From the sixteenth to the twentieth of March 2012 it was eighty degrees in Minneapolis for five days running.3 With the weather forty degrees warmer than average, a swallowtail butterfly emerged in my backyard only to find that no flowers had yet opened to provide life-giving nectar. As friends and neighbors celebrated this early gift of warmth, turning their gardens and getting out their flip flops, I privately shed tears for the swallowtail, for mothers in Africa, for my own children, and for the delicate system so violently altered by this “extreme weather event.”