What can you do to help increase the abundance of monarchs?

The following draft resolution–based on analogous state legislative initiatives in California, Minnesota, New Mexico and Oregon, offer a non-partisan means of assessing whether there are risks to farmer’s profitability and to state food security due to recent declines of honey bees, bumblebees, monarch butterflies and other pollinators.

The striking beauty of the monarch butterfly is unmistakable — but their uniqueness goes beyond the vivid orange and black wings that make them so recognizable.

These slight creatures weigh less than a dime, yet travel thousands of miles every year — 50 to 100 miles in just a day. An instinctive internal compass guides them on the same migration path as their ancestors — in spite of the fact that they have never taken the journey before. It’s nothing short of a miracle of nature.

But the butterflies that begin this majestic odyssey will never finish it.

In a landmark meeting in the history of insect conservation, the White House today convened diverse stakeholders to address catastrophic declines in pollinators and prioritize their recovery on a continent-wide scale. Led by White House Science Policy Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, more than fifty farmers, beekeepers, nurserymen, scientists, educators…

Want to help monarch butterflies? Encourage a local school, faith group, business or institution with gardens or green space to add more milkweed and butterfly-friendly plants.

Here are the seven steps to planting the seeds for growing a butterfly garden in your community…

A landscape of runway and sleek aircraft aluminum, seen through a windowpane. Metal and concrete and glass. The same materials crushed and crumbled and torn where the World Trade Center had stood six days earlier.

We were waiting at our gate, at Boston’s Logan Airport, on the day after it reopened—six days after September 11th 2001.

Every year a generation of monarchs reach the forests of Mexico’s Michoacan region. The 2,800-mile journey south from the U.S. takes four generations of monarchs in a single year.

Millions of the butterflies turn the forest orange as they wait out the winter for six to eight months.

The annual migration to Mexico of millions of orange-and-black monarch butterflies is one of the nation’s cherished rituals. But it could come to a virtual halt if the insect’s natural habitat is not urgently salvaged.

That is the conclusion of a long list of scientists, artists and environmentalists who are calling on the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada to act swiftly to protect butterfly breeding grounds.

Download and print your own free Make Way for Monarchs poster. It’s designed to print for about a dollar at any quick printer, like Kinkos or OfficeMax, using a laser printer.

The image is 12 x 18 inches…

Monarch butterflies are known for their striking flame-orange and black appearance, and especially for their mass migration in their millions to spend winters in the mountain forests of Mexico. But despite growing problems with deforestation in Mexico, their struggle begins at home in the United States and Canada.

The butterflies that fly to Mexico are the great-great-great grandchildren of the monarchs that were in Mexico the previous winter. In 2013 the overwintering population in Mexico covered 0.67 hectares of fir forest (about 44 million butterflies) the lowest since counts began in 1994.

We know monarch numbers have declined drastically in recent years. Estimates are down by 80 to 90% from a population size of about one billion in the early 1990s.

It’s long been thought that the big reason behind this is the loss of milkweed throughout the farming regions of the U.S. Midwest.

Two serious diseases (one in people and one in animals) transmitted by insects have been totally eliminated from specific locations. Such news would be noteworthy in any season. During this environmentally troubled holiday period especially it merits celebrating and sharing with friends, relatives and colleagues in the year ahead. Why?

Because the methods used in each case involved science-based strategies that minimized or removed reliance on toxic chemical pesticides.

Forty years ago, amid a forest swirling with millions of monarchs, an aging scientist found a thumbnail-sized sticker placed by two Minnesota schoolboys and solved a decades-old mystery.

Dr. Fred Urquhart, a Canadian zoologist, had searched for the wintering grounds of the monarch since 1937. At the time, no one knew where the monarchs came from each spring. In pursuit of an answer, Urquhart and his wife, Norah, created thousands of monarch tags — tiny stickers that adhered to wings — and distributed them to butterfly enthusiasts throughout North America.

We’ve framed the environmental problem the wrong way. There is no environment out there and we’re here, and we’ve got to regulate our interaction with it.

We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we are doing to our surroundings, we’re doing directly to ourselves.

Ferguson Missouri has stayed in the news for much of the summer and fall of 2014, and not much of what the media has been saying about this community has been pleasant, let alone laudatory.

But when I arrived in St Louis and asked my wife if we could go to Ferguson for a prayer vigil, I found a community unbelievably different from the one represented in the news.

Monarch numbers are declining; this decline is statistically significant (Brower et al. 2012) and readily apparent from data on the area occupied by monarchs on the overwintering roost in Mexico.

While we saw more monarchs during the summer of 2014 than we did last year or the year before, and will thus hopefully see more in Mexico this winter, it’s unlikely that the population will be anywhere near as large as it was a decade ago.