While Ogarrio found Chincua in Michoacan, an eccentric Englishwoman, Virginia "Whitty" McHenry, took Gottfried to Pelon in the state of Mexico in December 1977, and he felt the same call to duty. A mutual friend in Valle de Bravo introduced him to Ogarrio, who invited him to join the board of Monarcha. "In the beginning we waited for hours outside ministers' offices," recalled Gottfried. "We were laughed at. Nobody gave us the time of day. The ministries in Mexico City were these Machiavellian oxymorons like the Ministry of Urban Development and Ecology and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. 'Why are you so interested in these freaking butterflies?' the ministers would ask us. Five years later the same politicians were saying, 'S~ Dr. Gottfried. How interesting.' I took every ambassador and the heads of all the large corporations, and television and movie crews, out there. We got the government to issue a monarch stamp and a 50peso coin. We promoted the bejesus out of the thing, and eventually it caught. The phenomenon was bigger than all the forces around it."

    By 1986 there were several encouraging developments. The World WIldlife Fund decided to sponsor Monarcha, and though Gottfried said it never gave more than $20,000 a year, "having W.W.F behind us gave us tremendous credibility." A shrewd politician, Manuel Camacho, became head of a newly formed Ministry of Ecology. "There was by now a growing environmental movement in Mexico to which the government was not sufficiently responsive," Ogarrio told me, "and Camacho immediately saw the value of protecting the butter flies in environmental and local and international political terms."

Calvert and Brower designed a proposal to make the five colonies in which probably 75 percent of the monarchs roost into sanctuaries with a combined area of 62 square miles, of which 18 were "core areas" that could not be touched, and the balance "buffer areas," whose trees the local ejidatarios could harvest only by applying for permits from the Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources. But if there was any evidence that the butterflies would be harmed, the cutting could be prohibited.

Another powerful ally, Homero Aridjis, joined the fray. A well-known poet, now 59 years old, Aridjis had been Mexico's ambassador to Switzerland and the Netherlands. "Homero had integrity, moral authority, and national visibility, and he wasn't afraid to stick his neck out," Gottfried told me. "We were the low-key activists, lobbying behind the scenes. We had to be careful not to be too associated with Brower, who was like a bull in a china shop, dangerously ignorant of Mexican culture. He would say things like 'Why don't you just put these people in prison if they're cutting [trees] illegally?'"

Aridjis had a special affection for the monarch, having grown up in a mountain village in Michoacan called Contepec, which is right next to Cerro Altamirano, one of the five sites in Brower and Calvert's proposal. "The hill with the butterflies faced the village, and as a child I used to go to see them," Aridjis recalled over lunch recently in Mexico City. "For me they are visual music, the apotheosis of light, motion, and beauty, a solar-light symphony. In the morning the butterflies are in the trees, with their wings closed. When the sun comes out it touches their wings and they begin to open. Noon is the hour of activity. I learned to love nature through the butterflies. We didn't know they were coming from as far away as Canada, or that there were people like Dr. Urquhart who were looking for their wintering places."

Aridjis wrote poems about the monarchs, and, in the end, he persuaded Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid to sign the decree that made the five sites into an ecological reserve in 1986. Urquhart was unable to attend the ceremony dedicating the reserve because on that very day he had a triple-bypass operation. When he got out of the hospital, he wrote Ogarrio a letter which Ogarrio now has framed on the wall of his office. "This is the first time that I have had enough strength to ...sit in front of my typewriter. You are doing a wonderful job, Rodolfo. I can foresee the day when many thousands of visitors will visit the monarch sites-one of the most remarkable phenomena in the world today. I trust that you will be able to encourage the local citizens to take advantage of this popularity by providing accommodation, tours, and various souvenirs. I am certain you have given all this considerable thought. If the presence of the monarchs is meaningful to the citizens of Mexico, you will not need to fear for their preservation."

The local ejidatarios, however, were hopping mad that the use of 18 square miles had been taken from them, and within days of the decree they began to clear-cut one of the sanctuaries, Chivati-Huacal. "The butterflies returned to the sites as they had for thousands of years, and there were no trees," Aridjis told me grimly. "They stayed around for several days in confusion, and finally left for God knows where." (Brower told me, however, that some monarchs do return to roost in what is left of this sanctuary, but not every year and not in the numbers they used to.)

As with many cases in which Mexican law is flagrantly violated, the precise circumstances of the devastation of ChivatiHuacal are murky. I collected several explanations for why the trees were cut by the ejidatarios: (1) in protest; (2) to chase away the monarchs, whose presence the ejidatarios thought would result in the loss of their access to the forest; (3) because the ejidatarios feared they would not be able to harvest the wood in the future, so they had better get it now.

But Aridjis suspected that high-level government corruption was the actual catalyst. "To give you a taste of the politics of duplicity, on October 14, 1986, only five days after the decree, the Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources gave the ejidos permits to cut without restriction in the buffer zones that were renewable for the next 12 years," Aridjis told me. "I only found this out in 1992."

