You correctly explain the monarch butterfly decline as direct result of the loss of milkweed, which in turn is due to the application of more weedkiller, which in turn is enabled by the GMO technology that makes the crop more resistant to weedkiller.

Either we allow the weeds and keep the butterflies or we kill the weeds and lose the butterflies. If farmers were to remove those weeds using cheap labour or robotic drones, then the effect on the butterfly would be the same. It’s not about GMOs, its about milkweed and yields.

Such “systems thinking” leads us to understand that GMOs are merely the means, not the goal. It is the goal of higher yields and greater profits that has done for the monarch butterfly. That more “holistic view” can lead us to a more intelligent debate about how we want to reconcile our desire for cheap and plentiful food with the health of our environment. Reducing that debate to GMOs is indeed a “trap of reductionist thinking”.