Environmental Engineer and Farmer Nancy Hayden Lives Her Ideals

Thanksgiving was right around the corner, and a sizable number of one of America’s most famous migrants could be seen still sputtering south. Not across the Texas-Mexico border, where most monarch butterflies should be by that time of year. These fluttered tardily through the migratory funnel that is Cape May, N.J., their iconic orange-and-black patterns splashing against the muted green of pines frosted by the season’s first chill.

This delayed migration is not normal, and it alarmed monarch researchers across the country.

This week marks the beginning of our second annual “Pollinator Giving Tree” community project. The dates are flexible but can be mid-October to late winter.

The theme for this year’s trees is sunflowers! While there were thousands of people who added nectar flowers and milkweeds to their yards in 2015, we (and the pollinators that depend on them) actually need many millions of gardens planted.

In light of the severe decline of both the eastern and western monarch butterfly populations that has occurred since the late-1990s, we are writing to ask you to establish a multi-agency monarch butterfly recovery initiative to restore the habitats that support the extraordinary migrations of this iconic species.

We encourage you to direct the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Farm Service Agency (FSA), and Forest Service (USFS) of the U.S. Department of…

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.

Monarchs have been in the news a lot lately, most of it grim. Numbers have dropped dramatically over recent years from various causes, including climate change, illegal logging at the insects’ overwintering sites in Mexico and new practices in the agricultural industry.

A major factor is the widespread use of GMO crops that are Round-Up resistant, allowing U.S. farmers in the monarch’s summer breeding grounds in the Corn Belt to spray the herbicide on their fields to kill weeds.

Los tres niveles de gobierno, instituciones académicas, de investigación y sociedad civil, se comprometieron a unir esfuerzos tendientes a proteger el fenómeno de la Mariposa Monarca y a pugnar porque aumente el número de lepidópteros que año con año llega a los santuarios de Michoacán y del Estado de México.

Al inaugurarse el Segundo Encuentro Internacional de Investigación y Conservación de la Mariposa Monarca, el Comisionado Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, Luis Fueyo…

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

Threatened animals like elephants, porpoises and lions grab all the headlines, but what’s happening to monarch butterflies is nothing short of a massacre. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summed it up in just one grim statistic on Monday: Since 1990, about 970 million have vanished.

It happened as farmers and homeowners sprayed herbicides on milkweed plants, which serve as the butterflies’ nursery, food source and home.

Among the countless organisms that have evolved during the history of life on earth, monarch butterflies are among the most extraordinary.

Sadly, their unique multigenerational migration across our large continent, their spectacular overwintering aggregations on the volcanic mountains in central Mexico, and their educational value to children in Canada, the United States, and Mexico are all threatened. Monitoring of the butterfly population over the past two decades indicates a grim situation.

The largest habitat recovery initiative in American history is needed to plant new and enhance existing populations of milkweeds and other native wildflowers for the recovery of monarch butterflies. This report offers insights—particularly for departments of transportation and other landscape managers—on how best to build collaborations to manage the milkweed seed supply chain to recover monarchs as well as crop pollinators in North America over the next decade.

A line of people curves like the body of a giant caterpillar, twisting up the mountain into the endangered oyamel fir forest. Michoacán, Mexico—the cloud-misted overwintering site of the monarch butterfly.

Near the middle of the caterpillar of people, I kept pace, thinking about Catholic peregrinos who journey on well-worn footpaths and roads, sometimes hundreds of miles, to reach a precious relic…

The steep declines over the last quarter century of wild pollinators in the Southwest among native bees, monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus L.), hummingbirds, and nectar-feeding bats have come during a time of accelerated climate change, and are likely due to a variety of stresses interacting with climatic shifts.

It’s a welcome summer sight: butterflies fluttering from flower to flower. But we could be seeing less of them. A study released today points a finger at road salt.

According to the study, researchers from University of Minnesota found butterflies that were fed a high-sodium diet only had a 10 percent survival rate, compared to a 40 percent to 50 percent survival rate for butterflies that were fed low-to-medium sodium diets.

  In the U.S. alone, there are more than 17,000,000 acres along federal, state and county highways that can potentially…

On your way to being seated at Oyamel in Washington D.C., you pass stunning mobiles of orange and black monarchs, the now-imperiled butterfly that winters in the sacred oyamel fir forests of Central Mexico.

But once you look at the menu, you read that Chef Jose Andrés is donating one dollar for each Taco de Puerco Estilo Apatzingan to the preservation of monarch…