The Shield That Protects Us: Monarch Butterflies, Biodiversity, and the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act

MOST OF US unknowingly benefit from the natural world. The trees we walk past spray immune-boosting aerosols on us. The fluty song of a robin percolates into us, easing our breath. And at times, we stop in our tracks to watch an iridescent hummingbird probe a Mojave sage or a monarch butterfly land on a milkweed. Whether we embrace city life or dream about living off the grid, we can walk into the startling and transformative beauty of nature. Yet those who seek the natural world soon become aware that, with each passing year, there is less beauty and the hummingbirds and monarchs are growing scarce.

We live in a time of staggering biodiversity losses, but since these losses seem to impact wildlife more than humans, they do not command media headlines or our attention in the way that climate change does. Biodiversity loss, however, sharply degrades the integrity of the biosphere we live in—and what harms our environment cannot possibly be good for us. A landmark conservation bill, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA), aims to stem some of these losses by targeting almost $1.4 billion annually toward 12,000 species of concern, including the iconic monarch butterfly.

The House passed the bill in June 2022 with bipartisan support, though with fewer Republican votes than expected. The Senate was expected to pass RAWA in the fall of 2022, but there were paralyzing disagreements about how the bill would be paid for. Unfortunately, RAWA did not pass the Senate in the last session of the year, and it will need to be passed all over again in the House in 2023—with significantly lower chances, given the House’s new composition after the midterm elections.

I first observed the western monarch butterfly in Santa Cruz two decades ago, when it was less imperiled. In an old notebook, I found this fragment: “Hundreds of monarch butterflies flock the coastal California town of Santa Cruz every winter. Mustard-orange with black veins, they hang on each other like bunches of grapes from eucalyptus trees, suspended weakly between the frogs croaking below and the blotchy skies above.”

At the time, I lived a couple of miles from Natural Bridges State Beach and regularly walked along the pale, frothing ocean to observe the ghostly pelicans and screeching gulls. I envied the people who lived in glassy houses across the street from the Boardwalk; they could breathe in beauty all day long from dawn to twilight. I was a newcomer to Santa Cruz, and the area’s natural beauty sustained me. I fell in love with the nearby Monarch Grove, where I observed the western monarchs overwintering in what is one chapter of an epic 3,000-mile migration.

In the winter’s blues and grays—the ocean, the seabirds, the isolation—the monarchs hung on to each other until they became one pulsing organism, a flame that fed my spirit. They were a miracle, a throbbing illustration that there are other ways to live than being alone. More than their beauty, I was touched by their astonishing sense of community.

In the end, I got married at the Monarch Grove (followed by a ceremony back in Canada for family and friends). While I will forever associate this gorgeous butterfly with love, it has not received enough love from humans—monarch populations have declined by 85 percent over the last 20 years. “The western population—which overwinters in California as part of its international migration—has suffered a heartbreaking 99 percent decline,” notes the Center for Biological Diversity. “Overall the migrating populations are less than half the size they need to be to avoid extinction.”

In the summer of 2022, the heavenly orange butterfly clusters that I long ago fell in love with entered the Red List of Threatened Species maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. According to the IUCN, the status of the migratory monarch butterfly is now “Endangered”; the primary threats it faces are habitat destruction and climate change. Humans have been revolving so fervently around the sun of economic growth that the butterfly we once saw as a personification of happiness has had its wings gravely singed.

The monarch is among thousands of species of greatest conservation need who would benefit from RAWA. Until now, wildlife conservation had predominantly taken an emergency-room approach, with major legislation such as 1973’s Endangered Species Act (ESA) tackling one species at a time. RAWA, however, would be like a series of hands-on primary care visits designed not simply to address the health of, say, the bald eagle (or any other species that might otherwise go extinct) but to proactively assist groups of declining species—“from bumble bees to bison,” according to Senator Martin Heinrich, the Democratic senator for New Mexico who sponsored the bill—and the ecosystems they need to thrive.

In order to restore habitats and stem biodiversity losses, such as the loss of three billion birds in North America since 1970, RAWA would allocate $1.3 billion annually to state wildlife agencies and $97.5 million to Native American tribes. Numerous scientists believe that biodiversity loss is just as important as climate change, and we must address these crises simultaneously. The Biden administration underscored this point while explaining why it supports RAWA:

As the urgency of addressing a rapidly warming climate, mass extinction, and other conservation challenges increases, it is important that strong and innovative action is taken to ensure that fish and wildlife managers are provided with the tools they need to carry out science-based conservation actions that are so important to healthy populations of fish and wildlife.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service confirms that the foremost threats to the monarch butterfly are habitat-related. A butterfly that weighs less than a paper clip has to contend with an overwhelming list of hazards:

The primary drivers affecting the health of the two North American migratory populations are changes in breeding, migratory, and overwintering habitat (due to conversion of grasslands to agriculture, urban development, widespread use of herbicides, logging/thinning at overwintering sites in Mexico, unsuitable management of overwintering groves in California, and drought), continued exposure to insecticides, and effects of climate change.

The late E. O. Wilson, sometimes referred to as the “dean of biodiversity,” implied that we cannot save one species at a time—not only is that not feasible, but it also contradicts the nature of species interacting with each other and forming the interconnected web that comprises an ecosystem. “Biodiversity as a whole forms a shield protecting each of the species that together compose it, ourselves included,” Wilson wrote in his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. The shield that protects us is growing weak and buckling with each passing day, and RAWA’s approach is urgently needed because if we fail to protect our ecosystems, we will eventually fail to protect ourselves.

