THE EARTH SAID REMEMBER ME

An urgent manifesto about what it takes to hold onto memories of a livelier world.

When monarch butterflies started disappearing from the famed Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, California, Mia Monroe, a park ranger at Muir Woods National Monument, co-founded a census to track the butterflies’ decline, from 1.2 million in 1997 to 0 in 2020. But when they reappeared the next year, she felt too much joy at their miraculous return was misplaced. Their numbers weren’t nearly what they’d once been. This “shifting baseline syndrome” acts like a modern malady that’s come to limit our views of the natural world. “Even a fire-orange sky can glow with the warmth of childhood,” writes Mark, the former editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine. The vignette serves as an example of the kind of community science for which he advocates. His prescription, or antidote against such environmental amnesia, is simple: Go outside, bear witness, make a record, pass it on. All you need is a pair of eyes, a calendar, and a pen. Read aloud, his instruction sounds like an incantation, to help us remember what it takes to keep the work going. It involves constructing glacier memorials, totem poles, and salmon ceremonies and keeping a record of when the lake ices over each year, like a “low-key vigil.” But his greatest tool against forgetting is language. Mark doesn’t hold back: Monarchs hang off trees like “coppery Christmas-tree decorations,” only to become “orange-and-black bangles,” then “a tangerine explosion.” Readers learn of an “orange cloud” and a “breath of butterflies.” Mark’s devotion to getting it right is what convinces the reader to turn our own quests into art. So we might become, each in our own way—be it fisherfolk, butterfly “czars” like Monroe, suburban homesteaders like the author, or just people enjoying walks—the ecological memoirists devoted to saving our world.

A passionate cry of resistance to bear witness to the natural world and remember its abundance.