Pollinator Giving Trees – a fun hands-on project to learn about pollinators

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.

One of my most vivid childhood memories from Iowa’s corn country is watching clouds of monarch butterflies dance around the milkweed patch by our back steps and finding caterpillars on the leaves.

My brother and I raised them, as many kids do.

Iowa is taking a big step to help the recovery of monarch butterflies. The Iowa Monarch Conservation Consortium on Feb. 27 released a statewide strategy to support monarch butterfly populations in Iowa and North America.

This insect is an important pollinator of plants and crops. The 135-page plan can help farmers, backyard gardeners and others with a road map for boosting monarch butterfly habitat.

Pollinators—including honeybees, bumble bees, butterflies, and other insects—play an important role in our farms, flower gardens, and food.

In fact, some of the crops most important to Oregon’s agricultural economy—blueberries, raspberries, cherries, apples, vegetable seed, squash—are reliant on bees for pollination and reproduction.

Last year NRDC filed a petition with EPA asking them to review the use of glyphosate (also known as Roundup) in light of its effects on monarch butterflies and to impose restrictions on its use. After more than a year, EPA has yet to respond to our petition so today we are filing a lawsuit to compel them to act with expediency.

Anyone who has been following the plight of the monarch butterflies knows that they are in trouble.

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.

    On the first of November, when Mexicans celebrate a holiday called the Day of the Dead, some also…

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…

  In Chicago, hundreds of Mexican-American families are growing monarch butterflies, watching a caterpillar ball up into a green chrysalis,…

Monarchs rely on milkweeds for food and for breeding habitat, but over 860 million stems were lost in the northern United States over the last decade. Scientists with the USGS and partners examined the density of Eastern migratory monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico from 1979-2002 and the amount of milkweed plants available to them in North America.

The study found that 3.62 billion milkweed stems are needed to reestablish this monarch population, but only 1.34 billion stems remain in the U.S.

The next time you’re tooling down the highway somewhere in America, take a look around: Those miles of medians and roadsides along our highways offer unexpected environmental benefits.

All those broad, green strips along the nation’s highways turn out be vital habitats for many small critters, as well as pollinators including bees, butterflies and birds.

The sixth edition of Michelle Obama’s White House Kitchen Garden, planted on the South Lawn earlier this month, is now a bit more friendly to the insects we rely upon to pollinate our crops.

The First Lady announced the addition of the first-ever “White House Pollinator Garden,” a plot designed to not only assist the more than 70,000 bees that make up the White House…

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.

  One of the joys of the season is the stunning sight of a monarch butterfly. One Long Island woman…

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.”