How you can help save the monarch butterfly -- and the planet

Hi there.

I'm in the habit of saying
I would like it if butterflies could talk,

but I've been recently reconsidering that,

because we already have
a pretty loud world.

Can you imagine if butterflies
were yakking out there all over the place?

But I would like to ask butterflies
one question, which is,

what is the meaning of some of the stories
that we humans tell about them?

Because remarkably, all over the world,
cultures have really similar stories,

similar mythologies about butterflies
having to do with the human soul.

Some cultures tell us butterflies
are carrying the souls of children

who have died wrongly or too soon,

and other cultures
tell us that butterflies

are carrying the souls
of our ancestors among us.

This butterfly is called Kallima inachus.

On one side it looks
like a beautiful butterfly,

and on the other side
it looks like a leaf,

and it folds up like a leaf
to elude predators.

So now you see it, now you don't,

something hidden, something revealed.

Maybe we got our ideas about
the human soul from this butterfly.

So it's possible that butterflies
have some sort of outsized role

in our afterlife.

But in this life, in this world,
butterflies are in really serious trouble.

This is a moth.

Moths and butterflies are related.
Moths generally fly at night.

This is called Predicta, because
Darwin predicted that it must exist.

So today, more than 60 species
of butterflies are endangered

around the world,

but even more than that,

insects are declining,
declining, declining.

In the last 50 years, we've lost
nearly 50 percent

of the total number of bodies of insects.

Now this is a disaster.

It could impact us in a more serious way
more quickly than climate change,

because butterflies don't do that much
in the ecosystem that we depend on,

but they do things for other creatures
that we do depend on,

and that's the same story
with all insect life.

Insect life is at the very foundation
of our life support systems.

We can't lose these insects.

Biodiversity all over the globe
is in a vast decline.

Habitat lost, pesticides, herbicides,
and impacts of climate change.

Habitat loss is very serious,

and that's where we really
have to get developing better,

more mindfully.

It's the worst of times.

We are kind of overloaded
with our problems.

It's also the best of times.
There's incredibly good news.

We have exactly what we need.

We have exactly the platform
to save nature.

It's called citizen science.

So citizen science is generally a term
used to mean people without a PhD

contributing to scientific research.

Sometimes it's called community science,

which gets at the communal purpose
of citizen science,

which is to do something
for our commons together.

It's amateur science.

It's being turbocharged today
by vast computing power,

statistical analysis, and the smartphone,

but it's an ancient practice
that people have always practiced.

It's amateur science.

Professional science has its roots
in amateur science.

Charles Darwin was a citizen scientist.

He had no advanced degree
and he worked only for himself.

So someone showed Darwin
this Madagascar star orchid,

which as a spur that's 12 inches long,

and the spur is the part of a flower
that the nectar is in.

So this person showed this
to Darwin and said,

"This proves that evolution
does not come about in a natural way.

This flower proves that only God
can make these incredibly bizarre

and tricky-looking creatures on the earth,

because no insect
could possibly pollinate this.

God must reproduce it."

And Darwin said, "No, I'm sure
that there is an insect somewhere

with a proboscis long enough
to pollinate that star orchid."

And he was right.

This is a map of the monarch butterfly.

So, the monarch butterfly has a different story than that particular moth, but reflects the same kind of fundamental idea that Darwin had called coevolution, and coevolution is at the heart of how nature works, and it's also at the heart of what's going wrong with nature today. So over time, as the moth developed a longer proboscis, so the plant developed a longer spur. Over millions of years, the plant and the moth developed a relationship whereby they both make each other's chances of existence better. The monarch butterfly has a different kind of coevolutionary relationship, and today it is at the heart of what's going wrong for the monarch butterfly. So this is a map of the monarch butterfly migration. The monarch does this amazing thing, and over the course of a year, it goes over the entirety of North America. It does this in four or five generations. The first generations only live a couple of weeks. They mate, they lay eggs, and they die. The next generation emerges as butterflies and takes the next leg of the journey. Nobody knows how they do it. By the time the fifth generation comes back around and that one lives longer, they overwinter in Mexico and California. By the time it gets there, those butterflies are going back to where their ancestors came from, but they've never been there before, and nobody that they're immediately related to has been there before either. We don't know how they do it. The reason we know they do this kind of migration, and we still have a lot of unanswered questions about the monarch migration, is because of citizen science.