The Many Care Worlds a Butterfly Crosses

Abstract

This article explores the theme of heroes and villains in relation to the conservation of the North American monarch butterfly. The monarch butterfly is a migratory insect that performs an annual four-thousand-kilometer journey across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Through its travels, the at-risk insect connects and disconnects humans, revealing tensions between the different actors participating in its survival across its North-South geographies. In the North, conservation relies on the voluntary care work of butterfly amateurs who recreate monarch habitat, rear and care for the insect at home, and contribute economically and affectively to habitat protection. In the South, the conservation model is experienced by Indigenous and mestizo communities as a top-down imposition restricting their traditional livelihoods. Residents of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve contest their framing as nature trespassers, while they carry the political, affective, and physical labor of conserving a disappearing insect. They too care for this butterfly but with an emphasis on its forest relations. Based on ethnographic data collected among these two often-opposed conservation communities, this article explores the ontological questions raised by these hero and villain dynamics around radically different ideas of what caring for this butterfly means. The exploration of one insect and two care worlds intersects with the “one planet, many worlds” debate in a colonial context. By examining the tensions between these opposed care worlds, the essay illustrates how a disappearing butterfly constitutes and confronts distinct perceptions of the urgency of caring for nature.

Insects are a particularly special companion animal for investigating human perceptions of nature and “human nature.” Their group behavior, quick but discreet reproduction, and metamorphic abilities often reveal otherness-related affects and anxieties, as Hugh Raffles has so eloquently explored in Insectopedia . In this article, I discuss these affects in relation to one charismatic insect: the monarch butterfly. I explore its relationships to different groups of humans, specifically amateur monarch protectors in the northern geographies of the monarch conservation corridor and forest inhabitants in its southern overwinter habitat in Mexico. The monarch butterfly migration across Canada, the United States, and Mexico connects these geographies and their people. Monarchs spend their life in the northern countries during the spring and summer and move south to pass the winter in Mexico. The emotional and affective connections between these characters and their relationships with the monarch show drastically different ways of caring for the migratory monarch. I argue that these complex relations demand that we move beyond simplistic tropes that cast monarch protectors as heroes and loggers as villains. I offer the idea of care worlds, rooted in feminist understandings of care, to discussions of environmental politics in the Anthropocene. The idea of care worlds speaks to the friction and incommensurability that arise when different actors come into contact through their interactions with the migratory monarch. Care involves a sensible disposition to undertake concrete actions responding to identified needs. However, care also encompasses attitudes and ways of being toward life and death.¹ It extends to all living beings, both human and more-than-human, and speaks to existential and ontological dimensions of humans’ engagements with the world.

Care is a valuable analytical framework because it acknowledges that caring cannot be done solely through good intentions. All care is care work and is inherently accompanied by complex practical and ethical considerations. Looking at care practices from an anthropological point of view can give us insight into the values and beliefs of a particular group. Therefore, care cannot be viewed as a universal concept. That is why Latin American feminist theorists prefer the term cuidados in plural, as it is a more inclusive expression than the English word care. Care work exceeds human actions and resists being captured by dominant authorities and their associated ethics. In proposing care worlds, I emphasize how a butterfly can bring radically different worlds into friction despite their incommensurability. These worlds rely on contrasting forms of care enacted in relation to the butterfly. By drawing attention to the radical alterity of these care worlds, I do not seek to “do politics” merely by naming the colonial practices that suppress alterity and its care practices. Rather, I aim to propose new ways we can learn to live with human and more-than-human difference.

Care worlds is a scholarly perspective that merges ontology, epistemology, and politics as a single engagement with life.² I draw here on Vanessa Watts’s key observation that Euro-Western thought on agency—and, I will add, on who is a subject of care—often rests on a separation of epistemology (ways of knowing the world), ontology (ways of being in the world), and politics (ways of changing the world). These are addressed as distinct processes and considered hierarchically as part of the wider categorization of the world and its beings. Watts argues that Indigenous philosophy, by contrast, does not separate theory from practice. Her “place-thought” is an always practical and situated engagement across entities with agency. Indigenous place-thought sees all entities as subjects of care, even if these are negative forces. Building on this premise, I use care to recognize the radical alterity and unequal relations across western and Indigenous worlds that Watts highlights, but also to show how care builds worlds and invites us to live across them.

