(Video) The 1% that really matters

Video

Transcript

Intro

When I was a kid, I remember my backyard was full of life. We had a little garden and a pond with some fish and bullfrogs. Every year the pond would fill up with tadpoles and the garden would fill up with monarch caterpillars.

I would have friends over and we'd stick our hands in the pond and let the tadpoles nibble at our fingers or we'd stick our hands in and try to scoop up a bunch of tadpoles in our hands.

I remember learning about butterflies in first grade. How these little caterpillars would eat and eat and eat and then build a chrysalis and go through a thing called metamorphosis to turn into a butterfly. Our classroom had one of those mesh cages full of monarch butterfly chrysalises and we'd come in every morning eager to check on how they were doing.

I was lucky. My parents are still together and they were very involved in me and my brother's school. They say it takes a village, and when me and my classmates started learning about metamorphosis, they chipped in to help by supplying chrysalises from our own garden.

But outside of school, I loved being able to spot one of these chubby, colorful little caterpillars in my own backyard and watch them throughout their life cycle.

My backyard had probably about 40 different species of plants and animals between all the weeds, ants, flowers, fish, frogs, and the occasional bunny. I think that inspired a curiosity in me:

How many species are there?

Is species a good measure of biodiversity?

What even is biodiversity?

Well, it's a broad topic to say the least, but biodiversity is what makes the Earth work. Biodiversity is what filters your water, it makes the weather, and it's carved and shaped the Earth for a period of time longer than we can really conceive of. I can't make you understand the entire topic of biodiversity.

I can't teach you 100%, but maybe I can teach you 1%.

Maybe by asking the question "what can 1% do?" we can begin to understand what the whole picture – what 100% – really looks like. So let's begin with a simple question.

What is a species?

To answer that, let's start by going back way before my childhood with a review of how we got to where we are today. We'll be looking for how we got here, but also any lessons that history can teach us about what makes the bio so diverse.

1% of History

They say it takes a village. In reality, it takes millions of years of geological activity, the right temperature, plenty of carbon, nitrogen, and potassium, and another few million years.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, which is a lot to get through. If we just look at the last 1% of history, that doesn't even cover the latest geological era. So instead, let's take a look at the highlights, the 1%, if you will.

The good news is, you've probably learned this before – If not from school, then from Bill Wirtz.

Life began about 3.5 billion years ago as just genetic code or amino acids floating around in a bubble known as the cell membrane. These organisms just had their genetic code floating around wherever, willy-nilly.

About 2.2 billion years ago, some of these cells decided to clean up their room, and they stuffed all their genetic code into a nucleus: a ball with its own protective membrane.

These eukaryotes still had a problem. Their genetic code was still lame and boring, but they were just too tired to do anything about it. At some point, one of them drank an energy drink, now known as mitochondria, and that changed everything. Some eukaryotes didn't like the taste of mitochondria, they preferred the taste of cyanobacteria, which would later rebrand as chloroplasts.

Now, everyone knows that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but that's actually underselling it. In life, energy is everything, so acquiring a new cell part that can just pump out energy was more like an industrial revolution than just a simple power plant. With more energy, these cells could build and maintain a more complex genetic code.

That means they could do more complex things, like unionize!

These cells joined together to form multicellular organisms. Animal, plant, and fungus cells all decided that unionizing was pretty cool, and by about 560 million years ago, there were tons of different multicellular organisms with fundamentally different body plans. Here we can already see tons of actual, observable biodiversity. Animals, plants, and fungi all look radically different from each other, but there are also huge differences between individual species of animals, plants, and fungi.

Now remember, all of this is enabled by the mitochondria and chloroplasts that are providing the cells with energy. Unfortunately, a side effect of drinking mitochondria is that animal cells now have to do this pesky little thing called "breathing." Animal cells need oxygen to produce energy, which is known as respiration.

The good news is, the weather forecast shows there's a whole lot of oxygen coming up right about.. now!

[Old timey newsreel, complete with transatlantic accent]

It's the Cambrian explosion and things are getting wild!

All the animals are diversifying and getting much bigger!

Being bigger means it's easier to eat the things that are smaller!

All of this thanks to photosynthetic organisms that are transforming the atmosphere by pumping loads of oxygen into the air!

