The Many Care Worlds a Butterfly Crosses

This article explores the theme of heroes and villains in relation to the conservation of the North American monarch butterfly. The monarch butterfly is a migratory insect that performs an annual four-thousand-kilometer journey across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Through its travels, the at-risk insect connects and disconnects humans, revealing tensions between the different actors participating in its survival across its North-South geographies. In the North, conservation relies on the voluntary care work of butterfly amateurs who recreate monarch habitat, rear and care for the insect at home, and contribute economically and affectively to habitat protection. In the South, the conservation model is experienced by Indigenous and mestizo communities as a top-down imposition restricting their traditional livelihoods. Residents of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve contest their framing as nature trespassers, while they carry the political, affective, and physical labor of conserving a disappearing insect. They too care for this butterfly but with an emphasis on its forest relations. Based on ethnographic data collected among these two often-opposed conservation communities, this article explores the ontological questions raised by these hero and villain dynamics around radically different ideas of what caring for this butterfly means. The exploration of one insect and two care worlds intersects with the “one planet, many worlds” debate in a colonial context. By examining the tensions between these opposed care worlds, the essay illustrates how a disappearing butterfly constitutes and confronts distinct perceptions of the urgency of caring for nature.