Part One

by Ellen Sharp

When I left the world of monarch butterfly conservation, I took a break from speaking out on the butterflies' behalf. A condolence offered at my mother's memorial service in January reminded me why. A longtime acquaintance pulled me aside to say, "Your mother was very passionate, but she was not compassionate."

My mom was a committed educator, armed with sound, well-researched ideas about how to improve children's learning. She was feisty. Unfortunately, the way she expressed herself sometimes made others more defensive than receptive.

My training in a therapeutic modality called IFS (Internal Family Systems) has given me insight into this dynamic. IFS sees the personality system as a multiplicity of parts that ideally work in coordination with a compassionate core self. When we lead with energy from this higher self, we bring the same out in others. And when we lead from our other parts, they bring out people's other parts, especially parts holding rage, self-righteousness or blame.

My mom's passionate parts weren't connected to her core in a way that allowed her to be compassionate to those whose opinions differed. That lack of compassion for others was symptomatic of her lack of compassion for herself.

Self-compassion didn't come naturally to me either, but I started cultivating it as a key part of my IFS practice. While I made progress with processing my personal losses, my grief around the imperilment of the monarch butterfly migration still felt overwhelmingly huge. I worried how my concerns about planting tropical milkweed in the monarchs' Mexican flyway would come across.

In particular, I felt hesitant about approaching Audubon Mexico. This group of volunteers has created a model pollinator garden in the corner of Parque Juarez that includes a section of tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica). One day years ago, when I was still splitting my time between the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve and San Miguel, I'd joined these volunteers for a morning of gardening.

At the time, I didn't think much about the presence of tropical milkweed in their section of the park. I had the same plant growing on my property in the State of Mexico, and there was some growing at the entry of the butterfly sanctuary as well as at the local elementary school. I'd asked one of the many Monarch Watch conservation specialists who visited us if they thought that the presence of this milkweed could be hurting the migration. Her response was that the benefit of letting locals appreciate the joy of monarch metamorphosis probably outweighed the harm.

But in the intervening years, data about the effect of tropical milkweed on monarchs has become unequivocally damning. The evidence is clear: tropical milkweed does indeed pull migrating monarchs out of migration. Monarchs find it irresistible, as if it were junk food. And like junk food, monarchs reared on it are less healthy than monarchs raised on native milkweed plants.

Although Asclepias curassavica is also known as Mexican milkweed, it is not native to this part of Mexico. Monarchs born on tropical milkweed are much more likely to carry a parasite called OE, which weakens them. These monarchs are a paler color of orange, have differently shaped wings, and are less capable of flying long distances.

The rise of the popularity of planting tropical milkweed to "help the monarch migration," correlates with an increase in nonmigratory pockets of monarchs in places like Florida, Texas, and San Miguel de Allende. Instead of helping the monarch migration, planting tropical milkweed contributes to its attrition.

In 2022, Mexican authorities signed a declaration urging people to stop planting tropical milkweed here. In the same year, workers at Medio Ambiente del Municipio de Jerécuaro, located 113 km south of San Miguel, started a successful milkweed eradication campaign. Biologist Jorge Gustavo Zaragoza Rosales reports that municipal public gardens and schools have replaced tropical milkweed with native nectar flowers like lemon balm, salvia, lantana, and rue.

Despite the evidence, I still felt apprehensive broaching the subject with Audubon Mexico president April Gaydos. My passion hadn't gotten me very far in the past. While my projects received grassroots support from butterfly lovers, higher level decision makers responded badly to my truth-telling crusader parts.

Yet when I reached April, I discovered that we were on the same page, literally: both of us had just finished reading the same literature review on tropical milkweed's dismal record.

April said, "I like having new information come in and changing our practices to be more helpful, because that's our whole intention." When I brought up the milkweed patch in Parque Juarez, she remarked, "We're going to take it out and replace it with more nectar flowers for all pollinators, but especially for the butterflies, and research native milkweed and its potential to support our local population of monarchs."

I got off the phone feeling pleased that I'd managed to express my passion in a way that could be heard. But, these pleased parts of me weren't alone for long. There was some sadness sitting next to them too. Part of this grief was personal, as I thought about my mom, what she was able to accomplish and what eluded her. Another part of the grief involved feelings for the larger losses in an ecosystem undergoing cataclysmic change.

I welcomed both forms of grief. It is my hope that when we're able to open our hearts to all of our feelings, we'll be able to take action from a place of love and connection that reverberates throughout the world.

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Ellen Sharp is a writer and an IFS-informed therapeutic practitioner specializing in grief and loss. Prior to moving to San Miguel in 2020, she spent a decade developing ecotourism and forest conservation projects at a monarch butterfly sanctuary in rural State of Mexico. She's at work on a memoir about this experience. Sharp holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UCLA. You can read more about her projects at www.ellensharp.com

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