The elusive lady caught my eye from across the cul-de-sac on the street of my childhood home, her brilliant orange-and-black wings fluttering. The monarch butterfly sailed through the breeze, searching for a spot to land amid the manicured green lawns of North Texas suburbia. This fuzzy memory and others like it were a cornerstone of my youth. In nearly all, I was playing outside with siblings, neighbors, and friends, gallivanting barefoot while dodging acorns scattered across the concrete. Whenever I caught a glimpse of those wings, they entranced me.
The monarch has been treasured across North America—even before colonizers arrived or named the continent after one of their own. Some Indigenous communities in Mexico have long believed that the monarch carries the souls of their loved ones to the land of the dead. On the north side of the Río Bravo, Texas honors the monarch as its official insect. For many in the United States, the butterfly’s cross-continent migration has transformed it into a symbol for immigration reform. To supporters of immigrants’ rights, it represents a possibility for a new paradigm, a world in which traversing borders is not fatal but natural.
Despite humans holding the insect in high regard, the monarch’s iconic journey is at risk. It faces threats at various points along its migratory route: sprawl in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that has contributed to the destruction of the blackland prairie, the use of pesticides in agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley, and in Mexico, illegal logging and deforestation at the hands of organized crime operatives. And everywhere the butterfly goes, climate change imperils its environment.
In my hometown of Allen, a well-to-do bedroom community of around 100,000 locally famous for its high school football team with its gaudy $60-million stadium, the monarch finds few places to land.
Its host plant and only source of nutrition, milkweed, is scarce, though that fact shouldn’t surprise North Texans. A drive around Allen, or anywhere else in Collin County and the greater Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, demonstrates why: The whole place exemplifies suburban sprawl. The native ecosystem may be the blackland prairie, but little of the original vegetation—less than 4 percent even by the most generous estimates—remains.
There are few spots in this concrete expanse to appreciate the prairie. But catty-corner from my old middle school, a 72-acre preserve and relatively quiet oasis is tucked away between busy roads and mixed-use development zones. The Connemara Meadow Nature Preserve, protected in 1981 when a wealthy farm family created one of Texas’ first land trusts, is entirely run by a corps of committed volunteers.
At the preserve, a trail is lined with towering sunflowers and purple basket flowers that pop up in the spring and summertime, plus bluestems that billow in the wind year-round; monarchs feast on a row of milkweed in the warm months. However, outside that meadow, I don’t expect to see many butterflies—perhaps save for the occasional native flower patch in a dedicated gardener’s yard.
On my occasional visits back to Allen, and the surrounding suburbs whose boundaries tend to blur, I spot new businesses every time. Empty fields are transformed into a dentist’s office, a Dunkin’ Donuts, some other drive-through establishment, or a master-planned subdivision of ticky-tacky houses. Homeowners associations (HOAs) dot the Metroplex, and many have long required water-intensive, nonnative lawns. Between the HOAs, the lack of undisturbed green space, and the strip malls that seem to spawn every few months, suburbia has left little opportunity for milkweed to grow and for monarchs to visit.
Last January, I hiked through the high altitudes at El Rosario, a popular sanctuary within the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a conservation zone that straddles two states in central Mexico, spanning about 140,000 acres and hosting a large portion of the total overwintering monarch population. Only a fraction of the forest is open to visitors, who must follow a steep, uphill trail for around an hour to reach a clearing, where I was told butterflies would cover most of the trees’ surface area. In the wooded dell, pine trees lined the path, and dead and decaying monarchs decorated the forest floor; despite decomposing, their paper-thin wings maintained their distinct hue. Small groups of butterflies swirled above in circles, occasionally landing on trunks.
Yet, here, other forces threaten the monarch’s habitat.