As another side effect, oxygen is clogging up the upper layers of the atmosphere with ozone, blocking the sun's UV radiation from reaching the Earth!

What happens next?

We'll just have to wait and see!

[End newsreel]

Plants and animals are abundant on land now, on account of the sun no longer being a deadly laser. It's been 140 million years, and now it's the plant's turn for the spotlight!

We have trees now! A single plant managed to colonize the land, and since then they've diversified wildly. Some of them got tired of elbowing their neighbors to compete for sunlight, and developed a plan that rock climbers would be proud of:

Just go up!

The Carboniferous Period is marked by an explosion of plants on land and abundant forests. Forests change the geology of a region by stabilizing the soil with their roots, and slowing erosion by catching rainfall with their leaves. Additionally, animals colonize the shady new environments formed by forest canopies, and mushrooms and bugs feed on leaf litter from trees and ferns to recycle nutrients throughout the system. Once again, here we see life sustaining other life and transforming the climate.

We've come a long way from life preferring to just proteins floating in a sack. Countless species have come and gone, but in order to bring in the age of the dinosaurs, we need to look at the largest mass extinction event of the Eon, the Permo-Triassic extinction event about 250 million years ago.

Volcanoes in Serbia erupted, and they flooded the oceans and atmosphere with toxic gases. Oceans acidified, global temperatures rose, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by sixfold. These eruptions destroyed hundreds of species. Insects, land vertebrates, and marine species all decimated by 70 to 90 percent.

Here we see that in some cases life persists because of the climate, and in other cases life persists in spite of it. As a wise Jeff Goldblum once said, "Life, uh, finds a way."

Introducing the dinosaurs!

(Jurassic Park theme)

You know the dinosaurs.

After the last extinction event, the biosphere eventually recovered, and we got all kinds of plants and animals, most notably the dominance of the dinosaurs. Among tons of other life, we see the first appearance of early crabs, frogs, salamanders, and lizards.

Some dudes called the Cynodonts survived the last extinction event, but we'll come back to them in a second. Now, the last two extinction events – oh, yeah, we skipped this one, don't worry about it – the last two were caused by volcanic activity, so can you guess what the next one was caused by?

Wrong! Giant asteroid! Boom!

If you got that good for you, you're paying attention.

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck the Earth and killed all non-avian dinosaurs. The impact smothered plants and phytoplankton with a cloud of ash and dust that blocked out the sun for probably at least 10 years.

Most of the animals that did survive were lucky. Either their food chain depended on dead plants – which there were now a lot of – or they could go for a long time without eating, like crocodiles.

Remember the Cynodonts? Well, those sneaky little guys survived again, and now they're mammals! As the climate stabilizes, they take over as the dominant family on Earth, leading to primates, leading to humans.

From day one, humans are good at 3 things:

• Working together
• Killing things, and
• Not working together

Our large brains and our ability to work together is a large part of what has made us so successful. The time we live in now is a result of thousands of years of collaborating and iterating on top of previous generations.

But we've always been powerful and destructive. Even early humans were responsible for hunting species to extinction, and when we emigrated from Africa about 50,000 years ago, the fossil record shows most large animals start going extinct in our wake.

We were a large part of it, but we weren't the only ones to blame. After all, this was at the tail end of the Ice Ages. The Ice Ages weren't sudden enough to be considered a mass extinction event, but plants and animals did go extinct whenever they failed to outrun the warming and cooling of the Pleistocene.

Now that we're up to speed, what have we learned? Well, there are two main takeaways here to do with biodiversity:

First, climate is the most important factor that influences biodiversity. Large changes in the life on Earth were always preceded by large changes in the climate.

And second, life affects the climate. The relationship between life and the climate is not one way; plants and animals have both transformed the climate in unique ways, both locally and globally.

Got it? Cool. With all that settled... what the hell is a species?

1% of DNA

Surely defining species has something to do with DNA, right? Can a 1% change in DNA create a new species?

Humans share about 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. But, we also share about 60% of our DNA with bananas. With the way the evolution branches and species split off from one another, there's a ton of overlap in the genetic code between pretty much all life on Earth.

We're all remarkably similar. So to get at what's different, let's look at what's the same.

