Saving the Monarch Butterfly

You can start saving monarch butterflies by planting milkweed in your yard.  And, you can buy seedlings of common butterfly and butterfly weed (a compact milkweed) for $1 each at the Earth Day festival at Kenyon College on Sunday, April 6, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.   The seedlings will be sold at the Brown Family Environmental Center's booth at the festival, which will also have live monarch butterflies on display.

Populations of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico have crashed this winter, reaching nearly rock bottom, after a long-term decline starting with the winter of 1997-1998.  The butterflies were not only a week late in arriving in Mexico last November, but their numbers were the lowest yet, 94 percent less than the record high in the winter of 1996-1997.

Heather Doherty, program manager of the Brown Center, describes the problem--and some solutions--in the Center's April newsletter, which is online at their website .
The easiest place to start, she says, are out lawns, where we can carve out some space for milkweed.

The Frontier of Ecology is in Our Yards, Not the Arctic

That reminds me of the theme of the annual conference of the Baltimore-Washington Partners for Forest Stewardship I attended in 2011:  The frontier of ecology is in your backyard.   conference theme at a conference I went to several years ago in Maryland:  The frontier of ecology is in our yards.  The point is that solutions to problems such as global warming and declines in species like the monarch butterfly lie in the backyards of cities and suburbs.  This is because it is in such developed areas that the causes arise, not in faraway places like the Arctic where the results show up most dramatically.