Living with Monarchs: The Uneasy Relationship Between Mexican Peasants and a Migratory Butterfly
by David Bray

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"When they first declared the reserve, some of the people said 'why don't we just burn the forest down. Then the butterflies will go away.' But we don't think like that anymore". The thought is expressed by Francisco Gonzalez Montoya, the Commissioner of the Mazahua indigenous community of Francisco Serrato, high in the eastern mountains of Michoacán state in central Mexico. The last part of it came as an enormous relief to the scores of monarch butterfly scientists and advocates who had gathered in the preceding days, about a hundred miles from Francisco Serrato, for the first North American Conference on the Monarch Butterfly held in mid-November in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico.

The conference, which was opened by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt and Mexico's Environmental Secretary , Julia Carabias Lillo, and Canadian Government officers, and also attended by Mr. Gonzalez and some 70 of his peasant colleagues, was intended to call international attention to the perceived threat to the Monarch butterflies amazing migration. Particularly to the threats that agriculture and logging are bringing to the Monarch's overwintering grounds in Mexico. The conference shined the spotlight on only one of the many dramas of conservation versus survival of small farmers and their families that occur in Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

Mr. Gonzalez and his neighbors had just spent the entire week before discussing ways to save the butterflies and their own livelihoods with Cabinet Secretaries, internationally renowned biologists, and other people who love Monarch butterflies. The campesinos present were understandably upset by the attention that was given to the butterflies, since they tend to regard themselves as an endangered species as well. As Mexican economist David Barkin put it at the conference, "There are two miracles in the Monarch reserve area. One is that the butterflies have survived, and the other is that the campesinos have survived".

But first, the butterflies. The migratory habits of one particular population of Danaus plexippus, as it is known to the taxonomists, is one of the grand mysteries of nature, with the efforts of scientists to explain it only serving to deepen the mystery. To begin the story in Mexico, the Monarchs awake from the winter hibernation in early March, when the temperatures in their high mountain wintering grounds began to rise.

The first post-hibernation generation journeys north to Texas and Louisiana where they arrive by April, lay their eggs on the milkweed plant with which they have co-evolved, and die. Their offspring continue north, towards the Great Lakes and spreading across the U.S. east of the Rockies, where they perform the same cycle of death and regeneration. The Great Lakes generation then makes a great arc, and begin to head south again, towards the Appalachians. The fourth or fifth generation, however, undertakes the epic journey which has brought all these people together at the conference center. As winter descends and the nights cool, they keep on going south, fleeing the cold, stopping about a hundred miles from where we are meeting.

The Monarch is a tropical butterfly, all the other species in its family would never dream of venturing as far north as these intrepid adventurers. But during some inter-glacial fluctuation millions of years ago, this particular population learned to head north to exploit the radiating expansion of the milkweed plant, but then mysteriously learned to beat it back to the tropics to sit out the winter. The knowledge of where to go embedded, scientists now think, in crystals of magnetic minerals in their bodies.

Where they go is high up in the mountains of central Mexico, in what is known as the Transvolcanic Belt, part of Mexico's massive Sierra Madre. They collect themselves from the vastness of the eastern U.S. and southern Canada, and funnel down into five adjacent mountaintops in central Mexico. They head for, not the sunny coasts, as one might imagine, but for the deep shade of oyamel fir forests at some 10,000 feet, where they hibernate in the chilly mountain air.

They hang, festooned in enormous conglomerations, arriving at densities of up to four million butterflies a hectare, poised in "a delicate envelope" of light and temperature, as pre-eminent Monarch scientist Lincoln Brower put it in his keynote address at the conference. As Brower has written elsewhere, their winter habitat must be cold enough to keep in their torpor, but not lethally cold, warm enough to keep them clustered, but not so warm as to send them north early, and wet enough to prevent desiccation and forest fires.

As the butterflies bad luck would have it, oyamel fir forests are an ecological remnant themselves, and threatened throughout Mexico. The oyamel fir forest of Mexico is a remnant of boreal forests that advanced south with periods of glaciation. When the glaciers retreated, they were left as high-altitude survivors, existing as isolated islands at 2400-3600 meters, with only 40-50,000 hectares left in all of Mexico.

But if the butterflies pass the winter in a delicate envelope, the envelope of the small farmers who they share their land with has been slit open by poverty, and the presence of the butterflies has not been regarded, thus far, as helpful in reversing that poverty. The human communities who have carved out their villages on the slopes of the Transvolcanic Belt are a mix of mestizo (mixed Indian-Spanish heritage), and Mazahua and OtomÕ indigenous peoples. The indigenous peoples in particular have roamed these moutains and lived with the butterflies for quite some time. The current legal land rights of these communities date back as far as the 1920s, and some are based on more ancient land claims.

Thus, the communities are understandably a bit miffed when scientists claim to have "discovered" the Monarch overwintering colonies in the 1970s. Scientists discovered the butterflies only in the same sense that Columbus "discovered" America. Local inhabitants had known where they spent the winter for quite awhile. Indeed, the butterfly colonies had been something of a local tourist attraction in the state of Michoacán for decades. Silverio Tapio Torres, a resident of the community of Jesus de Nazareno, recalled playing among the butterflies as a child in the 1940s. "It was a pastime, a diversion, something for children. We children would run among them, waving them around".

