The Beach Lady of American Beach Remembering MaVynee Oshun Betsch

There are people in California who remember driving through certain valleys in October and having to pull over just to take it in.
Monarch butterflies by the millions, moving south. Filling trees in coastal groves so densely the branches sagged. The air shimmering with orange wings. People who saw it describe it as one of those experiences that makes you feel genuinely lucky to be alive on a planet where something like that exists.
Recent winter population counts for western monarchs have come in around 20,000 to 30,000 individuals. That's not a typo. From millions to tens of thousands — a collapse of roughly 99% within living memory.
The causes are the same ones driving declines across the insect world: habitat loss, pesticide exposure, climate disruption. But for monarchs specifically, the destruction of milkweed has been devastating in a very direct way. Milkweed is the only plant monarch caterpillars can eat. It's not a preference or a tendency. It's a biological requirement. No milkweed means no caterpillars means no next generation. Decades of herbicide use in agricultural areas eliminated milkweed from millions of acres that monarchs once moved through.
California's response is the largest monarch recovery initiative the western United States has ever seen: 15 million milkweed plants, to be established along a single connected migration corridor by 2030.
The corridor design is the key detail. Scattered patches of milkweed help but they don't solve the core problem, which is fragmentation. A butterfly navigating hundreds of miles of migration needs reliable habitat at regular intervals. Break that chain too many times and the journey becomes impossible. The goal here is to rebuild a continuous route — to stitch back together what was severed.
Conservation scientists are careful with optimism when species have fallen this far. But 15 million plants along one corridor is the kind of commitment that says: we believe there is still time. We believe this population can recover if we give it something to come back to.
The monarchs that remain are still making the journey. California is trying to make sure it's worth completing.

Every summer, National Pollinator Week highlights the insects that quietly support global food systems and natural ecosystems.

For 2026, organizers selected an unexpected ambassador: the Swallowtail butterfly as the featured pollinator.

Most people associate pollination with bees, but butterflies play a crucial ecological role. As they move between flowers searching for nectar, they transfer pollen across wide distances, helping many native plants reproduce and maintain genetic diversity.

Swallowtails are especially significant because they connect gardeners directly to conservation. Adults visit flowers, but their caterpillars rely on very specific host plants — meaning successful butterfly populations depend on entire living plant communities, not just blooms.

Scientists increasingly emphasize that pollinator decline isn’t only about agriculture or wilderness loss. Much of it happens in everyday residential landscapes where host plants have disappeared.

Choosing the swallowtail highlights a hopeful message: recovery can begin close to home.

Planting milkweed, parsley relatives, spicebush, native shrubs, or regional wildflowers can transform ordinary gardens into breeding habitat. Across North America, citizen gardeners are becoming one of the largest forces supporting pollinator populations.

Pollinator Week 2026 isn’t just a celebration of a butterfly.
It’s recognition that conservation is no longer confined to protected land.

Sometimes it starts with a single plant — and the moment a butterfly decides your yard is worth stopping for.

I know Beach Lady is smiling about this and probably had her hand in making it happen

My grandmother kept a coffee tin under her kitchen sink filled with things that looked like trash. Dried bark. Roots wrapped in newspaper. Leaves pressed flat and brittle. A handful of small, hard seeds that rattled when you shook the tin. The whole thing smelled like earth and something sharper—medicinal, almost bitter.

I asked her once what it was for.

“For when the doctor can’t come,” she said. “Or won’t.”

She never explained further. Never named the plants or told me where she’d gathered them. But I watched her brew teas from that tin when someone had a fever that wouldn’t break. Watched her make a poultice for a burn that healed without scarring. Watched her give a neighbor something for grief—actual grief, the kind that sits in your chest and won’t move—and watched that neighbor sleep through the night for the first time in weeks.

I didn’t understand then that I was witnessing a library. A pharmacopoeia carried in memory, passed hand to hand, because writing it down had never been safe. Because the people who held this knowledge were never supposed to have anything worth protecting.

They protected it anyway.

A History of Survival
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Black history is not simply a story of resilience. That word has been sanded down, made soft enough for February celebrations and corporate statements. It doesn’t capture what actually happened.

What happened was this: enslaved Africans were made into instruments of an agricultural system designed to exhaust soil, bodies, and futures at the same time. Plantation economies weren’t just economic regimes. They were ecological ones—monoculture, enclosure, deforestation, extraction without limit, all enforced through terror.

The people who survived that system didn’t emerge with some romantic “connection to nature.” They emerged with hard ecological intelligence sharpened by necessity. Knowledge that kept them alive when everything else was structured toward their death.

This is what I think about when people talk about Black history as inspiration. Inspiration is comfortable. It asks nothing of you. What this history actually offers is instruction—if we’re willing to receive it.

Across the African diaspora, land knowledge traveled under constraint.

Cropping systems. Seed saving. Soil restoration. Water management. Food preservation. These practices persisted not because they were celebrated, but because they worked. Because when you have no safety net, no institutional support, no doctor who will come, you learn what the land offers. You pay attention in ways that people with options don’t have to.

Spiritual traditions that refused to separate human life from land, from water, from ancestors—those survived too. Not as curiosities. As cosmologies that made sense of suffering, continuity, and obligation when the dominant order offered only disposability.