There's a lot of basic stuff that we all have in common that you might not think about. At its most basic, it's worth mentioning that all life on Earth is based on DNA. Every living thing uses the same genetic code to build itself – that's amino acids stored as DNA and RNA. Using genetic code as building blocks, everything from frogs to plants to humans share the same basic instructions for how cells divide, how to produce energy, and how to move resources and dispose of waste.

The genome that we share with our fellow animals includes a lot of developmental genes. An example of this is a study where the eye genes from different animals were placed on the embryo of a fruit fly. When the fly matured, it developed an eye at that location. And it was a fruit fly eye, not an eye from the donor animal. This was tested with squids and mice, neither of which have eyes that are remotely similar to the compound eyes of flies. And yet, there seems to be some universal "place an eye here" gene that causes squids, mice, and fruit flies all to develop their respective eyes at that location.

But clearly, not all species look the same, so what's the difference? What's going on when you change 1%?

You may have already pieced together that messing with DNA can have a few different effects. When it goes wrong, there are plenty of diseases and disorders that could be a result of a genetic mutation. Cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and Alzheimer's all have a genetic factor to them.

Cancer is what happens when a cell's DNA changes in a way that it loses its constraints and begins to act in its own self-interest. After all, a cell's primary purpose is to reproduce, so by growing uncontrollably, it must be winning, right? No, obviously not. That cell only exists in the first place because it's part of a larger multicellular organism. An animal or a plant is a system that only works when all of its parts work together collaboratively. When a cell forgets that, it begins to leach resources from its host until the whole system collapses.

And yet, none of that answers our question. A person with cancer or a genetic disorder isn't a different species, so what else?

Another thing that minor changes in DNA can cause is just simply diversity. Every individual looks and acts slightly differently. You might have different color eyes than your parents, your arms are slightly longer, your nose is slightly sharper. It's not just physical attributes either. The way your body reacts to hormones is slightly different, you have a different blood type, you like different foods. All of this is a result of the fact that you're not a clone of your parents, you're a variation on their two genomes.

But you're not a different species from your parents, so what else?

The third thing that can happen from a change in DNA is speciation, or the creation of a new species. We're getting closer! Speciation depends on variation, it's the culmination of a bunch of different 1% changes in DNA across generations.

We learned earlier that climate is the most important factor that influences biodiversity, and that's because it's what drives speciation. In a word, speciation is specialization. Let's take an example.

The medium ground finch and warbler finch are related species. They became different species because the ground finch specializes in eating seeds with its larger, powerful beak. The warbler finch, on the other hand, specializes in eating insects with its longer, sharper beak. The traits and features that they have suit their environment, their climate, and the other animals that act as their competition.

It's like a person specializing into being an electrician versus being a cashier. Both jobs are important, but filling a more generic role like a cashier, you're going to have a lot more competition in the job market. Specializing into being an electrician or a historian or a pet trainer, you're going to have a lot less competition.

Similarly, if these birds filled a more generic role in their ecosystem, they would have a lot more competition. Instead, they do this one specific thing better than any other creature in its vicinity, and so they carve out an ecological niche.

Okay, so that's why speciation happens, but how did the DNA of those two species actually diverge?

That's a complicated subject with a bunch of complicated words like allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and my friend Patrick. In the spirit of 1%, we're only gonna explain one of them here.

When a population gets large enough, it spreads out over more land. At a certain point, the outer edge of the population might be pushed out into an environment that's different than the one that the core population lives in.

The peripheral individuals, that is, the ones at the edge, reproduce with each other. Some of those offspring have mutations that suit their new environment, and those offspring are the ones that thrive. That's the basic principle of natural selection.

The split happens when the peripheral population mates with the core population, forming a new "middle ring" of hybrid individuals. These hybrids aren't well suited for the core environment or the peripheral environment, so they have a lesser chance of surviving. This middle band of the population dies out, at which point the core and peripheral populations are separated.

The two populations keep adapting to their respective environments, drifting further and further apart genetically. At some point, the two populations diverge enough that they can no longer reproduce with each other.

We now have two distinct species! Awesome!

So, for the last time, what is a species?

1% of Species

I swear, I'm going to define species, but... you'd be surprised at just how tricky it is to define. There are some that would even argue that "species" isn't a thing.

