Perhaps no single person I’ve worked with and written with has such a strong love for the earth as Ina Warren, my co-founder of Make Way for Monarchs. What we lacked in financial support when we started our farmer-based coalition for monarchs and milkweeds, we made up with the confidence in one another that our collective work must be done.
At first I thought that Ina was simply pulling one great idea or image after another out of some magical hat, but then she sent me her masterwork on the science, folk knowledge and spirit of milkweeds and monarchs that she had been quietly assembling for years. There is nothing like it, nor anyone else like Ina.
Dozens of hours of phone calls later, I feel that Ina’s voice comforted and steadied me through the horrible crisis that Monsanto’s glyphosate poisons had put North American farmers, farmlands, butterflies and larval host plants through. Its not about “who won”– its about whether we’ve generated a conscience among those younger that us that will carry on such restorative work.
There was an afternoon in the midst of the monarch crisis when we simply went to the home in Maryland where both Rachel and Ina had lived during the Silent Spring era. I believe it was either on Carson’s birthday or a big anniversary of the printing of her prophetic book.
I felt I was in the presence of two saints, Rachel and Ina, and will never forget that holy feeling emanating up from the earth itself.