The butterflies from my childhood are almost gone

2 min read

video essay climate change biology ecology nature conservation
Monarch butterflies used to be abundant, but their numbers have plummetted over the last 2-3 decades. (Image credit: © Derek Ramsey / derekramsey.com / GFDL 1.2)

Monarch butterflies have lost over 90% of their population since their peak in the 1980s. I used to see them all the time as a kid in Florida, and in first grade we even had some monarch caterpillars in our classroom that we watched grow into full-grown butterflies.

The most frustrating part to me is that this is probably our fault. There are a few different specific causes that are suspect — habitat destruction, pollution, pesticides — but the time we're living in is called the "anthropocene" to explicitly describe human beings as a "planetary force of change," so... it's hard to argue that it's not our fault in one way or another.

Image credit: Schultz et al., 2017

Almost a year ago, I chose to use this story as a jumping off point to try and tell a small story to paint a big picture: why "biodiversity" is such an important feature of the natural world, and what effects humanity's actions have on the world around us.

The topic of biodiversity is incredibly vast, and after my research, I knew there was simply no chance of telling it all in a snappy, fun educational video like the ones I want to make. I ended up with the working title "Minuscule" because I wanted to use the idea of "the 1%" to illustrate just how massive "100%" really is, but also to emphasize how important that 1% is.

The diversity of life on earth is the reason we have any life on earth. So many of the topics I want to discuss (like how scientists are saving coral, or the abundance of microplastics) inevitably include a discussion about biodiversity, and it's hard to pause in the middle of another topic to get across just how much that matters. This video ties it all together, showing how the relationships between everything mean that everything is important — from the whales and bees that get championed for conservation, to the less charismatic snakes and molds and the Christmas Island Shrew.

The Christmas Island Shrew was officially declared extinct in 2025, primarily due to human influence on the island. Image credit unknown.

This video is at the core of why I made BeanStem and why I want to do this. It took me almost a year to make it for a ton of reasons, but one of them is because I wanted to make sure I got it right. This is the longest video I've ever made, and it took countless hours from me and the small, passionate team that I now work with.

I hope you'll give it a watch and decide it was worth it.