ABSTRACT
The monarch butterfly is both the symbol and embodiment of a trilateral ecology that connects nation-states, environmental activists, and conservation science across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. By demonstrating how the butterfly mobilizes a cyber-community to resist Monsanto, whose herbicides threaten the butterfly, this chapter explores cyberspace as the connector of a transnational community dedicated to monarch butterfly survival. I aim to query the active roles that more-than-human actors play in environmental resistance movements. This entanglement of a butterfly species, the humans who admire it, and an unstructured resistance to a multinational corporation instantiates a multi-order network that challenges agribusiness’s practices through the cultivation of milkweed and participation in cyber-lobbying. The chapter explores these practices through a Deleuzian approach to agency. It claims that practices of contestation can be distributed among actors of different natures and it offers an explanation of the limits and possibilities of a cyber-resistance movement that is mediated by a butterfly and enabled by communication infrastructures.