The various care worlds that I explore here encompass both the physical and metaphysical dimensions. Monarchs stand for different things for the people I interviewed during my research—enthusiasts, also known as amateurs, of monarch butterflies in Canada and the United States and Indigenous-mestizo peasants in Mexico. These individuals hold different understandings of the care required by the monarch because the butterfly’s essence and significance differ in each context. These care worlds, established for the monarch, are brough into friction by the butterfly’s migration. By highlighting the many care worlds that the monarch traverses, my work contributes to a growing body of anticolonial thought in anthropology and related fields. This includes research on species extinction and feminist theory about care and ecology. The latter emphasizes the importance of care work in addressing the connected forms of violence affecting more-than-human subjects and territories.³

How Many Worlds Are Too Many?

In the world of the monarch butterfly amateurs, embodied, aesthetic, and intimate encounters inspire a love for monarchs which motivates their care work. Amateur means someone who loves or is passionate about a particular activity; it comes from the Latin amare, “love.” Monarch amateurs seek encounters with the butterfly to cultivate a dedication to staying in that affective zone. This zone also motivates the amateurs to extend their care work into conservation policies in other spaces and scales along the migratory route. These practices can confirm their self-perception as heroes but can problematically reinforce an us-versus-them narrative in relation to those they see as harming the butterfly. As one butterfly amateur who calls herself a crusader shared, “Once you experience the birth of a monarch, once you hold that little life, you are hooked. . . . You have to go for another hunt.” When I asked her about how she took on the role of heroic defender, the Toronto-based amateur remarked, “I am a citizen scientist, but ‘crusader’ defines me better. I recognize the charged religious and negative connotation, but I still use it because I want to save this insect. I want people to know, love, and protect monarchs.”

The term affect is not merely synonymous with emotions, although it includes them. Affect also captures the intensities between two or more bodies in an encounter and which are often mediated by a sense of care, in the sense of responding to a need. The theory of affect currently explored by Spinozian philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti; or the approaches of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri analyzed by Susan Ruddick; or that of feminist STS scholars like María Puig can be instructive for understanding the Anthropocene. Affect illuminates the intertwined realms of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political as they unfold through matter (human and more-than-human) in an extraordinary world in deterioration.⁴ For butterfly amateurs who encounter the monarch in their backyards every day with less frequency, this affect—which they often frame as love—is the main impulse that moves them to care for monarchs.

For residents of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (MBBR) in Mexico, however, this affect is not expressed as love. Monarchs are creatures that, like any other forest inhabitant, also require care. However, they may also provoke disgust or repulsion. Care includes the necessary work of providing a home for monarchs as well as a diverse range of species, including humans. The reserve inhabitants are not likely to view themselves as being on a mission to save the monarch butterfly. This is because the butterfly is seen sometimes as a driver of dispossession and at other times as a villain that destroys its own habitat. I once heard the conservation decree for monarchs referred to as a “killer decree,” suggesting that the protected butterfly was responsible for destroying communities’ ways of life and the monarch’s own habitat. Similarly, people in this region have referred to the protected butterfly as a pest that brings about negative changes in their homes. In the early stages of monarch conservation policies, some communities attempted to get rid of monarchs and the “killer decree” by burning down the forest where the insect overwinters. However, in other conversations, people of this region have described the monarch as the “dearest butterfly,” “harvester,” or “pilgrim.” Residents described the insect’s travels as the monarch seeking homes and carrying the souls of human ancestors on the Day of the Dead. Monarchs were even sometimes described as food. In fact, monarch butterflies were once eaten in this forest as a source of good fat. These various ways of seeing monarchs show how monarchs are integrated in an ecology of care that transverses the human and more-than-human, though not necessarily without a hierarchization of the organisms involved. It is, however, a care that does not see the human as obligated to protect the monarch, but rather that both species are committed to maintaining reciprocal relations to flourish.⁵ By comparing the care worlds of the amateur in the northern habitat and the Indigenous and campesino in the southern habitat, we can see that while one organism moves across a continent, it enters and recreates the care worlds of human communities in radically different ways.