The presence of the butterflies got the attention of the adults when, in response to pressure from international conservation groups, the Mexican government summarily declared five butterfly reserves over the existing land claims of the communities in 1986. Thus, the farmer's forest lands were expropriated by the government on behalf of the butterflies, and without a nickel's worth of compensation to date. They have had reason to wish the butterflies would just go away. As one grizzled farmer who I spoke with in the Mazahua community of Nicola Romero said, wrapped in his serape and leaning against the cement block walls in the community center said "It's like somebody invaded your home. That's our land, and they came in and said we couldn't use it anymore".

Indeed, the communities whose lands were taken for the butterflies can't afford to lose any of their resources. Even the more prosperous among them live in conditions of deprivation unimaginable for middle-class Americans, or middle-class Mexicans for that matter. Most of them live in houses with dirt floors and, if they are lucky, concrete block walls instead of drafty wood planks. In some areas, more than 50% of the population does not have access to potable water and 80% have no dependable health services. They live hard lives of rural toil, extracting a subsistence from corn fields that yield a fraction of what Iowa corn farmers extract, and what they can gain from selective logging of the forests they share with the butterflies.

Because of the region's relative proximity to the enormous industrialized sprawl of Mexico City, part of the region are now "weekend communities" for people who pass the week working in the urban area. But even with that, many people earn less than a $1,000 a year. They look at the butterflies and they look at their children, who have the same needs for clothes and food and schooling as the schoolchildren in the north who are tracking the flight of the Monarch, and for them the choice is clear.

To make the science and human poverty aspects even more perplexing, it is not entirely clear that the butterflies will pass the winter only at this altitude, in this kind of forest. Nor is the Monarch as a species even remotely threatened. It is, luckily, "the most common butterfly in the world" according to Brower. And although scientists fear that the migratory phenomena is endangered, that is not totally clear either. West Coast U.S. populations of Monarchs overwinter in California, in an entirely different environment and parking themselves on eucalyptus trees, an exotic species which they would have adapted to relatively recently. (In south Florida, Monarchs may not migrate at all, happily continuing their life cycle throughout the year, without a pause for hibernation).

Thus, if the oyamel fir forest were to be extinguished, there appears to be some evidence that the monarchs could adapt to some other altitude, on some other trees even, as one daring biologist ventured to me privately, on artificial tree limbs! But it is not as if the small farmers could be given the green light to log on up the hillsides into the reserve. It is not in their interest to do so, and they are well aware of it.

The forest is the major resource for them and their children, and they have an instinctive feel for the need to preserve it, even if they do not know exactly the way to do it under modern conditions. Nor is it in their interest, they know, to do away with the butterflies. The butterflies are bringing them an international attention they would not otherwise have with, they fervently hope, assistance to follow, and they also provide an enormous potential for profitable ecotourism operations. The reserves are only some four hours from Mexico City and, with only two open, are already receiving upwards of 200,000 visitors a year.

As recent achievements in Mexico have shown, the techniques and even markets exists to bring conservation and development in the region of the reserves into harmony. In the southern Mexican states of Quintana Roo and Campeche, organized forest communities have declared over a half million hectares as "permanent forest areas", to be used only for sustainable selective logging. Around the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico, over 10,000 Mexican small coffee farmers have been certified as organic coffee producers, reaching high value niche markets, while reducing soil and water contamination. In the poverty-blasted arid state of Guerrero, the organization Zanzekan Tineme is reforesting hillsides, and finding new markets for their sustainably harvested woven palm artisan objects.

In each of these cases, what has proven to be crucial is the fact that the small farmers have overcome the forces that divide them and organized into production cooperatives with their own technical staffs. In the reserve area, such an organization appears to be in the early stages of emergence, the Alliance of Communities and Ejidos of the Monarch Reserve, which now represents something over half the communities in the region. Although the Alliance is hampered by internal disputes and lack of funding, it is beginning to provide the kind of consistent and politically independent support that is necessary.

The governments are also beginning to focus more attention on the issue. At the conference, the Mexican government displayed an interest in expanding its programs in the areas, the International Office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has launched a small program, with a Mexican non-governmental organization, in soil conservation and ecotourism, and the Canadians are introducing a Model Forest program which has been successful in Canada and elsewhere in Mexico.

If these forces were to come together, in a relatively short time things could be significantly improved. The farmers around the reserve, within a few years, could have theirs forests administered under community-sanctioned management plans, be reforesting in the reserve area and have plantations for domestic and commercial use outside of the core areas, have relatively well-run community-based ecotourism businesses, be engaged in sustainable, intensive agriculture that reduces the need to hack out new corn fields from the forest, and be launched on a variety of small enterprises and low-intensity exploitation of non-timber forest products like honey.

In one of the workshops at the meeting, the small farmers showed themselves to be on the cutting edge of market opportunities, debunking any lingering notions of peasant resistance to change, with several proposing ostrich farming and carbon sequestration as economic alternatives. Such optimistic scenarios depend, to be sure, on a degree of institutional collaboration among Mexican government agencies that has seldom been seen, and on international agencies which have a history of not following up conferences with cash.

But Julia Carabias, Mexico's environmental secretary, is not a typical bureaucrat, having emerged from years of work with peasants as an academic and an NGO leaders, and Bruce Babbitt has displayed his personal interest it not governing over the disappearance of Monarch butterflies from the U.S. east of the Rockies. U.S.-based Monach NGOs who have deployed hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in tracking Monarchs and learning about them, are now exploring ways to use these children to raise funds for the schools of the children of the reserves. And it is increasingly clear to the farmers that the butterflies are not so much a threat to their livelihood, but an opportunity.

David Barton Bray is the Chair of the Department of Environmental Studies, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33185.

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