"Living in the time of the butterfly:" Engaging more-than-human temporalities to rethink biodiversity conservation

Abstract

This article describes the ecological accounts of Jñato and Hñähñu (also known as Mazahua and Otomi) people who inhabit a territory that is today the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in México. We draw on their narratives, documented through a multiyear historical and ethnographic study, to discuss multispecies temporalities and reciprocal relations across more-than-human entities. Analyzing local environmental knowledge through "deep time" and relational perspectives, we invite conservation and environmental studies scholars to reconsider epistemological assumptions about time and the Anthropocene. We do so by documenting the multispecies rhythms and temporalities maintained in our research sites from time immemorial. In contrast with linear notions of time, these rhythms operate cyclically through reciprocal gifting between plants, humans, and other entities such as a water spirits and witches. The "deep time" lens that such practices offer, we suggest, can enrich biodiversity conservation and more-than-human political ecologies. We conclude by stressing that this relational "world-making" is also power-laden. Political identities are embedded in, and reconstructed through, a complex political economy and uneven relations of knowledge production. Together, these constitute what we call "the time of the butterfly."