Paul Nadasdy’s article “How Many Worlds Are There?” provocatively addresses this contrast between worlds.⁶ Nadasdy raises concerns about the “many worlds” perspectives, which are often labeled as the ontological turn, due to their lack of sociological and political pragmatism. In Nadasdy’s critique of the radical alterity project of authors such as Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, having too many worlds out there may deter people from questioning or challenging the ongoing inequalities across them.⁷ In this sense a radical alterity lens may not advance the decolonial project it aims to, but rather do the opposite. Nadasdy suggests that the ontological turn may portray Indigenous or Indigenous-descendent groups as sharing one coherent ontology to advance an academic and political decolonization project that does not align with how Indigenous people construct reality in practice. In this view, radical alterity flattens the ethnographic register and produces a simplistic reality of incommensurable worlds, allowing those in power to remain careless. “In a pluriverse,” he writes, “no one is ever compelled to question their own knowledge of the world.”⁸ Nadasdy’s proposal is to embrace indeterminacy and incompleteness. Neither reality (colonial or decolonial) is “more real than the other but both are incomplete.”⁹ In this view, all knowledge is partial, processual, and emergent.

While I am sympathetic to some aspects of Nadasdy’s critique, in the Latin American context the explicit recognition of alterity—in terms of different worlds—is still important because, not too long ago, scholars problematically addressed Indigeneity and Indigenous thought as already and forever marked by processes of hybridity.¹⁰ A central consequence of colonial mestizaje was, in this view, a mixed-race postcolonial subject holding hybrid mestizo ontologies.¹¹ Radical alterity scholars such as de la Cadena and Blaser have criticized this overattention to mixing as a “saming” that dangerously reduces life experiences of once-colonized subjects to colonialism.

In another challenge to this alleged blending, the Latin American decolonial feminist scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui claims that such world-mixing never happened because these are radically different worlds, yet ones which are fully capable of coexisting.¹² This proposition argues that ontology is not a mix of anything. Rather, subjects are entangled with more-than-human worlds and simultaneously reproduce and engage with them through an abigarramiento. Abigarramiento is a concept that Rivera Cusicanqui has developed through her conversations with the Bolivian scholar René Zavaleta Mercado. Abigarrado, across Spanish speakers of Latin America, means something that is together yet without harmony or unification. As a sociological concept, abigarramiento refers to the process of living in and creating diverse and inconsistent worlds in friction yet capable of co-flourishing, or ch’ixi. In sum, although Rivera Cusicanqui is not interested in inflexible academic debates on ontology, her proposition is attractive because it insists that it is at that micropolitical scale of action where care is enacted and thus where care worlds in friction coexist. This abigarramiento is present across the Jñato and Hñähñu (also known as Mazahua and Otomi) groups of the monarch region who have lately organized autonomous Indigenous self-government, claiming their right to live according to their care world, including caring for monarchs as part of the forest. The ways in which they envision this eco-ethico-political project contrasts with those of Mexico’s westernized government and its ruling entities, including the monarch reserve’s management.

Monarchs and Their Affective Relations: Love and Disgust

In Western popular and scientific discourse, there is a general trope of the monarch as heroic and well-loved because it completes an impossible four-thousand-kilometer migratory loop to a place it does not know. To do so, it extends its usual lifespan of four or five weeks to nine months to survive winter in Mexico. A folk myth across butterfly amateurs is that Danaus, its scientific name, comes from a reference to the Danaids of Greek mythology: fifty women condemned for eternity to complete an impossible task for having killed their husbands on their wedding night. Thus the butterfly, like the Danaids, is often cast as showing heroism through its outstanding behavior and ability to achieve the impossible: completing one of the longest animal migrations on earth. The fact that this migration is at risk adds an aspect of innocence or victimhood to this narrative. As Miriam Ticktin has noted, this lens is more easily applied to animals that people in a given culture consider pure, heroic, and untouched by politics: animals that are good moral figures.¹³

The monarch discoverers—the scientists—are also portrayed as heroes. One scientist, Frederick Urquhart, became famous for tracking the insect’s migratory route after decades of tagging monarchs’ wings.¹⁴ The celebration of the “discoverer as hero” advances a long-standing colonial ethos that sees Western knowledge as superior, the righteous path toward protecting this butterfly. I have elsewhere developed a critique of coloniality in conservation science, claiming that this heroization of Western science vis-à-vis other ways of knowing justifies northern intervention in the South, often with deadly outcomes. In the case of the monarch reserve, Western scholars, NGO workers, and bureaucrats have imposed a conservation model that has failed to protect both the monarch and the local people. Conservation’s threats to human life have been palpably illustrated by recent violent events in the reserve which have put communities at risk in the name of forest protection.¹⁵

