BEAR WITNESS

51        Ole Schell remembers it: Personal interviews with Ole Schell.      

52        who had experienced the monarch diminishment as a steady decline: Recent research confirms that people are more likely to perceive environmental change when it is presented as a binary rather as a gradual shift. In a large-scale cognitive experiment, subjects were presented with two sets of data: one showed temperatures rising steadily over time, and the other delivered the exact same information, only offered in the form of black-and-white data about whether a local lake froze or not. Perhaps not surprisingly, test subjects were better able to notice change when it was sharp. “The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change,” a reporter at Grist wrote, “they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow moving targets.” See: Kate Yoder, “Scientists Just Found a Way to Break Through Climate Apathy,” Grist, May 5, 2025. Available at: https://grist.org/science/break-through-climate-apathy-data-visualization-lake-freezing-study/

52        Less than fifty monarchs were spotted: See Western Monarch Count for all butterfly figures year by year: https://westernmonarchcount.org/data/ 

55        aware of an awful irony at work: Oliver Milman draws attention to this irony in his grim book The Insect Crisis (Norton; 2022) when he writes (page 178), “It’s a savagely remarkable dimension to the story of monarchs that the wonder they provoke appears to be doing little to shield them from being rubbed out. Despite all the angst-ridden efforts, the monarch still faced being erased from all but a few pockets of North America.”

55        The biologists at the Xerces Society: See Xerces Society announcement at https://www.xerces.org/press/western-monarch-butterfly-population-declines-to-near-record-low

56        But that’s a dilution of the original meaning: For a short primer on the origins of the phrase, see Bret Sullivan, “An Opportunity to Bear Witness,” Covington Theological Seminary: https://www.covingtonseminary.org/covington-blog-1/bear-witness.

57        “It’s astounding how little the ordinary person”: See Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (Vintage Books, 1989), page 129. 

57        his memoir, Speak, Memory: Nabokov’s original title for the book was Speak, Mnemosyne. (Fortunately, someone talked him out of it.) In Greek myth, Mnemosyne was a Titan, the goddess of memory. She was the mother of the nine muses, who were the wellsprings of all art and culture. Among these was Clio, the muse of history. Clio’s gifts of memory made her paramount among the muses. History came first, for without memory there’s no poetry, or tragedy, or comedy, or song. Even at the very beginnings of Western history, the ancient Greeks understood that the past always beats within the present.

58        “Few things indeed I have known”: Nabokov, page 126

58        “gaudy” in the words of one lepidopterist: This characterization, along with the subsequent quip about the “crazy cat lady convention” came via Liam O’Brien, a former Broadway actor who invented a second career for himself as one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most dogged butterfly conservationists. O’Brien’s work to protect the Lange’s metalmark butterfly is featured in Jon Mooallem’s Wild Ones. It’s yet another book in which shifting baseline syndrome has a cameo. Mooallem writes (page 129), “Acknowledging the problem of shifting baseline syndrome, like truly acknowledging the enormity of climate change, can be profoundly disturbing and discouraging. It begs the question of what baseline biologists should be measuring wildlife populations against in the first place.”

59        surfing the winds in the company of hawks: For a detailed, and wonder-filled, overview of the science of monarch butterfly migration see Sue Halpern, Four Wings and a Prayer (Vintage, 2001). The bit about monarchs flying on thermals appears on pages 166-167. 

59        monarchs use the planet’s magnetic fields: ibid. See also: Patrick A. Guerra, et. al., “A magnetic compass aids monarch butterfly migration,” Nature Communications, June 2014, available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5164

59        Nabokov intuited that butterflies can perceive: See Speak, Memory, pages 21 and 22. Note that Nabokov is talking about his own toddler experience of time, and then at the end of the sentence conjectures that a sense of time is also shared by “apes and butterflies.” 

