The Butterfly Effect is a research project on the Alcon Blue Butterfly, supported by FOTODOK Utrecht and the MIAP fund 'Future of Nature'. Easy to overlook, due to it’s size, but whenever you see them, pressed in your memory due to it’s magical blue color. Zigzagging they leave a trace in front of you, before quickly disappearing. 30 years ago all the wet moors in the Netherlands were covered with them. A beautiful sight and with that an icon for our biodiversity. I remember seeing it about 17 years ago, walking with my parents down the Malpie*. The Alcon Blue. I felt a sense of wonder, but with the disappearance of this butterfly, this memory of wonder disappeared. Until I saw them again early 2020, this time dead in wooden drawers in the Naturalis depot in Leiden, where they are cherished with a pin through their slender blue body. Where there once were so many, this species has declined by 93% in the last 30 years. Due to the increased nitrogen deposition the habitat of the Alcon blue slowly disappears. A familiar blue face is slowly disappearing from our landscape, threatening to disappear from our collective memory. But while the Alcon Blue is slowly disappearing, a certain value is growing, a collective value that we all share. Streets have been named after the butterfly, postal stamps depict them, and schools have been created with mosaics of the Gentian Bell. The Alcon Blue is cherished. If there is so much evidence of the value of this butterfly, why don't we bother bringing it back? * a nature reservation in the South of the Netherlands With this project I’m trying to regain value for our biodiversity, with the Alcon Blue as its ambassador. Strolling through archives, talking to biologists, campaigning with inhabitants of the ‘Alcon Blue’ streets and walking through wet moors like an Alexander von Humboldt, I try to imagine in what state our biodiversity could also be like. Environmental politics is a difficult subject to tackle with photography; a medium sometimes criticized for its limitations in communicating the necessary action to prevent further environmental damage before its effects can be seen and photographed. But, by creating photographically constructed and poetic imagery, I am trying to regain a sense of wonder to this beautiful butterfly.