Along the same heroic spectrum, there is a tender character—the butterfly amateur—who seeks to help the monarch and the scientists through an almost obsessive relation with this butterfly. Although not conservation professionals, amateurs can easily spend all their summer free time engaging with monarchs. Their unpaid care work often turns into animosity as they villainize those who kill the animal: from Monsanto in the northern prairies, whose Roundup herbicide kills the milkweed plant on which monarchs lay their eggs, to loggers in the reserve who threaten the butterfly’s overwinter habitat.

In the blurry realm between hero and villain, we have the North American Free Trade Agreement’s environmental plan. This was a trinational trade agreement that mobilized the monarch as a symbol of open borders and fostered tri-national talks for monarch forest protection. For the conservation “pro-park” people, this agreement was a heroic intervention. By contrast, for the forest inhabitants, the NAFTA plan to protect monarchs became a villain—a killer decree—that once again attempted to dispossess them of their ties and relations to this land.

Finally, we have the ambiguous figure of the reserve inhabitant: a villain if they cut down the oyamel trees that host monarchs in Mexico, but a hero if they protect them. People of Mazahua and Otomi or Matlatzinca descent have lived on this land for at least four thousand years. Those who identify as peasants arrived during more recent waves of immigration, especially after Mexico’s agrarian revolution restituted lands that had been dispossessed through colonialism. After 1980, these lands were once again dispossessed through monarch conservation. In the next section, I ask what we can learn from these contrasting perceptions of the monarchs among the humans who interact with them. How do these questions help us arrive at a more complex view of the care worlds implicated in the Anthropocene? To explore these questions, I want to travel further with two central and often juxtaposed characters in the monarch story: the butterfly amateur/citizen-scientist and the oyamel logger. I present the dichotomy between them and how it is perpetuated in conservation discourse and practice. The relations between these actors and between them and the butterfly matter for the way the conservation corridor works and for the survival of this butterfly. I argue that the sensationalized conflict between heroic amateurs and villainous loggers doesn’t have to be this way. However, insights into their contrasting care worlds can indeed help this butterfly survive. Dwelling with these oppositions may offer important lessons for living with difference in ways that promote less suffering and more flourishing, for both humans and butterflies.

A Crusader’s Story

The first step on this journey takes us to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I began my work among monarch butterfly amateurs in the United States and Canada. I first met the butterfly amateurs at a conference in St. Paul that convened North Americans interested in monarch butterfly conservation. They gathered for three days to exchange knowledge about and experiences with the insect. I went to the congress as an attendee, and it was my first field encounter with the northern monarch world.

As part of the event, we went on field trips. A common practice among entomologists, these involve collectively looking for insects and crossing them off a checklist as they are found (in this case a list for prairie habitat). The more boxes checked on the list, the more expertise. When the walk is over, people compare their lists and informally prize the participant who managed to see the rarest insects. On this trip, my assigned group was looking for monarch butterflies in the egg, caterpillar, and adult stage. Each armed with a conference-issued field guide and water bottle, we set out to explore Minnesota’s arboretum. I remember this walk as unpleasant. I had a hard time understanding the interest in searching for insect eggs underneath each milkweed leaf. They are tiny, about 1mm long, and hard to find because the butterfly is in sharp decline. It was hot and humid, and I struggled to find an egg or a topic to discuss. Suddenly, a participant’s sneakers caught my eye. They were basketball shoes hand-painted with monarch butterflies and other artistic motifs. It was the perfect conversation starter. “I like your sneakers,” I commented. “Thank you! A friend in Toronto gave them to me,” she replied. “What a coincidence! I also live in Toronto,” I answered. We agreed that we should meet again in Canada. Meanwhile, she told me to check out her social media profile, “The Monarch Butterfly Crusader.” During that week, I met many more butterfly amateurs. From here on, I will use both amateur and crusader when presenting these so-called heroes of monarch conservation.

