Monarch Madness

You may have seen the heartbreaking news (here, here and here, for example) that monarch butterflies have been added to the endangered species list. By some estimates, their population has declined between 85 and 95 percent since the 1990s. This is terrible news for the monarchs, of course. But it’s also bad news for us. Each extinction represents another assault on the biodiversity that makes this fragile planet livable. For us.

Yes, our politicians have been criminally irresponsible (I’m looking at you, Sen. Joe Manchin, among many of your esteemed colleagues across the aisle) and our corporate and industrial leaders have hostaged our futures to their short-term profit margins.

But we are not helpless! Plant some milkweed, already. If you’ve done that, then log onto the National Wildlife Center’s Native Plant Finder, plug in your zip code, get a list of the native plants in your ecoregion that support the most caterpillars, and put some of those in the ground, too. It’s not hard and it’s so, so critical.