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

Early in 1958 after living for 6 months in her new house on Berwick Road Rachel Carson started the four year long writing project that would become her renowned Silent Spring.

Rachel’s observations of the nature she loved from the wide windows of her home provided joyful relief from the gathering of somber subject matter for her new book and served to remind her of a compelling reason for accepting this challenge –the urgent need to protect life on the planet from toxic chemical pesticide threats.

There is growing evidence that many pollinators and plants are being triggered into earlier but not necessarily synchronous activity by the same temperature shifts associated with global warming. Find out what strategies you can implement in your own garden, orchard, or farm to enhance your plant pollinator habitat.

With climatic uncertainty now “the new normal,” many farmers, gardeners, and orchardists in North America are desperately seeking ways to adapt how they grow food in the face of climate change…

  A silent crisis that has been building up over recent decades may ultimately assume the form of one of…

The David Suzuki Foundation is calling on governments and rail, road and hydro agencies across Canada to join the growing ranks of milkweed lovers who are rallying to support monarch butterfly conservation.

Over the past month, U.S. federal and state agencies have made encouraging announcements, including a commitment of US$3.2 million for programs to grow milkweed — the plant monarchs depend on — in schoolyards and gardens and on highway roadsides from Mexico to Minnesota.

The number of monarch butterflies that completed an annual migration to their winter home in a Mexican forest sank this…

In 1995, National Geographic sent a reporter to the American West to document what the magazine called “A Farming Revolution“: a back-to-basics movement that eschewed monoculture crops and synthetic fertilizers and relied on crop rotation, green mulches and respect for the soil.

Fast forward 20 years, and the principles expressed by the fringe farmers in that story have become the basis of organic agriculture and the bedrock of the food movement.

The migratory monarch butterfly population has been decimated in recent years, with a total population decline of 90 percent over the past two decades.

But the dying butterflies are a bellweather for even bigger environmental damage.

Thursday, Sept 24, 2015 will be a not-soon-to-be forgotten date on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands are expected to gather to acknowledge Pope Francis’s momentous visit to the US as he delivers a first-ever papal address to the Joint Session of Congress.

But what makes this event even more memorable is the connection to the Pope’s Encyclical letter, Laudato Si, that he issued in June.

They fly through the Louisville area each year on their way from Canada to Mexico — an iconic flutter of orange and black that has taught generations of Americans about the biology of life cycles and metamorphosis, but now may be at risk of vanishing.

Monarch butterfly populations have plummeted so much that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now believes there might be reason to protect them under the Endangered Species Act.

A national wildlife group awarded $3.3 million in grants Monday in its initial push to stem the worrisome decline of monarch butterflies, hoping the effort helps restore as much as 33,000 acres of habitat for the black-and-orange insect.

The 22 grants announced by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation will be matched by more than $6.7 million from the recipients, who are in more than a dozen states and among 115 applicants for funds in the conservation effort launched earlier this year.

The Obama administration is hatching a plan to establish a 1,500-mile butterfly corridor along US Interstate 35 connecting Minnesota and Texas to protect the monarch butterfly.

The majestic North American monarch is well known for both its trademark orange and black stripes as well as its epic annual migration from Canada to Mexico.

A new census found this winter’s population of North American monarch butterflies in Mexico was at the lowest level ever…

One of the hottest winters in history poses good news and bad news for migrating Monarch butterflies this season. The good news: warm weather and well-timed rains translate into a grand wildflower season with plenty of milkweed in South Texas.

The bad news: those same high temperatures in Mexico where the Monarchs overwinter mean that many butterflies have burned up much of their stored winter fats, creating a lack of fuel and extra stress for their journey north.

Threats to several of the world’s great animal migrations necessitate a research agenda focused on identifying drivers of their population dynamics. The monarch butterfly is an iconic species whose continental migratory population in eastern North America has been declining precipitously.

Recent analyses have linked the monarch decline to reduced abundance of milkweed host plants in the USA caused by increased use of genetically modified herbicide-resistant crops.

A small garden is taking root around the corner from an East Chicago ArcelorMittal plant. Its presence on the 3000 block of Michigan Avenue is to draw another type of visitor to the industrial grounds – monarch butterflies.

JobLink, which has provided classes and training to mill workers since 1980, is providing a class for ArcelorMittal employees to come in their off-time in a lot next to its office and put in some elbow grease for the garden to bloom.