When I arrived at the clearing, I expected to see oyamel firs and pines blanketed in roosting butterflies. But, at the hike’s end, many of the trees’ boles were largely barren.I strolled back, wondering if I’d somehow missed the right spot because of hiking with too much haste, or waiting to put my glasses on until I was halfway up the trail. As I bumbled about, I overheard multiple tour guides provide a more likely explanation: The monarch’s population levels in the area had plummeted 90 percent since the 1990s.
Climate change was largely to blame, the tour guides said, though illegal logging is another culprit. The illicit enterprise is among the fastest-growing endeavors of Mexican organized crime, and the forests here have not been spared; over the course of two decades, cartel operatives have slashed trees across the butterfly reserve. Meanwhile, government authorities tasked with investigating deforestation face threats, including kidnapping.
The avocado trade also imperils the monarch’s winter habitat. Each year, Mexico exports more than 2 billion pounds of avocados to the United States; nearly 90 percent are grown in the area near the butterfly reserve, with expanding avocado plantations accelerating deforestation.
As though these threats in North Texas and central Mexico weren’t enough, I’ve also learned that the monarch is endangered by yet more forces in its resting spots between.
In the South Texas borderlands, the Rio Grande Valley is a hot spot for ecotourists, who fly in from across the country and world to witness both butterfly and bird migrations. National Butterfly Center Executive Director Stephanie López told me that the center attracts visitors from places as far as the Philippines and Ireland.
Though the center remains popular, the surrounding habitat has dwindled. Tamaulipan thornscrub, the ecosystem covering much of its eponymous northern Mexican border state and the Rio Grande Valley, is a fraction of what it once was; only 3 to 5 percent of its native vegetation remains. The majority of this habitat loss can be blamed on agriculture and the American lawn, López told me, but another force disrupting this local ecosystem is border militarization.
The security build-out in this region has meant clear-cutting swaths of land, at varying distances from the Rio Grande, for a border wall and roads for the ever-present Border Patrol pickups and SUVs. This militarization is a sore subject in the National Butterfly Center’s history. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, the center was thrust into the spotlight when it sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its attempts to build a border wall through the center’s 100-acre sanctuary. Then-executive director Marianna Treviño Wright became a face of grassroots resistance.
The butterfly center received a carveout from Congress that shielded it from the wall—at least during Trump’s first administration—but that hasn’t stopped the border fence from encroaching around it or turned the broader tide of militarization. (And now, with unrestricted funding from last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the administration has awarded a contract to build through the refuge.) A federal flood levee runs through the preserve; only a few months after Trump’s second inauguration, the Department of Defense designated the entire levee system part of a national defense area.
López does not want to be the face of that fight, though. “I don’t like to talk a lot about the political part,” López told me. Though border militarization plans are expansive under Trump’s second presidency, they receive less media coverage than they did almost a decade ago, as stories of immigration raids at the hands of secretive and, increasingly, poorly trained federal agents engulf the nation’s attention.
(Images: Vecteezy, Wikimedia Commons)
It is politics, though, that threatens the entire habitat: the profits that defense contractors can rake in when vegetation is razed for border security theater in South Texas, funded through federal and state pet projects; the paltry parcels of land preserved for public enjoyment in Texas, compared with the more than 90 percent that are privately owned; and, on a smaller scale, the insistence of HOAs on contributing to maintaining the 40 million acres of American lawn to the detriment of our local ecosystems.
Despite the forces that threaten the monarch and other fauna across the Americas, defenders exist, even in unlikely places. The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature—the national laboratory for bad government, in the words of the Texas Observer’s late Molly Ivins—passed a law last session that prevents HOAs from fining homeowners for stressed or brown vegetation during drought, and Texas law protects the right to use drought-resistant landscaping. And guerrilla gardeners have long defied their neighborhood politicos, letting their grass die and opting for native plants instead.
Perhaps, the revolution does literally start in our backyards. So if we care about our planet and our communities, we should consider ending rules that bar us from preserving our own ecosystems. Maybe we should let old norms—like the American lawn and mass habitat destruction for profit generation—die, too. Then maybe the monarch and its famous migration won’t.
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