Monarchs

My wife asked me for advice on investing money in the stock market the other day, and a full thimble of knowledge was all I needed to wax on about the stock market, and how for a long-term investment it is quite safe, but there are no certainties, and always an element of risk, etc. From the macro, macro point of view it is pretty simple. Do we have enough food to feed ourselves? Enough energy to keep us warm in the winter and power a fan in the summer? Enough raw materials to keep the roof fixed, clothes on our back? Are there invaders swarming at the borders?

The answer to the last question is an emphatic no, unfortunately quite a few people struggle to varying degrees with the first three, but for economic reasons, not because any of those resources are not readily available in the United States. Fortunately, my wife and I are not in this category, indeed few considering investing in the stock market would be, which is another story in itself. So the bottom line is that the future doesn’t look bad for us, and having a long-term investment plan makes sense. At least to me the stock market, and by that I mean industry in a broad sense, seems like a strong investment, safe for the long term, a good place to secure, at least the money part of, the American Dream.

But this line of reasoning has also got me thinking more and more about the fact that we only saw a single Monarch butterfly in the yard last summer, and two summers ago, none. My wife is a big fan of Monarch’s, a few summers ago we had King Louis, and King Richard, and a few other Kings producing chrysalises on milkweed in the yard. But these past two years next to nothing.

A Monarch chrysalis in our yard, photo taken in 2012.

A Monarch chrysalis in our yard, photo taken in 2012.

The Monarch is truly one of nature’s miracle creatures. Gathering to breed each winter, primarily in a small spot in Mexico, they fan out across North America in a migration that takes several generations to complete. This is the really incredible part. An adult Monarch leaves its breeding grounds in Mexico, and flies in its first leg to, say Missouri, where it lays an egg on a milkweed plant. The egg will hatch to produce a new butterfly, which then continues the journey to Maine, where another egg is laid on another milkweed before the parent dies, and then that butterfly hatches, and flies the thousands of miles back to the breeding grounds in Mexico.

So these little dudes, with a neural network not much bigger than the head of pin, can not only make a round trip of thousands of miles, but do it over several lives. Their navigation system is genetically programmed! How does this happen? I am pretty good at thinking about simple organisms and how genes can control behavior, but it’s hard to wrap my head around this one. I expect there are scientists who, either have, or will figure it out. The Monarch’s genome has been decoded, but I am perfectly happy to leave it in the category of one of nature’s most beautiful sources of wonder.

So by now is it reasonable to ask what kind of tangent are we on here, since this started out as a ramble about the stock market as a safe investment. Well, the problem is there is a far more, I would say linear, that is obvious, relationship between the fact that the stock market is a good investment and the reason we no longer see Monarchs in Maine, than there is between the fact that a Monarch can complete a genetically programed trip of four thousand miles that was started by its great grandparent.

So here’s the linear argument. There are a number of reasons Monarchs are struggling; their habitat is being lost to development, and especially their breeding grounds. Another big factor is the continued growth of large scale (industrial) farming in the mid-west that keeps reducing the number of milkweed plants available to them. Then there is the constant drumbeat of human-made, low-level additives to the environment (pollution, if you will) that more than likely extracts a toll as well.

Development, large scale farming, pollution, all signs of industrialization. What makes the stock market a good long term investment — large scale industrialization. So it is not unreasonable to argue that an unintended consequence of the stock market being a ‘safe’ long term investment is that fewer and fewer Monarch’s make it to Maine. This ‘cost’ will not show up in the balance sheets of investments, in purely financial terms the monarch is of miniscule value.

But still, it makes me wonder, just how safe an investment is a system that cannot account for the wondrous creature that is the Monarch? Is it possible to have a stock market that accounts for economic growth at the industrial scale, but also accounts for the native value of the Monarch? Is it too revolutionary to think that devising such a system might have more value than a watch (AAPL: $111.31/share) that is connected to your phone that is connected to the internet so that it can remind you about meeting a friend at Starbucks (SBUX: $58.69/share) at 3:30 tomorrow afternoon? And the most niggling doubt of all: does the loss of the Monarch (MNACH: priceless) describe another small segment of a tangent from which civilization shan’t return? Stock market bedamned.

David Emerson

About David Emerson

David Emerson is a professional scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences who studies bacteria that live literally between a rock and a hard place. The views expressed here are his alone.