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.

So for decades people
have made observations

about monarch butterflies
where and when they see them,

and they've contributed these observations
to platforms like Journey North.

This is a map of some observations
of butterflies made and given

to Journey North.

And if you can see the dots are coded
by what time of year

those observations were made.

So these massive amounts of data
come into a place like Journey North,

and they can create a map
of this time of over a course of a year

of where monarchs go.

Also because of citizen science,

we understand that monarch butterfly
numbers are going down, down, down.

So in the 1980s, the overwintering
butterflies here in California,

there were four million counted.

Last year, 30,000.

Four million to 30,000 since the 1980s.

The monarchs on the east coast
are doing a little bit better,

but they're also going down.

OK, so what are we going to do about it?

Well, very organically, nobody
really asking anybody to do it,

people all over the continent

are supporting monarch butterflies.

The heart of the problem
for monarchs is milkweed.

It's another coevolutionary relationship,
and here's the story.

Milkweed is toxic.

It has a poison in it that it evolved
to deter other insects from eating it,

but the monarch developed
a different kind of relationship,

a different strategy with the milkweed.

Not only does it tolerate the toxin,

the monarch actually sequesters
the toxin in its body,

thus becoming poisonous to its predators.

Monarch butterflies will only lay their eggs on milkweed, and monarch caterpillars will only eat milkweed, because they need that toxin to actually create what they are as a species. So people are planting milkweed all over the country where we have lost milkweed due to habitat destruction, pesticide use, herbicide use and climate change impacts. You can create a lot of butterfly habitat and pollinator habitat on a windowsill. Go to a native nursery in your area, and find out what's native to where you live, and you will bring beautiful things to yourself. Now, citizen science can do even more than rescue monarch butterflies. It has the capacity to scale to the level necessary that we need to mobilize the save nature. And this is an example. It's called City Nature Challenge, and City Nature Challenge is a project of the California Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.