Home
Earth, a Comfortable Rock
Home!
Monarch Butterfly
This creature (Monarch Butterfly Danaus plexippus)… is a wonder of nature. It's biology is hard-wired to the heavens. It has an exquisitely sensitive eye that locks onto the sun and allows it to navigate its way across the face of the planet.
In a sense, it has an instinctive understanding of its place in the solar system. A tiny insect brain joined to the movements of the sun and the planets. This connection steers the monarch and millions of its brethren as they make one of the longest migrations of any butterfly species.
They're heading for these trees known locally as the oyamel or sacred firs. Some of the butterflies began their journey over 4,000 km away, that's 2,500 miles, up here in the north-eastern United States and Canada. And over the autumn and the winter, they've migrated south across the United States and arrived here, in central Mexico.
Incredibly, no butterfly has ever learned this route. It cant have, because it takes at least 3 generations to make the round trip. Instead, the homing instinct is carried on a river of genetic information that flows through each butterfly.
The allure of this place to the butterflies, this sense of belonging, is a deep feeling we all share. We even have a word for it – home.
Every living thing that we know to exist is found on this one rock. So, what is it about our planet that makes it such a rich, colourful, living world?
I want to show you why our world is the only habitable planet we know of anywhere in the universe. Now, the answer depends on the presence of a handful of precious ingredients that make our world a home.