Part of the trouble with defining species is that nature doesn't really care about the lines we like to draw or the boxes we like to put things into. For example, the same species might exist in two wildly different parts of the planet, with lots of geographical separation. That might be two different populations, but it's not necessarily two different species. That can trip people up, including scientists.

A recent paper demonstrated that there can be plenty of variation within a single species that has mistakenly led to the discovery of new species:

We... find that geographic variation has resulted in the over-description of species... We emphasize that explicit tests for gene flow among populations are required to test species hypotheses. Without positive evidence for reproductive isolation, the null hypothesis of any researcher should be variation within a single species.

(Source: Chambers et al., 2025)

If you didn't catch that, that study also gives us a convenient way to define species. A species is generally defined by reproductive isolation. If there is gene flow between two populations, and two individuals from those populations can successfully produce offspring, then they are probably the same species. If you remember from speciation, the split doesn't happen just because those two populations become isolated. It happens when they evolve enough on their own and diverge enough that they can no longer produce offspring with each other.

So there we go! Twenty minutes later, we finally know what a species is!

But species is just the lowest part on a larger system that classifies all life on Earth. Or at least, you know, tries to.

I'm sure you already learned about the taxonomic rank system at some point. That's domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. So the fun thing is, all these middle bits kind of don't matter. It's all wobbly anyway because... it's hard to draw lines around something that doesn't really care about your pencil. Nonetheless, let's look at a few examples to get an idea of how the taxonomic rank works. There are tens of thousands of species in beautiful Appalachia, so let's go find a few of them!

We got a southern magnolia!

So we've got ourselves a southern magnolia. How does that fit into the taxonomic rank? Well, at the bottom we have genus and species. Biologists use genus and species together to uniquely identify a species. So the scientific name of a southern magnolia is Magnolia grandiflora. That tells us the genus and species.

Moving up the tree, the southern magnolia is in the family Magnoliaceae, Order Magnoliales, Class Magnoliopsida, Phylum Streptophyta, Kingdom Plantae, and Domain Eukaryota.

Here are a few related species to give you an idea of how different species can be related at different levels. For example, look at the Tulip Poplar, which is in the same family of Magnoliaceae, but then the two species diverge at the genus level.

Let's take a look at a completely different species to show off more of the tree.

We have ourselves a good old white-tailed deer.

You can see that characteristic white tail, just a-waggin'.

We found a white-tailed deer, or Odocoileus virginianus.

It's in the family Cervidae, order Artiodactyla, class Mammalia, phylum Chordata, kingdom Animalia, and domain Eukaryota.

Once again, here are a couple related species. You'll notice orcas on there. Orcas are actually related to the white-tailed deer and the elk at the Artiodactyla order. That's because Artiodactyla is (roughly) an order of tetrapods, or four-legged animals, that have lost some, or in the orcas' case all, of their toes. Let's find one more!

We found a friend! Look at him! Look at the guy! Oh, that's so fun!

The Grey Ratsnake, or Pantherophis Spiloides, is of Family Colubridae, Order Squamata, Class Lepidosauria, Phylum Chordata, Kingdom Anamalia, and Domain Eukaryota.

Obviously, there's so much more to the tree of life. We don't have time to get into fungus or arthropods or mollusks, but this is already a lot of information. How do we make sense of all of it?

Well, we know that genus and species together will uniquely identify a species. On the other end, domain separates bacteria from larger organisms. Kingdom separates plants, animal, and fungi. And then phylum is arguably the last "useful" classification when looking at it from a top-down perspective.

Phylum is loosely related to the idea of a "bauplan." Bauplan can give us an idea of approximately how many types of creatures there are.

The word bauplan comes from a German word to essentially mean "blueprint" or "body plan". Some of the groups I mentioned just a minute ago, the arthropods and the mollusks, are examples of phyla. The idea is (roughly) that all the species within a given phylum are all just variations on the same fundamental body plan.

Each larger grouping of animals is tightly confined within an invariant body plan. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight legs, and crabs have ten. Our lineage arose from early four-legged amphibians, and we are stuck in that format as tetrapods. It seems that once a new developmental protocol, such as a three-parted body plan in insects, becomes established, it is virtually impossible to change.

