They came. Migrants from Mexico, in their orange and black. Making their way through Texas and Louisiana, stopping in Florida and traveling up the East Coast, as far as Canada. The monarch butterfly, one of nature’s many miracles.

They came. In the dark of night, wearing protective gear. Broadcast spraying herbicide along thousands of miles of roadways and power lines, leaving brown swaths of dead — trees, shrubs, milkweed, the only host plant for the monarch butterfly.

They came. Crews with lethal mowers and chain saws. Guillotining trees, cutting off crowns, insuring their certain death. Chopping and slicing milkweed, all vegetation. An untimely human mandate. Even fields, not gathered for livestock food, cut, gone. Leaving the super generation of monarch caterpillars, those that become the super butterflies that return to the forests of Mexico, extinguished.

Can we schedule and employ necessary safety protocols differently? Can we hold welcome for insect, bird, human? A call, to care for creation, as without human change, they will come no more.

Patti Flowers Jacobina

Ligonier

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