Reprinted from the August 25, 1998, New York Times
By CAROL YOON
HIGH
in the mountains of central Mexico, monarch butterflies arrive by the millions
each winter to take refuge, their black and orange wings festooning stands of
towering fir trees. But conservationists have grown increasingly concerned as
the butterflies in these small patches of forest, some of which were set aside
as preserves, compete with the needs of the residents around them.
Now conservationists are trying to help the butterflies by helping the residents. In July, 40,000 trees were planted near El Rosario in the state of Michoacan in an effort to save the fragile habitat where monarchs congregate after their long flight south from the eastern United States and Canada.
Rather than becoming new roosts for monarchs, the newly planted trees, are intended to be cut.
The idea is to provide the local farmers with trees they can grow for firewood, construction and selling, leaving the monarch forests intact.
''The monarch overwintering areas were really being hit hard,'' said Robert L. Small, who runs the Michoacan Reforestation Fund, a one- man fund-raising organization aimed at buying trees to reforest the mountaintops of central Mexico.
The local subsistence farmers ''were poor and had to have wood to live on, and they would sell whatever they could,'' Mr. Small said.
''This is extreme poverty,'' he said. ''We're trying to give them an economic alternative that they've never been offered before.''
Mr. Small, a retired public administrator who runs the fund from his home in Oakland, Calif., raises money that is used by the La Cruz Habitat Protection Project, the Mexico-based arm of this conservation effort, to buy the trees.
The project had a tentative start last year with the planting of 7,000 trees, most of which were killed by El Nino according to Jose Luis Alvarez, the Mexican nurseryman who has overseen the planting.
Expressing frustration over the many previous failed attempts to stop logging in the area, Dr. Lincoln Brower, a biologist at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and a monarch advocate, said: ''I've grasped at a lot of straws in the last 20 years. A lot of what people do is for show, but Bob and Jose may really have found something.
''I don't see any alternatives that anyone has suggested that have as much promise as this one does.''
By planting seedlings, Oyamel firs, the trees where the monarchs roost, and pines, farmers can begin making money from reforested land in a few years, Mr. Alvarez said. Oyamels can be harvested as Christmas trees in four years, and pines can be harvested for wood in as little as five years. The hope, Mr. Alvarez said, is for farmers to use the donated trees to begin a cycle of planting, harvesting and replanting that will maintain a standing forest.
But at first, even giving away the trees was not easy. Mr. Alvarez said residents were concerned that if they reforested their land it might be taken by the Mexican Government as a monarch sanctuary.
Mr. Small said that in 1986, when the Government set aside land for the monarchs, the people in the communities that had been using those forests received no financial compensation.
Mr. Alvarez said that attitudes were slowly changing and that all 40,000 seedlings he delivered to El Rosario were immediately loaded onto burros and carried up the mountainside by farmers to plant on their land.
Conservationists agree that even next year's hoped-for planting of 100,000 trees is just a beginning, the equivalent of a mere 100 acres of forest. They say the effort must grow considerably to keep the monarch sanctuaries out of harm's way in this poverty-stricken region. At least one similar reforestation effort is under way, run by the Mexican Government.
Planting trees near the monarch sanctuaries may have benefits besides the obvious economic ones.
As trees have been cut around the sanctuaries, stronger winds are blowing through the reserves, drying the normally moist habitat and making the trees more prone to disease, Dr. Brower said.
As trees are planted, he said, this potentially devastating problem should begin to disappear.
Mr. Alvarez said: ''There are thousands of acres out there that have been transformed into corn or oat fields. I want it all to go back to forest. I think this is definitely the answer.''
