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

Monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico each fall from Canada and the United States to overwinter in forested areas in mountains…

I have a confession to make. A few years ago, on a farm I own in eastern Nebraska, I took 44 acres out of production, on purpose. That’s a lot.

Where corn and beans once grew, I planted tall, native grasses and wildflowers. Among area farmers, this was seen as nothing short of scandalous.

Right now in Washington and Oregon, 380,000 honeybee hives are at work pollinating cherry, pear, and apple orchards.

Last month, a million hives—three-quarters of the nation’s entire stock of commercial honeybees—were pollinating almonds in the Central Valley of California.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not high on most physicians’ worry lists. If we think at all about biotechnology, most of us probably focus on direct threats to human health, such as prospects for converting pathogens to biologic weapons or the implications of new technologies for editing the human germline.

But while those debates simmer, the application of biotechnology to agriculture has been rapid and aggressive.

On March 9th 2016, just days after we’d heard the good news that monarch numbers had rebounded to cover just over 4 hectares of forest in the mountains of central Mexico; a huge winter storm hit their wintering sites and the surrounding area.

The storm began with rain and was followed by hail, snow, and sub-freezing temperatures. The freezing temperatures killed many monarchs and the strong winds caused trees to topple over, losing monarch habitat.

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.

Monarch butterflies have arrived in Mexico, and conservationists are applauding the country’s crack down on illegal loggers who contributed to habitat loss and decline of the species.

Now they are turning their attention to the U.S. to help save the migratory insect.

The number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped by 27 percent this year, reversing last year’s recovery from historically low numbers, according to a study by government and independent experts released Thursday.

The experts say the decline could be due to late winter storms last year that blew down more than 100 acres (40 hectares) of forests where migrating monarch butterflies spend the winter in central Mexico.

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.

My mantra has always been “the impact of the individual, the impact of the individual…” I have had great teachers in my life that made sure I realized that we indeed make a difference – but it’s up to us to choose if it’s a positive or negative one.

This all started with Gary Nabhan and his wonderful, heartwarming idea for Make Way for Monarchs to sponsor a “Day of Action and Contemplation”…

As Mexico emerges from the most violent election campaign within living memory and embarks on the presidency of Andres López Obrador, one prominent citizen watches at a diagonal: a veteran of Mexico’s other war – not that over narco-traffic and its clients in politics, but that against nature.

In a recent interview with the daily El Universal, Homero Aridjis – award-winning poet and former ambassador – described all the candidates at last June’s election as “environmental illiterates” – referring to the battle he has fought for decades now, and which he sees reaching its final stages – for Mexico’s natural and cultural heritage.

A simple but easily-forgotten fact about American farmers was recently revealed in what may be the most innovative social history of our continent since Howard Zinn wrote A People’s History of the United States thirty-five years ago.

Chip Taylor is the founder and director of Monarch Watch.

He talks about the recent decline of the monarch butterfly due mainly to habitat loss, pesticide use and government policies that encourage ethanol production, and how there will need to be a massive effort to plant milkweed if we hope to save this iconic species.

Sometime in the mid-1990s,Will Harris looked around at the Georgia farm that had been in his family for more than a century, and decided he didn’t want to pass it on to his daughters.

Not like this. His herd was unhappy. He was under constant financial stress.

The actions of ordinary people are often absent in studies of urban renewal and urban ecology. Around the world, people who are fed up with environmental degradation and the breakdown of their communities come together to transform blighted vacant lots, trashed-out stream corridors, polluted estuaries, and other “broken places.”

Civic ecology practices—such as community gardening, wetlands restoration, river cleanups, and tree planting…