Loss, of course, is another matter; Loss is easy and has occurred often. Many insects have lost their wings. Snakes have lost their legs, while dolphins transform theirs into flippers; but the basic body plan, what German-speaking zoologists called Bauplan, remains invariant.

(Source: Complexity: The evolution of Earth's biodiversity and the future of humanity)

The idea of a bauplan mainly applies to animals. You kind of can apply the idea to plants, but it refers to developmental biology. Plants don't have the same developmental process as animals and, as we saw earlier with DNA, animals, have a LOT of overlap in their developmental processes.

What's remarkable is that despite all the different kinds of creatures on Earth, all animals can be described with fewer than a hundred bauplans. One such bauplan is shared by all vertebrates. That means that trout, giraffe, turtles, and humans all share the same fundamental body plan. In some way, it kind of makes intuitive sense: They all have a spine and four limbs and a face with eyes and nose and a mouth in that arrangement.

But more than just comparing physical attributes, we can compare how these animals develop as embryos. For example, all vertebrates develop what's basically a fish kidney.. And then they do it again at a later stage of development! These are two organs called the pronophros and the mesonophros, and they quickly become reabsorbed as development continues. The mesonophoros becomes the actual kidney in fish and amphibians, but in birds, reptiles, and mammals they quickly atrophy when the real kidney develops.

But that's not it! Did you know that all vertebrates develop gills as embryos? In fish they finish fully developing into the gills, but in humans they mostly disappear.

"Ben, what do you mean mostly?" Well, I mean that all the slits on both sides disappear except for one. That one slit is what develops into your eardrum.

Once again, we're all remarkably similar.

We finally know what a species is, hooray! Now we can start to look at what 1% of species can do. But, like I mentioned earlier, nature doesn't seem to really care about our pencils. Every species crosses these lines to form unique relationships with the other creatures and plants that they share their home with.

Ants work with each other, and they aerate the soil for flowering plants, (slow breath) which are pollinated by bees who feed on the flowers, which are harmed by deer that trample plants as they migrate, and who in turn have their blood sucked by ticks, (quick breath) who are eaten by woodpeckers that help disperse the seeds for trees that they live in — trees whose nutrient intake is bolstered by fungus thanks to mycorrhizae, and then are decomposed by fungus when they eventually fall. (big breath) Slugs and snails eat the fungus, who are eaten by salamanders, whose eggs are eaten by fish who are caught by bears, who also help spread seeds (breath) for trees that have the soil aerated for them by worms that are eaten by birds.

The link between all life on Earth is a run-on sentence. It doesn't start, it doesn't end, and it goes in circles.

And here we begin to see a problem with the very premise of this video. By trying to look at just 1%, we begin to see all the strands that inextricably tie every living thing to every other living thing. We begin to see that they can't be isolated.

We begin to see that we are all remarkably... different. But the relationships we build are what keep everything going.

The relationships we build

(POV: You're on a date, Ben walks up and takes a seat across from you)

Hey, it's so good to see you! No, thanks for meeting me, I'm excited, this is fun! Sorry I was late, by the way, I was going down a rabbit hole, I was learning about some biodiversity stuff.

So you know how species are categorized, right? Yeah, taxonomic rank, yeah! So, kind of like that, the interactions between species can be put into some broad categories.

So, like, the most commonly known are mutualism, parasitism, competition, but there's also amensalism and commensalism. Those are some kind of weird ones, that's where one species is helped or harmed by the other and the other species is just entirely unaffected.

But kind of like the taxonomic rank, there's a lot of nuance to this structure that isn't really captured by these broad categories. Because there's different types of parasitism, right? There's these ticks that suck your blood, obviously, but there's also birds that will, like, lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and have those other birds raise those kids as their own.

There's also other types of mutualism, so there's those, you know those weird little shrimp that clean the teeth of sharks and stuff like that? That's obviously a mutualism, but there's also lichen, which is a symbiosis between fungus and algae.

Frankly, I think it's such a shame that there's just such a common misunderstanding of how flat the natural relationships are in the world. I hear so many people talking, like my buddy Patrick, about "survival of the fittest." But there's so much more to the nature than that! You don't have to be the best at everything to succeed in this world. You can just take resources from others while making them do all the work and call yourself a CEO!

