On beauty

Last night I had dinner with Bill Toone, the director of the Eco-Life Foundation and a man who has devoted the last 20 years of his life to saving the monarch butterfly. Before giving himself to the butterfly, he had traveled the world researching endangered species. But nothing, he said, prepared him for the beauty he encountered in the Monarch Butterfly Preserve in Michoacan, Mexico.

When he said those words, I dutifully wrote them down but I didn’t stop to think about them. I figured it was just what passionate people say when they try to explain their obsessions. Well-intended hyperbole, nothing more.

But then I went to the butterfly preserve myself. It’s a three-hour drive from Morelia, and as our van approached the preserve, we were swarmed by orange-and-black butterflies. The driver slowed down, and the swarm parted to make way for our little party. I wanted to stop and take photos, but we pressed on. When we got to the preserve, we parked and hiked uphill for nearly an hour, the number of butterflies increasing with each foot of elevation.

My wonder (and my heart rate) grew with each step, too, and when I got to the summit, I realized what Bill Toone meant. The butterflies are beginning their migration north, so they had alighted from the trees on which they spent the winter, and the air was thick with them – thousands, if not millions. I felt their wings brush against my cheek and I heard their buzz-like flapping sound rush by my ear.

As I try to describe the scene, I keep deleting what I’m writing because I can’t find the words to explain what I felt. They may not exist at all. But it was the most stunning display of nature I have ever experienced. I stood paralyzed for a while, unable to comprehend this amazing sight. Even when I close my eyes now, hours later, the blackness is filled with fluttering orange wings.

The monarch butterfly’s home in Mexico, though, is threatened by illegal logging in the preserve. About 100,000 trees are cut each year by the indigenous communities that live in the preserve, and countless others are cut illegally by loggers who gain access by bribing the communities or the wildlife law enforcement. And that’s what I’m here to write about – the threat the logging poses to the butterflies and the communities, which won’t have the trees to live on forever and are slowly realizing they must change their behavior. The new president in Mexico has also pledged a crackdown on illegal loggers.

But standing in the preserve, choked with awe and wonder, I thought, isn’t it enough just to save something because it’s beautiful? Maybe that’s an arrogant and patronizing attitude, and maybe it’s only felt by comfortable, well-off Americans who don’t have to choose between saving something beautiful or feeding their children. But there must be a middle ground, and anyone who comes here can’t help but want to fight for it.

The answer, though, is that just being beautiful or good is not enough. Journalists and foundations must concoct complex reasons for why something is worthwhile, to satisfy themselves and their editors and the people who write them checks. You can’t say: Save these butterflies because they’re pretty. There has to be something more.

But to stand in the preserve today was to realize, if just for a moment, that sometimes beauty alone is enough.