A New Approach to Conservation

By Bill Toone, PRS

The annual migration cycle of the monarch butterfly is one of nature’s most spectacular events. Up to 750 million monarch butterflies migrate to the Transverse Neo-Volcanic Mountain Range in Mexico to collectively roost for the winter. There they cluster together in massive clumps, each butterfly hanging next to the other and depending on the trees’ shelter for warmth and protection from the rain.

In general, there are two populations of monarch butterflies in North America—those west of the Rocky Mountains and those to the east. The eastern population is by far the larger of the two. It takes four to five generations of monarchs to complete the annual migration from as far away as Canada all the way to central Mexico. Even with four generations separating them from the sites in Mexico, they make their way back to the same trees, the oyamel firs, every year. 

The oyamel fir forests in Mexico are being badly deforested. The ECOLIFE Foundation, which I helped to found in 2003, implemented an effective strategy to help protect Central Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve that was a truly community-based conservation project, one that involved the local people. The approach protected the monarch butterfly habitat and directly improved the quality of life for communities of people living within and surrounding the reserve.

When I first began traveling to Mexico to study the monarch butterflies, there were approximately one billion of them. This number plummeted to its lowest level in 2009, to 250 million butterflies. The main cause, deforestation, occurred because local communities took wood from the surrounding forests for cooking and heating—about seventy trees per year per family, totaling over 250 million trees a year.

Our idea to help the butterflies was to provide a stove that would burn less wood and to give them to the families free of charge. Our initial efforts failed. Families took our stoves, but when we returned, we saw that they had gone back to cooking over open fires. People who were concerned about their next meals or the health of their children were not very interested in helping butterflies. 

We presented the stoves again and explained that the stoves use less wood. Not only that, they also have a chimney and allow the person cooking to stand up, thereby preventing smoke inhalation, illness, and even death, all of which can result from cooking over open fires. In the rural communities in the area, women invest over four hours a day cooking meals indoors with unvented fires, the equivalent of smoking five to seven packs of cigarettes a day. The use of the fuel-efficient stoves would decrease respiratory ailments caused by open fires by 40 percent or more. Moreover, the stoves prevent children from getting burns and the women’s long dresses from catching fire. The more efficient stoves allow the families to use 70 percent less wood. To date, we have installed over 500 stoves and planted over 30,000 trees.

We identified the need to consider the community as a whole, rather than a specific species we wanted to protect. Human communities need to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and water before they can care about conservation. Our efforts to intertwine humanitarian and conservation efforts, thus creating a sustainable solution that addressed the root causes of the environmental issue, helped stop the destruction of the butterflies’ habitat and improved the quality of life for the local population. Once their basic needs were met, the people became interested in how the stoves could also help their butterflies.

Bill Toone is a biologist and president of the ECOLIFE Foundation. Click here to watch the CBS News story on Bill's work. San Diego Magazine also reported on ECOLIFE's work.