This article is part of our monthly Mental Health & Climate Change series about how extreme weather and other climate impacts affect our psychological well-being—and ways we can cope.
One of my twins’ favorite books when they were “little” was When We Went Wild. They’re fifth graders now, solidly in bigger-kid territory, but When We Went Wild still gets pulled off our shelf. It’s a charming picture book based on a true story about two farmers who notice that “even though they tried to do everything right,” their chemical-laden, over-tilled farmland isn’t looking so good: “The pigs looked sad. The cows looked sad. Even the trees looked sad. No flowers grew, no bees buzzed, and when it rained all the animals had to stay inside, as the fields turned to sticky, stuggy, stodgy mud.”
The farmers let nature take over, abandoning the chemicals they’d long been taught to use and rewilding the land. As you might expect from a children’s book, there is a happy ending: the land recovers, triumphantly. Eventually, even the neighbors who disapprove of the chaotic, full-of-life brambles come around when they realize that the unplowed soil better absorbs rainwater and protects their village from flooding.
Reader, my family and I went a bit wild ourselves this summer. The solitary milkweed we’d planted in our tiny plot of land a few years back to attract monarch butterflies managed to multiply abundantly this year. Monarchs are threatened, and their survival is entirely dependent on the milkweed plant. With a few coneflowers and black-eyed Susans in the mix, we finally had a real pollinator garden—and a healthy batch of monarch caterpillars making it their home.
Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.
When an overeager crew of groundskeepers started pulling the milkweed out, we shooed them away, rescuing and replanting what we could. And when a neighbor tsk-tsked our request to ask the grounds crew to not spray or weed our unit’s land (“Let me check the HOA guidebook about that”), I helpfully sent her several websites on the state of Vermont’s efforts to promote native pollinator plants and the vulnerable status of monarch butterflies.
That night, I threatened to order a menacing “Don’t Mess With My Milkweed!” sign. My husband, better at neighborly diplomacy, ordered a sign that politely says “Pollinator Garden” instead.
I fought for our little monarch-friendly ecosystem because I needed the monarchs as much as they need every extra milkweed plant they can get. If you have never followed the full process of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, it just might change your life. At our house, we track caterpillars and chrysalises like some people track eclipses, waiting for the transcendent moment when a butterfly emerges. (The technical term is eclosion, and it’s really, really cool.) This year, we tracked well over a dozen monarch caterpillars and witnessed eclosion twice.
What captivates me about caterpillar metamorphosis is the fact that when a chrysalis is created, parts of the caterpillar literally dissolve so that a butterfly can form. Maybe it’s cliche, but I want (need?) to believe that the systems dissolving in our world right now—a stable climate, democracy, basic public health and human rights protections—are in some kind of a chrysalis phase that we can’t see clearly from the messy middle. I want to believe that on the other side of all this pain will be something beautiful. Something new and unfamiliar, perhaps, but fundamentally good. Something with wings.
Climate change is threatening monarch habitats, with hotter and drier conditions in some parts of their range making it harder for the butterflies to survive, reproduce, and migrate. Last year, all our monarchs were eaten by wasps; our efforts to help them failed.
A new report from the UN Environment Programme released earlier this month warns that we’re on track to breach the 1.5°C warming limit that climate scientists have been warning for years is critical to the long-term survival of humanity (and presumably monarchs, among many, many other species). Meanwhile, the Trump administration is expected to roll back limits on climate pollution from power plants and oil and gas operations within the next few months, following the rollback of the Endangerment Finding, the legal and scientific foundation of federal climate safeguards, earlier this year. It’s as though our federal climate protections are being devoured by evil, power-hungry government wasps.
Will there be a happy ending to the story we’re all living through right now? Is there a beautiful, transformed version of the world waiting on the other side of this slow-motion train wreck of climate change, where humans and monarchs thrive together on rewilded data center land? Is there a moment where the governments and grumpy neighbors admit they were wrong and join forces with those of us who want healthy ecosystems and a safe future for our children more than profit and manicured lawns?
I don’t know. Sometimes my doubt in the goodness of the future is stronger than my faith.
But this summer, our pollinator garden reminded me that our efforts in these times matter. Even when they are met with resistance in the form of disapproving neighbors, hostile administrations, and greedy industrial developers. Even when they seem to fail. It delights and amazes me to think that the small troupe of monarchs we nourished might lead to generations of caterpillars and butterflies we will never meet.
On a good day, I can bring this same sense of wonder to the work that those who care about climate justice are doing now. We may never get to meet those who benefit most from the actions we’re taking, even as futile as these actions often seem. But the possibility that generations into the future something beautiful might get to fly because we kept showing up even when everything seemed to be falling apart—isn’t that worth the effort?
Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.