Tempus Fugit: Monarchs, Mentors, and Mysteries
When I reflect on my debt to the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, what often comes to mind is butterflies. Specifically, monarch butterflies.
I don’t recall precisely how or when I became aware of the ISSRNC—though it was surely through religion scholar Bron Taylor. But the first conference I attended was the 2008 gathering in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico. The exact dates I do recall—January 17–20—because the first day of the conference happened to fall on my only child’s second birthday. The conference was my first real solo adventure since his birth. I felt like a fugitive, giddy and guilty.
The roster of Sunday afternoon excursions (the ISSRNC has the best excursions!) included a visit to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. It commenced with a two and a half-hour bus ride over roads that grew increasingly rutted, rocky, and narrow as we neared the base of the reserve. Some of us wondered aloud if the bus would make it. I was both slightly nauseous from the persistent jostling and remorseful about missing an important milestone in my son’s life. Happily, my seat mate was the preeminent scholar Holmes Rolston III, a plenary speaker for the conference and the environmental ethicist whose work inspired my dissertation research, first book, and much more.
Mexico is a hotspot of butterfly species, none more iconic than the monarch. As Rolston and I made the challenging hike together, eventually reaching 10,000 feet, our guide and others in the group discussed the religious and cultural symbolism of the monarch, its association with Día de Muertos rituals —particularly the returning souls of deceased children. I thought of my little boy 2000 miles away and blinked back mawkish tears. The climb was more strenuous than we had anticipated, but I could hardly complain, given that my hiking companion was 75 years old and outpacing me. (The older I get, the more that impresses me).
That yawning distance between my son and me is nothing to a monarch. Some travel twice that distance to overwinter in Michoacán. These “super-migrators” fly from the northern United States and Canada all the way down to overwintering grounds in Mexico. At winter’s end, the same generation of seasoned travelers flies an additional 600 miles north. Upon arrival, they lay their eggs. Soon after, their lifespan of approximately 8 months comes to an end. Subsequent generations, each living 3–5 weeks, take it from there, continuing northward in a succession of journeys until they reach their breeding grounds. There another generation of super-migrators is born and the process begins anew.
This much we understand. The mystery is how those monarchs who complete the arduous 3000–4000-mile journey down to roosting sites in the mountains of Mexico know where they’re going. How do they steer themselves back to a far-away home they’ve never seen before—even to the exact stand of trees that their great-great-grandparents left several months earlier? There are theories, of course, some involving magnetic fields, the slant of the sun, circadian antennae, or genetic memory (whatever that means). You might as well call it magic. However the butterflies do it, all the information required for this astonishing feat of navigation and endurance is housed within a brain the size of a pinhead.
I choose to let the mystery be.
Despite the many details I vividly recall from that pivotal 2008 conference, I have no recollection of the topic on which I presented my first ISSRNC paper. So, I checked the archives. I was amused to see that my paper argued “for a fundamental distinction between (1) enchantment in/with nature and natural history as a reality outside the human mind and (2) enchantment with science and human reason itself.” Amused, that is, because therein lay the kernel of what would become my next book, nearly 9 years later (Yes, reader, it takes me that long to write a book.)
As it happens, that argument, as I subsequently elaborated it, landed me in some contentious territory with a faction of scholars who did not take kindly to my assertion that their projects reflected greater enchantment with science and the wonder of the human species than with the natural world itself. At that point, the ISSRNC, via its associated Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, proved invaluable again, as the journal offered me a platform to air my unpopular opinion. Bron Taylor has often framed both the Society and JSRNC as “taboo-free zones” where diverse scholarly viewpoints are “welcomed into the ferment, regardless of their ideological, ethical, religious, or areligious views.” The Society, its conferences and publications, he argues, ought not to engage in advocacy at the expense of open inquiry.
The JSRNC editors lined up an array of formidable interlocutors, with my offending essay about consecrating science as the centerpiece. A friend of mine joked that the resulting journal issue resembled, collectively, a “hit piece.” But I did not experience it that way—I was energized by the discussion and grateful for the opportunity to face these critics openly and respond to them. That is how scholars should engage each other.
