Three Countries Trying To Save The Monarch Butterfly

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. - Aug. 17, 2016 - PRLog -- In June of this year, President Obama met with Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to discuss climate change and more specifically how these three countries can save our important pollinators from extinction. That's why Vermont small business owner, Peggy Farabaugh, of Vermont Woods Studios (VWS) has partnered with Canadian businessman Francois Simard and Mexican expert silviculturist, Jose Luis Alvarez to save the monarchs. The trio has, for years prior to meeting, been working individually with different methods to save the species and restore its habitat.

This summer Peggy and VWS are sponsoring a Save the Monarchs Tour throughout the Northeast. The tour begins August 25 with an event at Vermont Woods Studios in Vernon, Vermont before moving onto the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (8/26), Museum of Science, Boston (8/27), Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum (8/28), ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center in Burlington, VT (8/30), Marsh Botanical Garden at Yale University (8/31), Audubon Greenwich (9/1) and the Philadelphia Zoo (9/2).

There are two purposes of this tour: first, to raise awareness of this important pollinator's population decline due to habitat destruction within the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The second purpose is to conserve and increase the acreage of the monarch butterfly habitat across North America.

Peggy Farabaugh started a small online business selling sustainable, Vermont made wood furniture in 2005. Vermont Woods Studios is a mission oriented company with forest conservation at its heart. When Farabaugh learned that the monarch's winter forest habitat had shrunk by 90% she decided to put the business's resources to work helping with reforestation. That was the beginning of her partnership with Alvarez and Simard.

Jose Luis Alvarez has spent a lifetime planting trees and reforesting the monarch butterfly's mountain habitat in Michoacan, Mexico. In 1997 he created Forests For Monarchs (FFM), a non-profit business with the goal of planting millions of trees to restore the monarch habitat. While combating illegal logging, climate change and freak snowstorms, FFM has planted over 6 million trees and is eager to plant more.

Francois Simard is a chemical engineer from Granby, Quebec, who created a small business to develop technologies to use milkweed fibers (the only plant monarch caterpillars eat) for insulated clothing (i.e. down parkas) and for oil spill cleanup products. Francois is looking for farmers in Canada and Vermont to plant milkweed commercially so he can purchase it as raw material.

Simard will be joining Peggy and Jose for the Burlington, Vermont event. Alvarez and Farabaugh will discuss monarch evolution, migration, discovery of over-wintering grounds, population changes, deforestation/reforestation, U.S. habitat issues, threats and future predictions at the events.