Forests for Monarchs

Since the late 1990s, the monarch butterfly population has fallen dramatically. This dangerous decline has been linked to loss of winter habitat in the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, due to unsustainable logging and clear-cutting; heavy use of pesticides and herbicides in the U.S. and Canada that kill milkweed, the plant crucial to the monarch’s breeding survival; heavy use of neonicotinoids (neonics) that kill pollinators through poisoned nectar; as well as global climate change. At Forests for Monarchs, a program of La Cruz Habitat Protection Project, we reforest land in and around the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve where millions of monarchs spend each winter, and in the Highland Lakes watershed area in Michoacán, Mexico.