But one of those critics was Rolston. His own view was that the human brain was so impressive as to constitute a “massive singularity”—the third big bang of the cosmos, alongside the emergence of matter-energy, and life itself. We did not see eye-to-eye on the dangers of enchantment with science or the scourge of anthropocentrism. Previously kindred spirits, we both found this impasse to be awkward and painful, I think.
One of the things you realize as you, um, mature as a scholar is how the seeds of certain fixations were sown much earlier in your life and career, often in ways you did not fully grasp at the time.
Past ISSRNC president Mark Peterson, in his recent Counterpoint blog, captures how the Society, in its exploration of the religion, nature, culture nexus, “produces wonder and joy.” “The examples,” he writes, “arrive in a swarm of happy reflections” (sometimes slightly marred by altitude sickness). In 2008, I did not foresee that the ISSRNC would come to play such an important role in my personal and professional life. But, for many reasons, the Morelia conference sparked that headiness and wonder that Peterson describes: the opportunity to test out my incipient arguments, of course. But, also, what I now recognize as my profound emotional connection to that mysterious swarm of butterflies, an experience intensified by an arduous trek with one of my intellectual heroes, and a fuguelike state brought on by maternal longing and oxygen deprivation.
So much time has passed. Fugitive, fugue, flight.
On that January afternoon, eighteen years ago, we finally reached the main roosting site to discover thousands of monarchs dripping from the bowed branches of the towering oyamel firs, Abies religiosa, named for their cruciform shape. We gazed at them in awe for over an hour—I had no cell phone then!—and reluctantly began our descent.
Since moving to Santa Barbara, California, in 2021, my love of butterflies has returned in full force, like some distant, powerful dream I’d almost forgotten. Here I’ve witnessed, with great sadness, the plummeting (and sometimes—mysteriously—rebounding) populations of the Western monarch, a species that had previously served to anchor the biocultural identity of this place. Recently, I came across a letter—a kind of naturalist’s report, really—that Rolston had sent me via e-mail, following our long-ago butterfly hike. The file, which he’d labelled “Butterflies from Rolston,” set down many details of our excursion and interesting features of the monarch habitat. In March 2024, in the midst of various research projects on butterflies, I decided to send Rolston’s report back to him, as both a memento and a gesture of friendship and respect, along with a short essay of mine that referenced it. Butterflies from Lisa.
We had not been in touch for many years. He replied with a brief thank you and an acknowledgement of our long ago “memorable trip” in Mexico. “I am now over 90 years of age and rather frail,” he wrote. He signed off with: “Keep defending conservation.”
Rolston died less than a year later. Last fall, I gathered with a small group of scholars, mostly environmental ethicists, at the stunning Mountain Campus of Colorado State University to commemorate his long life and career, and honor him with essays. Those will be collected in a forthcoming volume, appropriately titled Walking the Wild with Holmes Rolston III.
Animals are good to think with, as Claude Lévi-Strauss observed. Monarchs are especially good for that. They remind us of what we owe the pioneering generations that came before us, and of the beauty of committing oneself to causes that extend well beyond one’s own brief life. They teach us that, even in our all-too-technoscientific age, we dwell among mysteries. Big brains, they seem to suggest, aren’t everything. Above all, they embody the cyclical nature of life, of meaning, and of the natural world itself.
The ISSRNC has always been a place to think these thoughts—a happy, but also sometimes bittersweet swarm of connections, lost connections, and reconnections. Long live the ISSRNC!
This blog post is the sixth in a series about the history of the ISSRNC. In preparation for the ISSRNC’s 20th-anniversary conference in Venice in October 2026, all of the association’s former presidents will share their experiences and insights.
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Lisa H. Sideris is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the ethical and spiritual significance of nature and natural processes and how “environmental” values may be captured or obscured by perspectives from religion and the sciences. She is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017). Sideris is co-editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the life and work of environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, titled Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (SUNY 2008) and co-editor of a forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Rachel Carson. From 2023–2025, she was President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.
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Image credits: “Tempus Fugit” book header; Augustus John Cuthbert Hare – Epitaphs for Country Churchyards (1851); Open domain, free download.
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