t addressed.” His compatriot Dimas Salazaar agreed, saying, “The population is increasing, but the land and the water don’t grow. The forest becomes smaller and smaller. We’re going to eat each other.” Here he grinned widely and laughed, and for a moment the whole thing seemed impossible and funny because it was impossible, so maybe we should talk about something else, like the grandkids or the weather. But suddenly Salazaar grew serious: “If nothing happens, we are going to take action. We are hopeful that something will come out of this, but if not, we’ll take action. I am not saying this is the next Chiapas, but …” He stopped there. He knew what he was doing.

  I had met Dimas Salazaar the day before, after he stood up in the middle of the gathering and said something unlike any other utterance that had been made in that cavernous room (which was arranged like a wedding, with a bride’s side—the Mexican campesinos—and a groom’s—the American and Canadian scientists and environmentalists): “To the scientists, if you can speak the language of the monarch butterfly, please thank them. Those little animals give us the opportunity to express ourselves as peasants.”

  In my notebook I had written down a brief description of the man who spoke those words, as much to help me track him down afterward as to remind me later what he looked like: “Stubby, middle-aged, tall white cowboy hat, tight jeans, bowed legs, dark leathered skin, silver teeth.” But he wasn’t hard to locate. Although he wasn’t a big guy, he created around him a big aura. Over on his side of the room he seemed to be holding court, kidding around with other men in jeans and cowboy hats, all of which activity stopped when I approached and asked to talk with him. Dimas eyed me quizzically for a moment, then cleared a space at the table and invited me to sit down. “Me, talk to me up-front, I don’t have to cover my face,” he said, and he broke into a big smile and made a joke in Spanish that I missed but whose punch line seemed to have to do with me. Everyone relaxed, more campesinos joined us, and Dimas began to play the host, as if he were showing me around the land he farmed in Zitacuaro—not far, he said, “from the Safeway”—where he grew peaches and raspberries and corn and wheat.

  Although Dimas owned a small parcel of this land—three hectares, or about eight acres—much of the land worked by him and his neighbors, many of whom were also his relatives, was communally owned. This was the legacy of Zapata’s radical constitution of 1917, put into practice three years later, when Mexican land was divided up and distributed to the peasantry, and of the land reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas a decade and a half later. The unit of administration for these communal lands was called the ejido, and its members were ejidatarios. Dimas Salazaar, in fact, was at the Morelia conference as a representative of the Alianza de Ejidos y Comunidades de la Reserva Mariposa Monarca. These were the communities whose land happened to coincide with that inhabited four or five months of the year by the butterflies. Dimas’s own collective, the Ejido Francisco Serato, jointly held 313 hectares of land, one hundred of which were mountainside forest in the Chincua preserve, one of the biggest (in terms of the number of monarchs it harbored) and healthiest (in terms of forest vitality) of the overwintering sites.

  AFTER DIMAS SALAZAAR had made his impassioned plea to the group at large, asking the scientists to thank the butterflies on behalf of the peasants, after he had thus gotten everyone’s attention in a way that ran counter to the rampant (though not yet virulent) animosity of the day—typified by a complaint from one of the Mexicans that “since monarch science is in the hands of scientists, it is elitist”—he said something else, with equal conviction, that nobody missed: “We want to make a general request that the 1986 decree be reviewed, taking into account the owners of the forest.” If the first part of his statement garnered great applause from the groom’s side of the aisle, the second part received even more from the bride’s. The decree to which he was referring was the one that Homero Aridjis had midwifed, and the reason so many ejidatarios were suspicious of Aridjis. The decree, they believed, was the cause of the worst of their problems: desperate poverty, chronic unemployment, hunger.

  “Before 1986 we could work more freely in the forest,” Dimas explained. “We would cut the trees reasonably and they would regenerate naturally. After the decree we had to do this clandestinely. The decree has meant that the police are involved. Then people pay off the police. Then it becomes a mafia. We don’t hate the butterflies. What’s happened to us has been done by men.”

  THE 1986 DECREE set aside five roosting sites, all in the Transverse Neovolcanic Belt, in the states of Mexico and Michoacán. Although the land was still nominally owned by the ejidos, the decree was specific: it designated both a core zone and a buffer zone in each of the preserves and described what the owners, ejidatarios such as Dimas Salazaar, were and were not allowed to do in them. The core zone was off limits for logging and farming; the buffer zone was not. In practice, what this meant for the ejidatarios was that a certain amount of their land had been effectively appropriated by the government and was no longer theirs to do with as they wanted. Logging was not completely banned, but it was, to a large extent, driven underground, creating a market for illegal trees. So for the ejidatarios, many of whom lived in unheated houses and subsisted outside the cash economy, taking the forest out of circulation compounded their hardships.

  “In 1986, when the government created the five monarch butterfly reserves, we thought we’d get some benefits,” Silverio Tapia, president of the Ejido Jesús Nazareno, told the conferees when it was his turn to speak. “But that never happened. Finally, in 1990, because our families were starving, some of us decided to log in the area without a permit. The government noticed and treated us like criminals. We went to jail because we took out some trees to feed our families.”

  SO IT WAS the snail darter/spotted owl thing all over again, a standard-issue environmental controversy that pitted local residents and their livelihood against outsider conservationists. Of course the threat of violence upped the ante, and the dire poverty added extra color, as did the fact that there were two languages (more if you counted the indigenous ones) and three countries involved, and at least one of the countries had some money to throw around. Walkabout money. Which is why the other refrain that could be heard throughout the auditorium was that the money should go directly to the ejidos and the ejidatarios and not to any middle-men—not to the bureaucrats, not to the NGOs, and especially not to the Mexican government, where money had the habit of disappearing before it got to where it was meant to go. But no one really, truly ever believed it would happen. No one, that is
, with the possible exception of the man holding the strings to the biggest purse, Bruce Babbitt, and what he had in mind was not exactly a direct deposit into the accounts of the ejidatarios.

  “Buying up the land from the people who live there is a very superficial way to deal with this problem,” he said, referring to a couple of proposals, some from the bride’s side, some from the groom’s, to pay the peasants for their land, by either buying it outright or renting it. “We’ve got to get into the culture of these communities and find pathways toward economic development. An ecotourism industry. That’s the kind of alternative development we should be investing in.”

  It was an attractive notion, ecotourism, especially the way the secretary was envisioning it: small guesthouses run by local folk who would also promote and sell indigenous crafts; visitors coming all year round, even when the butterflies were not in residence. But there was no infrastructure in the region to support it, and the idea also failed to take into account the butterflies and their habitat, and the impact that increased numbers of visitors would have. Already, more than a hundred thousand people—most of them Mexicans—had passed through El Rosario, the first butterfly preserve to capitalize on people’s desire to stand among millions of monarchs. But the dust that their feet had kicked up, as well as the concomitant erosion, trash, and water pollution they’d brought, had begun to worry some people, among them the Mexican biologist Benigno Salazar. “We need to determine the carrying capacity of the area,” he told the Morelia conference a few days after Bruce Babbitt had gone home. Tourism, he made clear, was not a panacea; it, too, had to be regulated and limited, just like logging.