The following summer I met up with the sneaker-clad crusader again. We scheduled an appointment at her house in Toronto, Canada. As on many other occasions with butterfly amateurs, our chat took place in the garden. We sat on a small bench that overlooked her recently rewilded yard. She commented,

The butterfly crusader brought me her latest published book of monarch photographs and continued:

This crusader’s story inspired me to reflect on affect for the first time. This butterfly became a companion to the crusader to the point of co-producing her sexual and activist/rescuer identity. The monarch’s mobilizing affects helped her to reimagine kin, and her garden transformation from flat grass to wild prairie invited more unexpected guests into this butterfly crusader’s intimate space. Yet it is the malleability of the monarch’s life cycle that allowed my interlocutor to connect her own life experience in entering a new community with her past interest in “hunting” monarch eggs. Her story speaks to engagements with the Anthropocene from an intimate place, one shaped by power differentials between the human and the insect, oppositions, and affects, one which makes sense of planetary extinction in relation to heroes and victims.

The question of human versus animal power is one I have encountered more than once in my discussions with amateurs. They acknowledge being affected by the monarch butterflies with which they work. The monarchs bring them joy, or sadness if they die, but the amateurs also recognize that they have a relationship of power over their insect companions. Some of my interlocutors who raise butterflies for collecting or for shows are uncomfortable with that power, particularly keeping them in captivity. On the other hand, they seem to take pleasure in the insect’s malleability and their ability to handle the insect for a while, and most of them do set the butterflies free. The more scientifically oriented amateurs also tag monarchs’ wings and release them in migration season so they can join wild monarchs on their journey to the oyamel forest in Mexico. Those tagged monarchs are sometimes recovered, and they provide information to scientists on the departure site and day.

What does this insect-human relationship tell us if we explore it through an affective lens? The affective angle helps, I contend, to think through the politics of multiple care worlds. It helps reveal how this one butterfly moves across and co-constitutes worlds through the care it receives and provides. In the world of the amateurs, embodied, aesthetic, and intimate encounters inspire a love for monarchs, which motivates their conservation work. This love cultivates in the crusaders a dedication to staying in that affective zone, yet also motivates them to extend their agency into conservation policies in other spaces and scales along the migratory route. These practices can confirm their self-perception as heroes or crusaders but can also reinforce opposed narratives in relation to those who they see as harming the butterfly. Butterfly amateurs are often explicit in recognizing that their entry into the world of monarch conservation is motivated by love; however, this love can easily turn to disgust toward those who threaten the monarchs. For instance, Monsanto is the “devil” because its herbicide Roundup kills the monarch’s host plant which is essential for monarchs’ survival; those who kill the trees that monarchs need are “poor loggers,” supposedly “ignorant” of this butterfly’s magnificence. Amateurs are also prominent users of social media, where this us-versus-them narrative circulates and is reproduced. Indeed, amateurs, through online activism, successfully pressured Monsanto to donate money to monarch protection.¹⁶ It is also not uncommon for amateurs to channel funds to monarch protection in Mexico, either through direct donations to ranger programs or to the larger World Wildlife Fund (WWF) conservation initiative, which operates without the full support of local communities.

A Logger’s Story: Mountain Man, Deer Man, Water Man

Let me move on now to what is often considered the opposite of love: disgust. To do so, let me take you to the oyamel forest in Michoacán and Estado de México, where we encounter an alleged villain, or perhaps another hero in the monarch story. The following lines combine temporalities and landmark events occurring between 1930 and 2000 as they were narrated to me by forest inhabitants of the MBBR. I convey the impact of colonial extractivism and conservation on three generations by recreating a family’s story, focusing on a father and his daughter’s engagement with the monarch forest. My aim in using this narrative is to show the care that the ethnographic characters I develop here hold within themselves despite the tensions involved in living across contrasting worlds.

Mountain man; his parents spoke Mazahua (the Jñato Indigenous language) and fled Mexico’s colonial plantation or hacienda forced labor system by living high in the mountains, where they made a living by hunting and harvesting corn. Corn is not always enough to feed a family, so he works downhill in the lucrative paper industry which processes tree pulp made from the forest where he grew up. This temporary employment in the sawmills of Zitácuaro, Michoacán, involves cutting dead trees. So he now logs and processes the trees that saw him growing up. Walking back home, he sees a trailer, a big truck full of dead trees. The mountains are unpaved; the dirt roads are narrow and muddy. The trailer’s driver manages to pull it out of the potholes. It is heavy. Full of oyamel trees. Dead trees. On the back, a sign: “La Comercial, Dead Clean Wood from the Monte” (mountain). This is the company’s motto, “clean dead trees.” A foreign corporation which partnered with a Mexican company. In the early 1900s, they loaded trains with dead trees. They shipped them to Mexico City and beyond. “How did I get here?” the mountain man wonders. “Why am I, occasionally, a logger and why are those trucks full of my home and trees?”