The knowledge in my grandmother’s coffee tin didn’t come from nowhere. It came from women who watched and remembered. Who tested and passed down. Who understood that healing was not separate from feeding was not separate from reading weather was not separate from knowing which creek to trust and which to avoid.

This is ecological wisdom. Not as abstraction. As practice.

A History of Restoration
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This is why George Washington Carver matters beyond the simplified biography we learned in school.

His work wasn’t just scientific innovation. It was direct intervention against a system that had already stripped Black farmers of land, agency, and soil fertility. By the time Carver began his research, the South’s soil was depleted—exhausted by the same extractive logic that had exhausted the people who worked it.

His insistence on regeneration was a refusal. A refusal of the assumption that both land and people were expendable once used up. He taught farmers to rotate crops, to plant peanuts and sweet potatoes that would restore nitrogen to the soil, to work with the land instead of against it.

This was not neutral science. It was survival strategy dressed in academic language so it could move through institutions that would have rejected it otherwise.

This is why Wangari Maathai’s tree planting was never “just environmentalism.”

When she founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, she wasn’t simply concerned with deforestation. She was confronting colonial land policy, state violence, and the deliberate dismantling of rural women’s authority over land and food systems. The British had replaced Indigenous forests with monoculture plantations. They had drawn boundaries that severed communities from the landscapes that sustained them.

Maathai understood that you cannot heal land without addressing who controls it. Restoration, in her work, was inseparable from political risk. She was beaten, jailed, called a madwoman. She kept planting anyway.

The trees were never just trees. They were acts of defiance rooted in soil.

And this is why Dr. Robert Bullard’s naming of environmental racism was not a moral appeal. It was an exposure of pattern.

Toxic waste sites. Highways that bisect neighborhoods. Pollution that settles in lungs and groundwater. These don’t distribute randomly. They follow lines of race and class because power decides where harm is allowed to accumulate. Bullard documented what Black communities had always known: that proximity to poison is not accidental. It is policy.

His research gave language to a reality that had been lived but not officially recognized. Once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it. Every zoning decision, every permit granted, every “acceptable risk” calculated—all of it asks the same question: Whose bodies are disposable?

The answer has been consistent for a very long time.

A History of Shared Knowledge
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Black ecological wisdom is not philosophy. It is knowledge forged under conditions where mistakes were costly and romanticism lethal.

My grandmother didn’t keep that coffee tin because she found herbalism charming. She kept it because she remembered a time when it was the only medicine available. Because her mother remembered. Because someone before her understood that knowledge hoarded is knowledge lost, and knowledge shared is survival extended.

This is the lineage that sustainability movements rarely acknowledge. The people who understood limits because limits were violently enforced on them. Who learned to regenerate because they were given nothing but depleted soil and expected to make it yield. Who developed practices that worked with ecosystems because they had no power to dominate them.

You can hear this ethic of responsibility and restraint articulated powerfully in our YouTube Spotlight Video with John Francis, whose decades-long commitment to silence, listening, and walking the Earth embodies Black ecological wisdom as lived practice—not theory [video in the web version - link in comments].

Through quiet comes the space to hear beyond the human world.

In a time of accelerating ecological collapse, this history does not ask to be honored. It asks to be taken seriously.

It asks whether we’re willing to learn from people whose knowledge was dismissed as primitive, superstitious, unscientific. Whether we can accept limits as an ethical choice rather than waiting for them to be imposed as punishment. Whether sustainability can mean something beyond branding—beyond the purchase of guilt offset, beyond the aesthetics of green.

If it can, it must grapple with this lineage. Not as inspiration. As instruction.

The coffee tin is gone now. My grandmother passed years ago, and I never learned what was in it. That knowledge died with her because I didn’t ask the right questions in time. Because I didn’t understand what I was being offered.

I think about that often. About all the libraries that have been lost because we didn’t recognize them as libraries. About what it would mean to start recognizing them now.

What forms of ecological knowledge have we ignored because they emerged from survival rather than privilege—and what would it require to center them now?

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Nikki Woods serves as Communications Director for The Gaian Way. She is a national media personality and founder of The Reinvention Method and Maroon House Press, a Black-owned independent publisher specializing in Caribbean literature.



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Happy Black History Month Babee!

MaVynee "Beach Lady" Betch believed that places carry memory, and that protecting land can also protect history.

Born in January 1935 as Marvyne Elisabeth Betsch, she was the great granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida’s first Black millionaire and founder of American Beach. American Beach was a space for Black Americans to recreate despite Jim Crow laws and segregation in public facilities.

MaVynee's life could have followed a very different path. MaVynee was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, studying voice and singing Opera in Paris, London, and throughout Germany. Yet, despite her illustrious career, MaVynee returned home to Florida. She sold her home and began donating her inheritance and time to protecting the land and legacy of American Beach.

Her efforts came to fruition in 2002 through an act of Congress that designated the dune part of the National Park Service. Betsch passed in 2005 due to cancer, but her legacy lives on at Timucuan Historic and Ecological Preserve.

Her story reminds us that conservation can be an act of cultural preservation, and that one person's devotion can shape a place for generations.

To learn more about American Beach visit, https://www.nps.gov/timu/learn/historyculture/ambch.htm

Photo courtesy of the A.L. Lewis Museum at American Beach

Naomi Osaka carefully removing a butterfly that landed on her nose while playing tennis