59        It’s a mystery: See “5 Monarch Migration Facts,” Xerces Society fact sheet, which reports, “Scientists believe they use the sun's position and Earth's magnetic field to navigate directionally, but the rest is still a mystery being investigated.” Available at: https://xerces.org/blog/5-monarch-migration-facts

60        “Trees cloaked in the richest raiment”: See Robert Michael Pyle, “Las Monarcas,” from Orion, available at: https://orionmagazine.org/article/ilas-monarcas-i/

60        the spectacle inspires rhapsodies: In Four Wings and a Prayer, Sue Halpern writes (page 71), “The butterflies stream past like spawning salmon.” Given the current state of salmon runs in much of North America, I think this line, now a quarter of a century old, is yet another example of shifting baseline syndrome. At one point Halpern describes the monarch as “the most common butterfly in North America.” Today it would be more accurate to say “once common.”

60        “Pendulous clusters masquerading”: See Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior (Harper Perennial, 2012), page 94 and then 144. 

60        “living stained glass”: Personal interview with Natalie Johnston, a staffer at the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum. 

60        The ancient Greek word: See Simon Barnes, A History of the World in 100 Animals, (Pegasus Books, 2022) page 393

60        Mary Dainton, a longtime docent: Personal interviews with Mary Dainton. 

61        a retired schoolteacher from SoCal named Stephanie Turcotte Edenholm: Personal interviews with Stephanie Turcotte Edenholm. 

62        what neuroscientists call a “flash bulb memory”: This is a common term of art, but see Schacter, pages 195 to 201.

62        strong feelings make for vivid recollections: My distillation of the science of memory and emotion leans heavily on James L. McGaugh’s Memory and Emotion (Columbia University Press, 2003).

62        “flashbulb memories are”: See Schacter, 201 and 209.

63        a feedback loop between hippocampus and amygdala: Ranganath dedicates all of Chapter 5 of Why We Remember to emotional memories: “We tend to disproportionately remember the highs and lows from the past. What we remember is inextricably linked with the feelings that accompany them.”

63       modern environmentalism has become a technocratic argot: I find the modern environmental movement’s turn toward an officious reliance on law and science to be befuddling given environmentalism’s roots in Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The canon of environmental literature—Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Dillard—is packed with emotion. The rank-and-file environmentalists I have met in my lifetime often talk about their work in emotive terms. I think the environmental movement’s reputation for being jammed with policy wonkery is a function of how NGOs—especially the “Big Green” groups—are so often forced to make their arguments in courts of law and official government proceedings. Over the years, this has led to an internalization of a cerebral, emotionally detached rhetoric.

64        Rachel Carson wrote: See Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (Harper Perennial, 1998), page 49.

64        Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy: See Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair,” which appears in Ecopsychology, edited by Roszak, Gomes and Kanner (Sierra Club Books, 1995). 

64        Britt Wray argues: See Britt Wray, Generation Dread (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2022), page 19. 

64        Feelings will prove one of the most effective: Clayton Aldern makes virtually this exact same point in The Weight of Nature, when he writes (page 42), “Climate empathy, the antidote to climate amnesia, requires a dynamism that matches not just the structure of our own environments, but those of others and environments past as well.”

65        a photocopy of a photocopy: Ranganath uses this metaphor in Chapter 8 of his book, which details how “remembering changes our memories.” 

65        False memories are real things: There’s a disconcerting literature about how easily we create false memories, how we can go so far as to make up entire episodes that never happened—or be coaxed by the suggestions of others into fabricating memories. Going down that wormhole is beyond the scope of my investigations. For more, see the work of researcher Elizabeth Loftus.

65        Nabokov knew this: See the foreword to Speak, Memory, page 12. 

66        Every generation believes: As long ago as 380 BCE, Plato was complaining that the glory days were long gone. Already, the land had grown thin and wasted. In the Critias he describes primordial Athens in the millennia beyond memory: “In those days, the country was fair as now and yielded far more abundant produce. Compared to what was, there remains only the bones of the wasted body all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left.”

