Summary
It’s early February; Dellarobia and Dovey go out shopping with the kids. Dellarobia feels a new sense of freedom now that she has an income and has even opened her own bank account, as well as paid off the mortgage. Cub doesn’t know about her bank account, which she is determined to keep a secret. Dovey continues to ask Dellarobia about her crush on Ovid, who has gone home to his wife, Juliet. Although Dellarobia tries to deny the crush, insisting that Ovid has a wife, she can’t help but acknowledge to herself that she feels “complicated” feelings towards him.
As Dovey, Dellarobia, and the kids stroll through the second-hand shop they’d chosen for their excursion, Dellarobia is proud to see Preston and Cordelia gravitate toward picking out books. Preston even picks up a projector that he wants to give to Ovid. They buy Preston a set of encyclopedias and then head home.
As winter comes to a close, fog rolls into the mountain. Ovid puts Dellarobia in charge of monitoring the butterflies from a distance through binoculars. He comes and joins her and compliments Preston, telling her that he’s come up with a project for Preston to work on. Dellarobia feels all the more curious about Ovid’s home life, wondering why he doesn’t have children and feeling enamored that he likes Preston.
Their conversation turns to the butterflies and they discuss the likely possibility of the monarchs going extinct. Ovid implies that Cub is part of the group of people who believe climate change can just be ignored and Dellarobia pushes back, saying that the “environment got assigned to the other team” and that worries about climate change are “not for people like us,” repeating something Cub had said to her earlier. Surprisingly, she begins to defend Cub, and even goes so far as to explain to Ovid how much her decision to work with the research team was contrary to the town’s class- and gender-based expectations of her.
After Dellarobia and Ovid finish their conversation, an environmental activist named Leighton Akins comes and tries to persuade Dellarobia to sign a Sustainability Pledge. As he lists off the proposed changes she should make to her lifestyle, she finds that every single one of them is impossible or irrelevant for her actual situation. For example, when he suggests that she use Craigslist to buy used items, she tells him that she doesn’t have a computer and has never heard of Craigslist. When he tells her to “fly less,” she simply repeats the phrase, emphasizing the irony present within the scene: a man instructing a woman who has never been outside of the country to “fly less,” as if she is frequently taking expensive flights and trips.
Dellarobia goes to help Hester out with the pregnant ewes. After they’re done, they head down to a part of the forest to try and look for flowers. When they get there, they run into some of the women who have traveled to the area in order to look at the butterflies and protest the logging. These women knit recreations of the monarch butterflies in order to raise awareness about them. Hester laughs at them.
Afterward, Dellarobia asks Hester if Bear is still planning on cutting down the forest and going through with the logging deal. Hester tells her that they’re planning on having a prayer meeting with Pastor Ogle to discuss the decision. The conversation shifts and Hester accuses Cub and Dellarobia of being a poor match for each other. She reveals that she didn’t expect Dellarobia to stick around. Dellarobia, angry that Hester would think so low of her, asks Hester why she didn’t tell her that she didn’t approve of their marriage.
A few days later, Dellarobia helps chaperone Preston’s class on a field trip to the research site. Ovid and Dellarobia lead the children around the lab. Ovid tells the class about climate change and how the butterflies, although beautiful, aren’t necessarily a good sign.
Later, once Dellarobia is home, a news truck pulls up to the house. Dellarobia tries to hide from them at first, but Tina—the journalist who she spoke with six weeks prior—sees and corners her. Dellarobia decides to take Tina to Ovid. Ovid unhappily agrees to let Tina and the cameraman into his lab, but refuses to provide Tina with the answers she wants about the butterflies. He points out that the butterflies are a distressing sign and pushes Tina into talking more about environmental damage and global warming. Tina cuts the interview and tells Ovid that if they talk about climate change, they’ll lose their audience. Ovid refuses to change his answers and they resume, going into more depth. As the interview continues, Ovid grows frustrated and angry with Tina’s circuitous questions, which often frame climate change as a lesser problem than it really is.