A Logger’s Daughter Story: Mountain Woman, Deer Woman, Water Woman

It is March in the early 2000s; the weather is warmer, and the butterflies depart from their winter home. They leave when the corn harvest cycle starts. Animals and plants move in cycles, adjusting to the ever-scarcer humidity and the sun, heat, and cold. The monarchs are leaving. The seeds are planted. The mountain man’s daughter carefully places purple ribbons and Santa Maria flowers at the four corners of her milpa (corn) plot, just as her father taught her. “These butterflies leave a damaged home,” she whispers. Their winter house is being chopped down, their mountains ravaged by those chainsaws that kill wood and, indirectly, butterflies. She meditates on the situation:

Few people in the world of conservation appreciate illegal logging. In fact, many loggers themselves disapprove of this activity. Through my visits to this reserve, I have learned that for many of the men and women who live in the butterfly reserve, socially regulated tree harvesting is a necessity and it is good for the forest. On the contrary, large-scale logging is not recognized as good for the forest or the monarch, but it is a last resort when other ways to make a living are gone. Yet these trees have a particular value in the world of conservation. They host a charismatic insect. They are the only possible home for overwintering monarchs. They are protected through an exchange value system instituted by the reserve—called payments for ecosystem services—which grants cash to communities in exchange for protecting live trees. Nonetheless, almost everyone I know in this reserve has been a logger at some point. The logger label or the narco-deforestation category makes sense only in the language of conservation.¹⁷

Locals, as the tale of the logger and his daughter shows, see tree removal as caring for the forest when trees are old or sick, or as a last resort if pressure from organized crime to convert forest land for avocado plantations threatens their lives or those of their families. Criminal groups have recently proliferated in the region, driven by the expansion of both the lucrative drug industry and the supposedly licit avocado industry. It would be easy to cast the local resident loggers as villains, but they are caught up in a conservation model that has replaced their long-standing agricultural livelihoods with precarious solutions. Now they must also fight organized crime’s incursion into this forest.

When the reserve was first created and imposed a ban on traditional forest uses, the locals logged the trees intentionally, trying to push the monarch out of the forest. Yet monarchs decided to return as they do each year. Recognizing the futility of resisting the monarch programs and the insect’s drive, inhabitants negotiated with the reserve and willful monarchs and succeeded in obtaining permission to carry out some livelihood activities in the reserve, such as greenhouse agriculture and ecotourism. When these activities or temporary employment in the lowlands are not enough, people may participate in logging or enter the organized crime networks by force. However, they want a living tree and a healthy butterfly, which they see as part of their forest. So what does this tell us about the politics of this conservation program? And what does it suggest about the politics of the Anthropocene more broadly?

Reserve inhabitants’ vision of monarchs as part of the forest offers a clue and helps explain what I mean when I say that this conservation conflict is an encounter between two care worlds. Saying they are part of the forest indexes more than their simple presence. For residents, palomas (monarchs) are not more significant than other forest beings. The forest is a communal property; that is, it is a sacred provider of water, timber and nontimber plant sources, animals to hunt, monarchs to eat, and mushrooms to forage.¹⁸ In some of these towns, this forest is also a ritualized environment. Inhabitants perform rituals to the land, such as placing Santa Maria flowers around the milpa and making offerings to the forest for good water and a good harvest. Living and nonliving and human and more-than-human entities all protect the forest. Humans must offer protection to these entities through ritual practices so the beings can, in turn, protect the forest. Disregarding these protective duties can bring misfortune.

If a reserve inhabitant sees a monarch as the carrier of the souls of their ancestors during the Day of the Dead celebration, as species in tune with the harvest cycle and part of a ritualized forest and human ecology, this does not mean they do not also see the forest and butterfly in utilitarian terms. The butterfly is also seen as an insect that helps them to make a living through tourism and souvenirs. In fact, before being protected, they could eat the butterfly if it was a short harvest year—likely as part of that reciprocal relation with the forest. When the reserve inhabitants claim they are water people, deer people, part of the mountain just like the butterfly, they are referring to this world.¹⁹ A care world where monarchs, like them, make a home. Yet this view of the forest as home is drastically different from the conservation ethic motivating the amateur. One butterfly, two care worlds.

