Anthony Battah, a long-distance runner and lawyer based in Montreal, plans to run nearly 2,800 miles from Montreal to Mexico, all in an effort to bring attention to the rapid decline of monarch butterflies and to highlight monarch conservation.
“We’ve been completely ignoring what science has been telling us for years, and that’s to take care of our planet,” Battah told CityNews Montreal.
During the trek, the ultramarathoner aims to raise $1 for every meter he runs, hoping to accumulate $4.5 million towards conservation efforts.
Battah says he was first inspired to make the run a decade ago following the birth of his daughter.
“Our beautiful Laurence just turned 10, and when she arrived, my wife and I, as so many parents do, started to realize and question what we’ve just done, and asking ourselves what kind of world we put her in,” said Battah. “And since then, I’ve been looking for a way to make a change, take action in a significant matter. And last year, I had this crazy idea of running to Mexico.”
The monarch butterfly population has declined over the past several decades due to deforestation. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the eastern monarch butterfly population decreased by 84 percent between 1996 and 2014. The IUCN declared the species endangered last year.
“Monarchs are pollinators, so when you protect the habitat of the monarch butterfly, we do have a ripple effect on a bunch of other species that have key ecological roles in our ecosystem,” Agathe Moreau, the education coordinator at Espace pour la vie’s Mission Monarch, told the news outlet.
Battah says the run is not just about the monarch butterflies but damage to the environment as a whole.
“That’s the purpose, putting myself in this big challenge… to rapidly attract attention to the cause, because yes, the monarch needs our help, but especially the environment and biodiversity. We need them, they need us, and the scientists are saying that the first to leave are the more fragile, the insects. It’s a sign, what they’re living now, is maybe what’s waiting for us and our daughters and sons and children down the road,” Battah said in the interview.
Battah expects to arrive in Mexico sometime in November. His three-month trip can be tracked on his Instagram and a live tracker.
“When I think of it as a whole, it’s dizzying,” he said. “Three months of running, [34 miles] a day, so you gotta bring it back to the basics, which is what I did. One meter at a time… how about we finance one dollar per meter?”
As of this Saturday, he’s already raised $22,129 for monarch conservation.
The International Monarch Monitoring Blitz, an annual event devoted to researching the migration and the preservation of the monarch butterfly, is currently running until Aug. 6.
Laura Ratliff is a New York City-based writer, editor, and runner. Laura's writing expertise spans numerous topics, ranging from travel and food and drink to reported pieces covering political and human rights issues. She has previously worked at Architectural Digest, Bloomberg News, and Condé Nast Traveler and was most recently the senior editorial director at TripSavvy. Like many of us, Laura was bitten by the running bug later in life, after years of claiming to "hate running." Her favorite marathon is Big Sur.