Don't get me wrong, competition does make up a large part of, you know, the natural world, but like, the most consequential relationship that I can think of is a mutualistic one- it's mycorrhiza!

Sorry, mycorrhiza is a mutualistic relationship between a fungus and a plant. So the fungus grows on the roots of the plant and helps it with nutrient intake. The fungus provides the plant with nitrogen and phosphorus, and the plant gives back to the fungus, it gives back sugar so that it can stay alive. That relationship has been around since plants made it onto land, and it affects over 90% of land plants.

Not only that – mycorrhiza is so cool – these fungus also allow the plants to, like, send messages to each other. Plants have fungus internet! That's insane!

Ah, geez, I'm rambling again. I'm sorry, you should have stopped me. I haven't asked you a single question about yourself in all this time! So, what's something that your parents never gave you as a child that you now desperately crave as an adult?

Wait, no, come back!

(End date scene)

Finding a way to measure that complexity and put some kind of number to it is no easy task. We need some way to measure the health of an ecosystem so that we know what helps it and what hurts it.

One way to do that is by looking at interaction extinctions instead of species extinctions. In other words, we look at the roles that a species plays in its environment, the services that it provides to its ecosystem and its neighbors. Modeling shows that in many cases, the extinction of that interaction comes before the true extinction of the specieses [sic] involved in those interactions.

The point of this is that it really focuses on the practical effects and local context instead of just looking at simple population numbers. It's one thing to say, "Save the bees!" but it's more impactful to say, "Hey! The bees pollinate the plants that give you fruit and filter your water, so we need to make sure that they can keep doing that!"

There are about 47,000 species described as endangered by the IUCN. But, it should be clear by now that when one species goes extinct, it will affect everything else. When one species goes extinct, it's possible that other species will go extinct as a result. That's called co-extinction. Similarly, co-endangerment describes species that are at risk of extinction because they rely on another species that's listed as endangered.

An old 2004 study estimates that for every one species on the endangered list, there are 6,300 species that are co-endangered. Similarly, a 2018 study found that models that predict climate-driven extinction but that fail to account for species relationships often produce inaccurate and optimistic results.

Speaking of climate change, what's going on with that?

1% of Humans

One day I got the news that one of our family friends had sadly passed away. I was young enough that I wasn't really close to this person and, I don't know, I was 12? I didn't really understand death. But I went to my dad to ask where my mom was and he told me she was in the backyard.

I went out there, the sun was setting and I found her crouched by the milkweed crying. She was watching the caterpillars and one of them was emerging from its chrysalis. I hugged my mom, and that's all I really remember.

Humans have been around for way less than 1% of Earth's history, and we've only become dominant in the last 10,000 years or so. In that time, we've built the life you live today, for better or for worse.

We live in the Anthropocene, a period of Earth's history that is defined by humanity being a planetary force of change. Despite making up only 2.5% of animal biomass, we as a singular species have transformed the planet in a way that no other species has. We've put a man on the moon, we've cured diseases, we can build housing and grow food to support a population of 8 billion.

And with nearly every step of the way, with every great achievement of humanity, we've taken a step back from the world we were once a part of.

We're no longer subjected to the inconveniences of nature. We don't worry about the weather, we can just check our phones and plan ahead. We don't have to forage and hunt. Most of us don't even have to farm. We only touch a plant when we pick it up from the grocery store – and half the time then it's wrapped in plastic.

Nearly half a million square kilometers of earth are covered in buildings, pavement, and asphalt. That's 169 Rhode Islands or one California. All of this concrete is used to connect our communities while cutting us off from the ecosystems that they're built on top of. As a result of all this, odds are you live in an area that's considered nature deprived, especially if you're in the US and especially if you're not white.

I mean, we're told to make eco-friendly choices as consumers, but your life isn't really changed by choosing to buy organic or by throwing something into the trash instead of recycling. We don't generally get to see the effects that our choices have on the world.

But just because we're often detached as individuals doesn't mean we're isolated from the environment as a species. We like to think that we sit at the top of everything, but if it all comes tumbling down, that just means that we'll fall the hardest.

If we take a step in to get closer again, we can start to see those strands tying everything together.

