Environmental Engineer and Farmer Nancy Hayden Lives Her Ideals

Recently, my orchard and garden “decided” that I needed more time in the wild to see how plants and animals really worked together, so they evicted me from cultivated ground of my own making, somehow giving me a concussion and a fractured rib on my way out.

However slow I usually am to get the picture, this time, I got the message loud and clear: if I were truly interested in seeing how to design farmscapes to harbor beneficial insects such as monarch butterflies and native bees, I needed to “apprentice myself” to a wild habitat where such healthy relationships are the norm, not the exception.

If you read the headline “Gardeners’ Good Intentions Are Killing Monarch Butterflies,” you might get the impression that planting milkweed is bad for these butterflies. Well, don’t believe the hype. Monarchs need milkweed—in fact, it’s the only thing their larvae eat!

In the interest of combating that disinformation, dubbed #MonarchGate, which kicked off in the media two weeks ago, I’m going to make a few more things clear. In a hurry?

Monarch butterflies: They are the iconic symbols of international cooperation in North America in the face of climate change.

Because of their long distance migration across a variety of climates and habitats, monarchs serve as a messenger of the collective global effects of climate change interacting with a variety of other stressors, natural and human-triggered.

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.

For more than a decade, Margaret McRae has raised monarch butterflies in her east-end Toronto home. Every two years she applies for permission from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, then scans the milkweed that grows plentifully in her gardens.

When she finds a leaf bearing an egg, she brings it inside to protect it from parasites. Within four days, she has a monarch caterpillar, covered in white, black, and yellow stripes.

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.

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.

According to several widely-cited refereed journal articles, monarch butterfly populations may have declined precipitously over the last decade due to a number of man-made and natural factors…

dramatic reduction in milkweed densities on a hundred million or more acres of row crop farmlands due to intensified glyphosate use in weed management practices…

Though small, pollinators play a big role in our lives. They make our world more beautiful — most flowering plant species rely on pollinators to reproduce. Pollinators also are responsible for keeping us fed. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports more than 75 percent of the world’s food crops rely on pollination by insects and other animals.

Without pollinators, there would be no coffee, chocolate, tomatoes or apples. There also would be no milk, cheese or ice cream — dairy cows eat alfalfa, which is pollinated by leafcutter and honey bees. Even spring break would take a hit.

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 City of St. Louis is launching a citywide initiative to help connect people and urban nature. The STL Milkweeds for Monarchs initiative goals are to increase monarch butterfly habitat and to help people experience the splendor of monarchs in neighborhood parks and spaces.

This initiative will advance a priority in the Mayor’s Sustainability Action Agenda: to foster an enhanced connection between people and urban natural resources.

As most everyone interested in sustainability knows by now, the concept has been appropriated by numerous entities and used in various ways, often to achieve different objectives.

In his introductory chapter to the excellent 2013 edition of the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World report, Robert Engelman coined the term “sustainababble” to reflect this “cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool.”

Make Way for Monarchs requests your updates on milkweed seed availability in your region.

According to some garden, nursery and farm journalists, the declines of monarchs created more demand for milkweeds than ever before in American history; and yet, we have no good numbers to document this. Help us explore what’s happening in your community or region by answering one or more of the following questions.

The population of North American monarch butterflies has plummeted from 1 billion to 33 million in just two decades. Now, a project is underway to revive the monarch by making an interstate highway the backbone of efforts to restore its dwindling habitat.

Interstate 35 lies at the heart of a vast circulatory system, one of the massive transportation arteries that enable Americans to move long distances quickly.

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