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

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.

Enhancing Native Pollinator Populations on Farms. We need these farming partners to pollinate our fruit and vegetable crops, yet our native pollinators and honey bees are struggling from multiple threats of pesticide exposure, habitat loss, parasites and diseases.

John Hayden from The Farm Between in Jeffersonville, VT will present on who the native pollinators are, why they are in trouble…

Monarch butterflies are — quite literally — a force of nature. They strike out each year by the thousands on a four-generation, 3,000-mile-long journey of pure instinct and faith.

They use both inherent and imprinted knowledge. They use subterfuge, placing their eggs on a plant that feeds their young caterpillars, but makes them poisonous and distasteful to predators. They use natural GPS.

Yesterday, the First Lady welcomed local students and FoodCorps leaders on the South Lawn for the sixth-annual planting of the White House Kitchen Garden.

The garden was first planted in 2009 to commence a nationwide conversation on healthy eating and inspired the First Lady to launch Let’s Move!

The news was already bad. Really, really bad.

Monarch butterflies that alight from Mexico and fly across the United States to Canada are being massacred. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service laid out a grim statistic in February: Nearly a billion have vanished since 1990…

Pollinators contribute substantially to the economy of the United States and are vital to keeping fruits, nuts, and vegetables in our diets. Honey bee pollination alone adds more than $15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year in the United States.

Over the past few decades, there has been a significant loss of pollinators, including honey bees, native bees, birds, bats, and butterflies, from the environment.

Data released today show that more monarch butterflies were counted at overwintering sites in California this year compared to last…

Milkweed isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when considering insulation materials. But the Canadian Coast Guard has other ideas and is testing the pods as a potential environmentally friendly insulation.

The Coast Guard works in partnership with Encore3, a manufacturing company in Québec, to prototype parkas, gloves and mittens made with milkweed insulation.

In 1996, World Wildlife Fund Mexico counted almost a billion monarch butterflies overwintering in the mountain forests of that country. By 2014 the number had plummeted to just 57 million, a decline of almost 94 percent.

The numbers were even lower the year before when only 34 million monarchs migrated to Mexico.

All over Minnesota and beyond, citizens and clubs and the occasional municipality are planting milkweed in hopes of helping the monarch butterfly reverse its ongoing population crash.

Still, the losses continue. This gorgeous, iconic creature’s numbers have declined by probably 80 percent in the last decade, and it may face 50-50 odds of disappearing from the Midwestern landscape in the next two.

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

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…

El Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) en el Senado propuso que en el marco de la Cumbre de Líderes de América del Norte, mañana miércoles, en la Ciudad de Toluca, se tomen decisiones conjuntas para poner en marcha un Programa de Conectividad Ecológica de la Región para la conservación de la Mariposa Monarca.

Dara Satterfield hadn’t planned to conduct experiments at the Texas State Fair, but that is where her study subjects showed up last month. She was still in Georgia when they arrived, so she hurriedly packed her car, then drove all night. As she pulled into the fairgrounds in Dallas the next morning, they were feasting on nectar-filled blossoms of frostweed alongside the Wild West Pet Palooza.

The hungry travelers, like most monarch butterflies that migrate from breeding grounds in the northern United States and southern Canada, had stopped in Texas to consume enough calories to power the last leg of their flight to the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico and survive five months overwintering there.

  A recently published analysis of data on tagged monarch butterflies migrating from the United States to Mexico emphasizes the…