Monarchs in trouble amid severe population decline
Trump order weakens potential protections
GREENBELT, Md. — Handraising monarch butterflies in the midst of a global extinction crisis, Laura Moore and her neighbors gather round in her Maryland yard to launch a butterfly newly emerged from its chrysalis. Eager to play his part, 3-year-old Thomas Powell flaps his arms and exclaims, “I’m flying! I’m flying!”
Moore moves to release the monarch onto the boy’s outstretched finger, but the butterfly has another idea. It banks away, beginning its new life up in the shelter of a nearby tree.
Monarchs are in trouble, despite efforts by Moore and other volunteers and organizations across the U.S. The Trump administration’s new order weakening the Endangered Species Act could well make things worse for the monarch, one of more than 1 million species that are struggling around the globe.
Rapid development and climate change are escalating the rates of species loss, according to a May United Nations report. For monarchs, farming and human development have eradicated state-size swaths of native milkweed habitat, cutting the butterfly’s numbers by 90 percent in two decades.
With its count falling to the low tens of thousands in the western U.S. last year, the monarch is now under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act. But if the Trump administration’s latest action survives threatened legal challenges, there will be sweeping changes to how the government provides protections, and which creatures receive them.
The administration will for the first time reserve the option to estimate and publicize the financial cost of saving a species in advance of any decision on whether to do so. Monarchs compete for habitat with soybean and corn farmers, whose crops are valued in the low tens of billions of dollars annually.
Another coming change will end across-the-board protections for creatures newly listed as threatened. Conservation groups say that will leave them unprotected for months or years, as officials, conservationists and industries and landowners hash out each species’ survival plan.
The rule also will limit consideration of threats facing a species to the “foreseeable” future, which conservation groups say allows the administration to ignore the growing harm of global warming.
A decision on whether the monarch will be listed as threatened is expected by December 2020.