SAVING THE MONARCH BUTTERFLY
Monarch butterflies are important culturally and ecologically across North America. Generations have watched in wonder as yellow-and-black striped caterpillars fold into green-and-gold chrysalises and emerge as large orange-and-black butterflies. Monarch's multigenerational migration is legendary — a journey of up to 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada, undertaken by animals weighing less than a gram.
BACKGROUND
In the United States and southern Canada, monarchs are ambassadors of nature in people's gardens and symbols of summertime outdoors. In Mexico the beloved butterflies arrive for the winter during Day of the Dead celebrations, where they symbolize the souls of the departed.
Yet these migrating butterflies, once a familiar sight, are plummeting toward extinction due to landscape-scale threats from pesticides, development and climate change. That's why the Center is working hard to win them protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and to safeguard them from pesticides.
In monarchs' overwintering groves, there were once so many butterflies that newspapers reported branches breaking under their weight and described the masses of monarchs as “the personification of happiness.”
Historically monarchs across U.S. grasslands would have numbered in the billions. In the late 1990s the clustered butterflies covered 45 acres of fir trees in their overwintering forests in Mexico, but over the past three decades monarchs have declined by 90%. Scientists estimate there needs to be a minimum of 15 acres of butterflies for the species to be out of the danger zone of migratory collapse, but the most recent count documented less than an acre of occupied trees.
The monarch population west of the Rocky Mountains, which overwinters on the California coast, is also in great peril, having declined by 95% over two decades. Numbering some 1.2 million in the 1990s — and having a brush with complete collapse in 2020 — the population now hovers around 200,000 butterflies.
Across their range, monarchs are threatened by pesticides, climate change, vehicle collisions, and fragmented and poisoned habitats as they navigate their way across North America. Conversion of their overwintering forests in Mexico to grow avocados for export to meet the United States’ unsustainable avocado consumption is a growing threat. Monarchs need a helping hand from the government, businesses, and concerned individuals.
OUR CAMPAIGN
We took our first big action for monarchs in 2014, when the Center and allies petitioned to protect monarchs as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
In late 2020 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that monarchs’ protection was “warranted but precluded” — meaning that although the agency’s scientists found that monarchs needed Endangered Species Act protection, they were put on a waiting list. We filed a lawsuit and gained a deadline that forced the Service to finally propose the species for protection in 2024.
With the monarch population well below the thresholds at which government scientists predict migrations could collapse, the Center and more than 100 other groups have repeatedly called on Congress to significantly increase funding to $100 million per year to help conserve the butterflies and their habitat.
The Center is also working hard to save monarchs and other imperiled species from toxic pesticides, like glyphosate and dicamba, through our Environmental Health program.
Monarchs' decline is a harbinger of widespread environmental change. The plummeting population of these familiar butterflies, along with the decline of other butterflies and bees, threatens peoples’ wellbeing too, since our food security depends on the ecological services pollinators provide.
Monarch butterflies and their epic migrations could disappear unless people take rapid action to protect them.
Check out our press releases to learn more about the Center's actions for monarch butterflies.
