We have practically no collective experience with the world compared to its 5 billion year history. The trees have seen and lived through innumerable changes and trends in the forest. They have been through drought and floods, cold and heat, fire and hurricanes. The butterfly knows nothing of these strange experiences. It only knows what it senses surrounding it.
People are like the butterfly.
We can't know if what we percieve is the norm compared with history going back millions of years. We have our ways of consulting with the trees, by looking at their rings or studying fossil records. But that information is subject to how we interpret it through our modern paradigms. We cannot have an impartial view of the history of the Earth. Like the butterfly, there is so much we can't even begin to understand, like the impact that glaciers, weather, and climate have had over time.