Ovid and Tina get into a heated argument. Ovid angrily points out that climate change is an incredibly grave and urgent threat as Tina tries to protest, telling him that people won’t believe in it because it’s too “intangible.” He accuses Tina of failing to do her duty as a journalist, essentially acting on a script written by advertisers and public relations firms. The interview ends with Ovid accusing Tina, and more broadly, the news, of allowing corporations to lie to the public and cover up climate change. After Tina and the cameraman leave, Ovid begrudgingly says that the news network will never run the interview—but, to his and Dellarobia’s surprise, Dovey reveals that she’d filmed the entire encounter and posts it online.
Analysis
As the novel approaches a close, its depiction of climate change grows even more complicated, reaching an emotional climax during Ovid’s interview with Tina as he lambasts her for the media’s complacency and failure to tell the truth about global warming. His accusations stem from a desire to see the media represent the truth; rather than label it as a problem with “ecology,” for instance, he demands that Tina explicitly state that the environment is in danger.
One of Ovid’s references that may at first be unclear, but that is a key to unlocking the subtext running throughout his interview with Tina, is the mention of Philip Morris and Exxon Mobil. As he speaks to Tina, Ovid accuses her of letting a “public relations firm” write her scripts, going on to say that the media has gone “off the Philip Morris payroll” and into the “Exxon pocket.” Ovid, here, refers to the 20th-century advertising and public relations boom, pioneered by Edward Bernays—considered the “founder” of public relations—and which greatly contributed to the rise in popularity of smoking. Bernays was one of the first to run advertisements that framed smoking as a trendy activity, and Philip Morris, a tobacco company, was accused in a later trial of deceiving the American public about the risks of smoking. Philip Morris was just one of many tobacco companies that paid media outlets to promote smoking’s false health benefits in order to push sales.
In comparing Exxon Mobil to Philip Morris, Ovid implicates Tina, and the media at large, of being paid off by oil and gas executives in order to cover up the truth about global warming. By constantly framing global warming as an uncertainty, Tina and reporters like her—Ovid argues—are complicit in the inevitable tragedies and deaths that will come about as a result of a changing climate. They are more concerned about the ratings and appearances of their shows than they are about doing their jobs as journalists.
While Ovid is speaking, Tina interrupts him by pointing out that the shot isn’t good and the scenery isn’t picturesque, which further proves Ovid’s point. Even as he’s trying to explain to her his role as a researcher, she is upset that the butterflies aren’t alive to provide a beautiful shot. The entire scene takes on a distinctly ironic tone as Tina worries about the aesthetics of the interview without understanding the sinister natural tragedy that is occurring right in front of them. Tina says that she doesn't expect people to believe in climate change because they can’t “see” it, and yet, here “it” is right in front of her: the dead butterflies, forced off of their migration path and frozen to death in a climate that was never meant to be their home.
However, another irony also emerges within these chapters as the climate change-related expectations of upper-class activists clash with the abilities of lower-class citizens in the town. When Leighton Akins, a climate activist, comes to Dellarobia’s home in order to try and get her to sign a “sustainability pledge,” she finds that every single one of his suggestions doesn’t apply to her life. When he asks her to buy second-hand, recommending that she use Craigslist, she tells him that she doesn’t even know what Craigslist is because she doesn’t have a computer. His final request—for Dellarobia to “fly less,” meaning go on fewer flights—is met with an ironic silence; Dellarobia, having never even traveled outside of the state, doesn’t even need to explain to Akins how inapplicable his advice is to her own life. Akins demonstrates a total lack of understanding about how people in Dellarobia’s town, a lower-class, agricultural town in Appalachia, and their lifestyles.
The scenes with Akins and Dellarobia and Tina and Ovid, while different in tone, serve as parallels for each other, both demonstrating how differing agendas and class backgrounds can cause people to fracture around a central issue. Tina is concerned with the ratings performance and profits of her news show, while Ovid cannot understand how anyone can so vehemently avoid the facts that he researches. Akins, a believer in climate change, cannot understand how Dellarobia—who also believes in climate change—could not react with the same form of activist fervor and lifestyle change that he believes in.