Wilson cautioned that we need more data on the habits and life cycles of species to determine their needs. RAWA could help with this too. I interviewed Darren Vaughan, communications director of the New Mexico Department of Game & Fish, and he confirmed that a portion of RAWA funding will be used “to address data gaps in our knowledge about the life histories and habitat use of a variety of understudied species.” This knowledge would then allow the agency “to make the necessary conservation actions to help improve the status of those species.”

Senator Heinrich, cosponsor of RAWA, calls it the biggest piece of legislation for wildlife since the ESA. His deputy chief of staff, Whitney Potter, told me that the bill is “an absolute priority.” “It’s a significant moment for the bill,” she added, “a time when it has a lot of momentum that senators Heinrich and [Missouri Republican Roy] Blunt have worked really hard to achieve.”

At the end of last year, Senator Heinrich was working through the gridlock over how the bill would be paid for. At least one breakthrough was reported: the Senate was considering reclassifying cryptocurrencies as securities instead of property; closing this tax loophole could eventually become the elusive funding mechanism for RAWA. While Senator Heinrich was optimistic that RAWA would be included in the end-of-the-year package and face a vote in the final 2022 session of Congress, it was ultimately nixed from the federal spending bill.

In the Senate, the bill had over 40 cosponsors, including both Republicans and Democrats. It brought together not only red and blue states but also conservation groups, birders, wildlife biologists, and tribes. Still, that was not enough. In a recent statement, Senator Heinrich struck a hopeful note: “[I]t has been heartening to help build such a motivated bipartisan coalition. […] Conservation and the outdoors hold deep meaning for so many across this country. I won’t stop until this is done.” He plans to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress, and public support is robust—a Data for Progress poll in September 2022 showed that 86 percent of voters favor RAWA. But if Congress fails to act, what’s at stake in terms of biodiversity loss is enormous.

RAWA could be a game changer for the monarch butterfly, helping to distance it from the “endangered” listing under the ESA. We have not previously had this land-based approach to wildlife conservation at a national level, and RAWA represents a major opportunity for understanding conservation science and the truly effective way to protect species of concern. The successful case study of Santa Clara Pueblo conducted by FEMA, in which government monies helped local conservationists restore land scorched by wildfires, illustrates that tribal lands are also being devastated by climate change and we need to move proactively.

In a positive development, senators Heinrich and Thom Tillis (a Republican representing North Carolina) reintroduced RAWA in March 2023, and Heinrich said that the bill would be funded “from court cases where there is a natural resource damage nexus.”

“Philosophically, it is correct to expect RAWA funds to be expended in improving and restoring wildlife habitat to the benefit of a diverse array of wildlife,” Vaughan told me. “The purpose of RAWA is to both improve the status of imperiled species and to prevent more species from becoming imperiled. The best approach to addressing these two challenges is to improve habitat quality for all wildlife and ensure that habitats are resilient to change.”

It is vital to understand that climate change and biodiversity loss are braided together. While climate change is drying up habitats—including grasslands, which are sensitive to extreme temperature fluctuations such as hotter-than-ever summers and freak snowstorms—it is also worsening biodiversity loss. As I write in my new book Conversations with Birds, this means that in drier, more climate-stressed grasslands, there are fewer grasshoppers for long-billed curlews to feed to their chicks. Climate change has similarly impacted the migratory monarch butterfly, and the IUCN calls it a “fast-growing threat; drought limits the growth of milkweed and increases the frequency of catastrophic wildfires, temperature extremes trigger earlier migrations before milkweed is available, while severe weather has killed millions of butterflies.” Last year’s Thanksgiving count, for instance, suggested that the western monarchs are rebounding, but right afterwards, the California coast was hit with extreme rainstorms that blew some sets of overwintering butterflies to the ground and away from their clusters, killing (by some estimates) over half of the population.

The New Mexico Department of Game & Fish is already investing in making habitat more resilient to climate change. They have spent more than two million dollars in the southern Sacramento Mountains to benefit the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse, the Mexican spotted owl, and an array of other “Species of Greatest Conservation Need” (SGCN), as well as to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire, which severely impacts all species in the ecosystem. The project proposes to restore approximately 140,000 acres and has taken more than four years to reach the point of getting federal approval. “Implementation will take millions of dollars and tens of years,” Vaughan told me—but RAWA funding would greatly accelerate the process.

I recently spoke with Tierra Curry, a campaign director and senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity who has been involved with monarchs since 2013, when their winter population reached its lowest-ever level in Mexico. In 2019, Curry finally visited Mexico, which has several monarch festivals. “The butterflies are part of the lives of the locals,” Curry said. One woman whose father started a monarch festival in the town of Angangueo, Michoacán, told Curry that climate change has wreaked such havoc on the calendar that the festival no longer aligns with the time when the eastern monarchs are actually there. When Curry attended the Angangueo festival, half of the monarchs had already departed. There is a danger in leaving so early: the monarchs may burn up their fat reserves to get to the United States, only to find that the milkweeds are not yet ready for them.

In Santa Fe, I have over several years been transforming my drought-stricken garden into a pollinator-friendly habitat by growing native wildflowers and milkweeds. Last summer, I experienced a thrill as I at last watched a monarch butterfly waft through my garden. The butterfly floated in like a dream, a molten flame of hope, so stunning that my six-year-old daughter stared in awe. But it was a rare visitation. I wondered whether this child (and her generation) will only see one monarch at a time, instead of the hundreds I saw two decades ago.

Can we reverse these terrifying declines? If we can allow charismatic species like the monarch to become endangered, what chance does the drab jumping mouse have? If we won’t act now, then when? The monarch has already been waiting too long. Twelve thousand other species are also waiting.

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Priyanka Kumar is the author of the widely acclaimed book Conversations with Birds (2022). Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and The Rumpus.