Conclusion

To close, I would like to re-center monarchs as cocreators of my arguments. Thinking with monarchs has been part of my ethnographic practice. I see it as a path to creating less anthropocentric tools for offering responses in the Anthropocene, in the sense Donna Haraway has suggested: a call for “response-ability” toward a continent damaged by a toxic transnational corridor that harms us and other beings.²⁰ Thus it is my aim to mobilize the monarch’s life force and migratory condition to think differently about heroes and villains in the face of planetary emergency. For four months, from November to February, the reserve inhabitants live with the same butterflies—literally the same individual butterflies—that a crusader bred and tagged in the Twin Cities in the early fall. Yet the tree logger and the crusader inhabit two worlds. An amateur informed by Western science sees monarchs in two ways. First, they are part of the invertebrate category, which allows them to conduct research on them or have them as pets, since invertebrates are not covered by animal protection acts. The amateur, secondly, sees the monarch as needing protection because of the uniqueness of the migratory phenomenon and due to their affective relation with this insect. This hierarchical understanding of species is one that does not exist in the same way in the reserve. It contrasts with the reserve inhabitants’ beliefs and practices that treat water, wood, deer, and monarchs as beings who are simply part of the forest and seeking a home. This ritualized ecology is often incommensurable with the Western scientific world and its ideas of why humans should care for monarchs as a priority. The reserve’s residents’ articulation across these axes, occasionally cutting trees or eating butterflies yet still wanting palomas around and alive, underpins the villains versus heroes story that has been shaping this reserve and the entire trinational conservation corridor.

For many, it will be intuitive to vilify a tree cutter and celebrate the work of a butterfly crusader against Monsanto who often also donates money to protect this forest. Yet I hope that the ethnographic data have shown that both the crusaders and tree choppers—although maintaining radically different affective relationships with the same butterfly and distinct environmental ethics—want this organism to live. They are economically, socially, and politically divided by a North/South disparity, and they have fundamentally different ideas of how or why this butterfly should live. Casting one as a hero and the other as a villain simplifies this but also makes it difficult to find common cause. Blaming the logger or adjudicating crusaders with the power to save a butterfly also sidesteps the serious ecological degradation and social injustice that occurs all along the North-South corridor. Among the main issues are water contamination and scarcity, destruction of milkweed habitat, increasing climate polarity making it too hot or too cold for monarchs to survive. All these phenomena pose risks for the monarch, but also for many unfavored humans and other organisms who cohabit in this continent. We have a care crisis, as Nancy Fraser so clearly puts it, because our socioeconomic system cannibalizes worlds, reducing the capacities of all the actors involved in monarch care to care.²¹

Extended to care, the notion of many worlds embraces disparate ways of understanding reality but recognizes the crisis as a shared one. As I have discussed, many worlds or many care worlds do not simply complicate the work of academics by recognizing too many worlds or diluting political action. Care worlds enable us to understand the current oppositions and crises we see and hopefully acknowledge that incommensurability brings frictions but these do not need to be apartheids. It is a proposition to acknowledge the potential of cares/cuidados beyond essentialized castings of the actors involved, and to practice ecosocial ethics of interdependence within mundos abigarrados. Monarchs reveal that connection. It is in the complexity of the story of one butterfly, yet two or even more care worlds, that the possibility for life for this insect and its human companions exists. It is in the tensions between heroes and villains, their affects, and the crude reality of extinction and self-destruction that we may find a way to coexist. In this way, the monarch life force and its plight invite us to recognize the power of insects not only as pollinators and malleable pets but as actors actively compelling us to live across care worlds.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the monarch butterflies and the communities who shared their knowledge and feelings about monarchs. Thanks to the special section editors, Liana Chua and Viola Schreer, for their work organizing and hosting the Heroes and Villains Workshop at Cambridge University and later this section, and to my workshop peers and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. Thanks to Jared Margulies for his comments on the last draft and to the whole Environmental Humanities editorial team. The research was funded by CONACYT, the University of Toronto, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Notes

References