I don't know if you knew this, but it says here in my notes: we live in the environment. Our entire way of life and our economy is tied to nature. Agriculture doesn't happen without a healthy ecosystem of pollinators, we don't have clean drinking water without healthy soil. Heck, my home state of Florida would just get washed away by hurricanes if it weren't for the mangroves to buffer the storms.

Megacorporations and your legislators know exactly how valuable nature is. Nature's "Ecosystem Services" has a hell of a track list. Pollination, water filtration, land stabilization and storm buffers, not to mention all the things it literally produces like wood, minerals, livestock and fish. And it does all of these for free. If we try to put a monetary value on this, it consistently turns out to be twice the global GDP.

Tony Juniper, in his book What Has Nature Ever Done For Us, talks about evaluating the financial cost of the damage we do to our environment. In 2008 alone, 3,000 companies in the top 1% of the world got effectively a $2 trillion subsidy for damaging our oceans and forests. A lot of the top companies in the world wouldn't be profitable if they had to not set forests on fire. They get to damage our natural environments because it's too expensive to make their products responsibly, and because so far we haven't stopped them.

All this to say, we are entirely connected to and dependent on nature, but it's hard to care about the financials. What about the tadpoles and bunnies and ants in your own backyard? What happens if we take another step closer in?

A closer look

Conclusion

I don't really see any monarch butterflies anymore. I've talked with friends and, like me, they remember flocks of them around when we were kids, but they don't really see them around anymore either.

The monarch butterfly population has plummeted over 95% in the last 40 years. In 1985, there were 10 million, and today there are a few hundred thousand.

They are arguably, effectively extinct, and odds are that we're largely to blame for that. It may have been habitat loss, or the pesticides, or the warmer seasons, but... we're in the Anthropocene. We have a hand in all of it.

We've been mindlessly tugging at these threads, never really understanding how our actions relate to the world around us. But the relationships we build are what keep everything going.

Like our relationships, biodiversity is complicated, it's messy. It's taken me this long to explain just 1%. But this isn't just a story about connection to nature, it's a story about connection. They say it takes a village, but who or what does your village not include?

Do you consider yourself a neighbor to the ants?

To the trees?

To the ducks and fish and turtles?

When God sings with all his creations, will not a turtle be part of the choir?

But just because we're all remarkably different doesn't mean we're not all remarkably similar.

It's so easy today to feel isolated and alone, like the effects you have on the world are miniscule. But the entire history of the planet shows us that your 1% that you contribute cannot be isolated from the other 99%.

They say it takes a village. But from you, all it takes is 1%.

Attributions

B-roll

• Florida Springs footage courtesey of Joseph Ricketts (@josephrickettsphoto)

Music

• swing - GINO DADA (Pixabay Content License)
• Smokey's Lounge - TrackTribe (YouTube Audio Library License)
• Chimes - 808xri (Pixabay Content License)
• Half Past Murder Time - kjartan_abel (CC BY 4.0)
• Jazzy Lounge - Schwarzborg (Pixabay Content License)
• Funky Heatwave - Brotheration Records (Pixabay Content License)
• Simple Step - Slenderbeats (YouTube Audio Library License)
• chill background music - ZHRØ (CC BY 4.0)
• Late Night Radio - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Crinoline Dreams - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Gonna Be Gone - kjartan_abel (CC BY 4.0)
• Brazilian Bossa Nova Jazz Acoustic Guitar Podcast Music - Denis Pavlov (Pixabay Content License)
• Last Night in March - HD-Studio (Pixabay Content License)
• Hard Boiled - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Lobby Time - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Night on the Docks - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Candy Apple Town - National Sweetheart (YouTube Audio Library License)
• Angel Share - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)

Video credits

Ben Rankin - Writing, research, host, editing, graphics

Alexis Parson - Writing, Camera

Logan Bailey - Camera, Editing, Narration

Hannah Ditzler - Interviewee

Joseph Ricketts - Interviewee

Simone Schuster - Interviewee

Special thanks: Amanda Dyar, Gaige Benkert, David Crompton, Laura Eye, Chattanooga Zoo, Reflection Riding Arboretum & Nature Center, Carving Rock Kitchen, Chattanooga Public Library

References

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