66        a longing that soothes: For details on how nostalgia can be soothing and create strong positive associations, see Yang, Ziyan et al: “Patterns of brain activity associated with nostalgia,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, December 2022, available at: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/17/12/1131/6585517. The researchers write, “When experiencing nostalgia, people generally feel well even when this sentiment is somewhat unwarranted by the valence of the pertinent past event (Cheung et al., 2018; Sedikides et al., 2015). That is, people reframe the nostalgic memory in a rose-colored manner.”

66        the past is viewed through rose-colored glasses: For a quick review of why we color the past with rose-colored lenses while often viewing the present and recent past through a dark lens, see Adam Mastroianni, “Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse,” The New York Times, June 20, 2023. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/opinion/psychology-brain-biased-memory.html. A cautionary example of how emotion can twist memory can be found In How the Word Is Passed (Back Bay Books, 2021), Clint Smith’s book about Americans’ efforts to remember (or forget by way of elisions) the history of slavery. Smith visits Monticello, where a volunteer guide offers (page 41), “There’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory.” This strikes me as an insightful parsing. History alone is too cerebral; nostalgia is weighted down by emotion. In between those two poles one might find an honest sort of memory.

66        Before nostalgia was a mood: For a deep dive into nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym’s encyclopedic The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001). Among other insights—plus a sharply observed chapter on Nabokov’s nostalgic tic—Boym makes the point in her Introduction that nostalgia is a reaction to modernity. “Somehow progress didn’t cure nostalgia but exacerbated it.”

67        a historian, Charles Maier, has written: ibid, page 6. 

67        The fantasy is a mirage: Ranganath sums it up nicely when he writes (page 48), “The cost of nostalgia is that it can leave us feeling disconnected from our lives in the present.”

67        “a romance with one’s own fantasy”: Boym, first page of the Introduction. 

67        solastalgia is a neologism of this bewildering age: See Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: new World for a New World (Cornell University Press, 2019).

67        it’s a deliberate play on nostalgia: ibid, pages 37 and 38.

68        Albrecht’s portmanteau sprang: ibid, pages 54 to 61. 

69        the city had built its civic image around the winged insect: For more on how the decline of the monarchs has scoured away Pacific Grove’s identity see “The Last Days of Butterfly Town, USA” by Alec Scott, Sierra, July 6, 2021. Available at: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/last-days-butterfly-town-usa

69        an illustrated children’s book: See Stephanie Turcotte Edenholm and Daniel Jackson (illustrator), The Perfect Place (Parnassus Books, 2021).

70        “a wing-stroke of the will”: The line appears at the beginning of Chapter 2 of Speak, Memory. Nabokov is here referring the act of conjuring the mental image of “the face of a beloved parent long dead.”

70        That’s Albrecht’s hope: Albrecht’s amplification of his original ideas appears in the foreword to Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World (Virginia; 2023), edited by Paul Bogard.

71        “Forgetting is a form of learning too”: See Clayton Aldern, The Weight of Nature (Dutton, 2024). Aldern dedicates the entirety of the first chapter of his book to shifting baseline syndrome and the science of memory. The first lines quoted here appear on page 32. The second half of the quote appears later in the book, on page 195.

72        by now it lives many other places: See Monarch Joint Venture,  https://monarchjointventure.org/monarch-biology/global-distribution

72        “undoubtedly the most well-known butterfly in the world”: See Karin Gustafsson et. al, “The Monarch Butterfly through Time and Space: The Social Construction of an Icon,” BioScience, June 2015, available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275960176_The_Monarch_Butterfly_through_Time_and_Space_The_Social_Construction_of_an_Icon.

74        where private grief is channeled into public mourning: For more on the imperative of memory-making in an era of climate emergency, check out Lauren Markham’s book, Immemorial (Transit Books, 2025). Markham notes (page 25) that “most memorials are made to remember the victims of human-made atrocities—war, genocide, mass shooters, terrorist attacks” and that “memorials are bound up with problems of power.” Non-human beings are virtually powerless on a human-dominated planet, which is why ecological memorials are so few and small.

74        “Remembrance Day for Lost Species”: See https://onca.org.uk/projects/lost-species-day/. Wray cover this in detail in Generation Dread, pages 209 to 214.

