One such “relict” can be found at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) where the El Segundo blue (ESB) butterfly occupies around 300 acres of leftover dune habitat. Legal protection of the butterfly, following its placement on the Endangered Species list in 1976, effectively halted expansion of the airport which had already gobbled up a considerable amount of coveted coastal land. Today the airport consists of nearly 3000 acres of actively used land, plus an additional 700 acres owned by the airport, including the El Segundo dunes where the blue butterfly lives with more than 900 other species.

At the time the butterfly was listed as endangered, its only known habitats were the small parcel at LAX and an even smaller fragment—a less than 2-acre-remnant of what was once a much larger dune habitat—on the grounds of the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo where the butterfly was discovered in 1975. At both the airport site and the refinery, the butterfly’s habitat exists within a highly secured and surveilled area with little or no public access. Nonnative plant species, however, easily traverse and colonize the otherwise hardened borders and, in doing so, they stabilize the shifting, sandy soil. Because the butterfly and its host plant prefer destabilized, windblown soil, regular removal of invasive plants is required to preserve the dynamic habitat conditions to which both butterfly and buckwheat are adapted.

Habitat loss remains the primary threat to the ESB. This is true for most endangered species. For butterflies, and insect species generally, climate change is also a major driver of extinction, as extreme weather events and more intense and frequent fires are linked to plummeting populations. In terms of percentage decline, butterflies are some of the hardest hit insects; they have seen an estimated 53% decline in their populations in the last decade or so. To be sure, all environments globally have now been affected by human activity. But there is a particular irony in the ESB’s continued survival being so intimately linked to the very industries and processes—climate change and habitat loss driven by the global oil extraction and the transportation sector—that threaten insect populations.

While the details may vary, the Janus-faced nature of protection—the peculiar commingling of imperilment and preservation—is a feature of many conservation success stories. At times, protection of endangered species requires ongoing, aggressive manipulation of landscapes. Consider another thumbnail-sized butterfly: the Saint Francis’s satyr (Neonympha mitchelli francisci) whose entire range is limited to an active military base. This tiny, brown, admittedly drab-looking butterfly’s unusually evocative name was bestowed by a pair of lepidopterists “in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi, known for kindness to animals and a love of natural beauty.”

The “satyr” classification denotes a larger subfamily of delicate brown butterflies to which this creature belongs. The Saint Francis’s satyr coexists with, and indeed depends upon, incendiary munitions deployed in artillery training on the grounds of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Guns, flares, and other ranged weapons frequently ignite fires that keep forests and wetlands open, which create the dynamic and highly disturbed conditions preferred by the butterflies. By chance, as biologists discovered, conditions on the artillery range happen to mimic the specific habitat requirements to which the butterfly is adapted. Thus, artillery explosions both threaten the butterflies—some of whom cannot escape the conflagrations—while enabling their survival. For conservationists at Fort Bragg, protection of this rare and endangered butterfly underscores a troubling paradox. In the words of the most ardent protector of the St. Francis’s satyr: “we must kill some butterflies to save all butterflies.”