At six on a Saturday morning last July, Gottfried picked me up at my hotel in Mexico City in one of his five vintage Jeep Wagoneers in order to visit Pelon. The monarchs would not arrive for another five months, but we wanted to see how successful the preservation efforts had been. Gottfried is a vibrant, bearded man. A fanatical paragiider, he likes to jump off mountains in Valle de Bravo and make like a monarch. We sped through the usually clogged streets of one of the world's largest cities, 16 million souls suffocating on their own fumes. The pollution here is the worst on the planet, so bad that in February, during the winter inversion, sparrows have been known to drop dead from the trees in Chapultepec Park, and you can allegedly get hepatitis simply from breathing, as fecal storms waft into the city from outlying shantytowns. The monarch colonies are only 100 miles away.

Before long we were wending our way up into craggy, forested high country. Oyamel firs loomed overhead, their tops veiled in mist, their thickly needled branches drooping. "The only remaining oyamel forests are here," Gottfried told me. "Oyamels once spread from coast to coast, but during the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, American and British companies came in and took most of them. Alexander von Humboldt"-the great 19th-century German naturalist who spent five years exploring Latin America and classifying its flora and fauna-"called the tree Abies religiosa because their forests are like cathedrals, and the natives used to have religious ceremonies in them."

After several hours we reached a high plateau spattered with volcanic cones. The campesinos were harvesting avocado trees. The avocado is native to the region. So is com, the creation of which from domestication of wild strains of maize triggered the New World's agricultural revolution and gave rise to the high culture that Cortes found in the Valley of Mexico in the 16th century. The people in this part of the world have an ancient and profound relationship with com. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the campesinos are as dependent on com as the monarch is on milkweed; you can see cornfields eating up the sides of the volcanoes. Gottfried explained that "the mission of agrarian reform, which the Mexican Revolution was fought for, is to deal out the land and to convert forest to com. The party"-the Institutional Revolutionary Party, P.R.I., which has ruled Mexico for the last 70 years-"gives the campesinos seed and fertilizer, buys their com, and sells them back the flour. The planners have everything ass-backward. The com should be in the plains, the trees in the mountains. Trees are the obvious crop to plant up here, but that would be contrary to the paternalistic revolutionary model. The oyamel grows nearly 365 days a year. It never goes into winter dormancy, unlike northern firs. It is soft and full of water and a fantastic pulp tree. A good man with an ax can chop one down in minutes. But instead we stupidly plant com, and are turning what was once the world's richest coniferous forest into an arid landscape like Spain, and there are only a few remnants of the forest on the volcanoes."

Tragically, the areas of greatest biodiversity in Mexico are also areas of grinding rural poverty. One hundred and fifty thousand people live in the monarch area, and as Jurgen Hoth, the scientific at tache at the Mexican Embassy in Ottawa, told me, "The best-laid plans in Mexico City to save the butterflies will come to nothing until the local social and economic problems are taken care of."

In 1995, Monarcha A.C. closed up shop under murky circumstances. It wasn't officially disbanded, it just faded away. Rodolfo Ogarrio told me that its mission had been accomplished: the monarch was now a well-known and beloved Mexican phenomenon, its colonies were sanctuaries, and the local people were being trained in ecotourism. World Wildlife's Mexico program has taken over the monarchs' cause, but the butterflies are far from out of the woods-or, I should say, safe in them.

Guillermo Castilleja, head of World Wildlife Mexico, Brower, Calvert, and their conservationist colleagues have determined that if the monarchs are to survive their existing sanctuaries must be greatly enlarged, and new ones created. They have been preparing a revision of the 1986 decree to present to the current administration of President Ernesto Zedillo, which calls for the reserve to be expanded to 174 square miles. Castilleja, over dinner at his apartment in Mexico City, showed me an aerial photo with the locations of the colonies marked on it. Some are in the buffer areas, and many are not in the sanctuaries at all and thus completely exposed. Since the decree, it has also become clear that the butterflies migrate down the watersheds in the course of the season, up to two miles in some cases, so the combined protected area will have to be tripled, according to Castilleja.

If the conservationists have their way, more forest will be taken from the ejidatarios, and "there will be a new flourishing of conflict," Julia Carabias, the Mexican secretary of the environment, predicted. For better or worse, the discovery of the monarchs by the outside world has already transformed the local culture. Most of the campesinos I talked to about it thought for the better. About a hundred thousand tourists come to see the butterflies in a season, each paying 15 pesos-$1.50-for admission, and all this goes to the ejidos. But not all the ejidos who are affected by this invasion benefit, and a group of campesinos that calls itself the Alianza has been threatening to make trouble unless the tourist dollars are distributed more equitably and their continued access to the forest is respected.

Continue to page 6