75        staff at the Center for Biological Diversity: See Maanvi Singh, “Grief is a rational response: the 21 US species declared extinct this year,” The Guardian, December 29, 2023, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/us-animals-birds-extinct-this-year

75        In Iceland, citizens came together: See Tony Luckhurst, “Iceland’s Okjokull glacier commemorated with plaque,” BBC, August 17, 2019, available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49345912.

75        “Where the glacier once touched the sky”: See Andri Snaer Magnason, On Time and Water (Open Letter Books, 2021), page 176. 

76        a multisite, multiyear project called “What Is Missing?”: See, https://www.mayalinstudio.com/memory-works/what-is-missing

76        “Each tree,” Lin said at the time: See Osman Can Yerebakan, “Interviews: Maya Lin on planting a ghost forest in Manhattan,” Artforum, June 22, 2021, available at: https://www.artforum.com/columns/maya-lin-on-planting-a-ghost-forest-in-manhattan-250154/

76        a direct response to the problem of shifting baselines: See, https://www.whatismissing.org/about

76        Lin has made the project interactive: See, https://www.whatismissing.org/memories

77        Neuroscience has shown that stress, depression, and anxiety: As Ranganath acknowledges in Why We Remember (page 92), “The effects of stress on memory are complicated.” That said, it’s well established that chronic insecurity and depression tax the memory systems. I recall a line that appears in Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks (page 89), when he quotes a New York Times report saying that Trump’s “tornado of news-making” had scrambled “Americans’ grasp of time and memory.”

77        Despair is an enemy of memory: This is a rephrasing of Restak (page 105), “The last enemy of memory is depression.” 

77       Joy, in contrast, energizes memory: Proust, again, for the win. Recall the famous episode of the madeleine dipped in tea—it’s an experience of joy. “Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?”

77        Brain researchers report: If you require something more scientifically rigorous than Proust, see: … See, Christopher R Madan, et al, “Positive emotion enhances association-memory,”  Emotion, June 2020, available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6612425/

77        Happy memories feel good: As always, it’s complicated. But for a fascinating read, see Samantha E Williams et al, “The Power of negative and positive episodic memories,” Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, June 2022, available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9196161/pdf/13415_2022_Article_1013.pdf

77        Thoreau wrote a long time ago: I came across this gem of a Thoreau line thanks to literary magpie Maria Popova’s wonderful newsletter, The Marginalian. See: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/03/01/thoreau-grief/

77        Margaret Renkl reminded readers: See Margaret Renkl, “The Nature of Joy,” The New York Times, June 26, 2023. Available at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/opinion/nature-pollinator-garden.html

78        Joy, he declares: See Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm (New York Review of Books, 2015), page 123. 

78        sparked by a childhood encounter: ibid, page 5. 

78        “the generation who”: ibid, page 15. 

78        “Abundance, blessed, unregarded abundance”: ibid, page 88. 

78        In the England of the 1950s: ibid, pages 100 to 105.

78        the “windshield phenomenon”: This is now almost a term of art in some entomological circles. See, Andrew Van Dam,“Wait, why are there so few dead bugs on my windshield these days?” Washington Post, October 21, 2022, available at:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/21/dead-bugs-on-windshields/ 

79        “A child born in the generations”: McCarthy, page 99. 

79        McCarthy is insistent about the power of joy: McCarthy, of course, isn’t the only person to make such a claim. In recent years there’s been a flourishing of writing about the political power of joy. A short list of American writers and activists who have made similar arguments would include Ross Gay, adrienne maree brown, Mary Annaïse Heglar, and Rebecca Solnit, among others. While I appreciate the celebration of joy as a form of political liberation, I think it’s fair to say that a politics of joy also has its limits. Bouquets are no match for bulldozers.

79        joy “as a conscious, engaged act”: ibid, page 131. 

79        “The highest enjoyment of timelessness”: Nabokov, page 139.

80        Monarchs can’t fly: See https://monarchjointventure.org/faq/monarch-biology