My childhood growing up in Pacific Grove, California was blessed with the kind of exposure to and immersion in nature that all kids deserve. We played among towering redwood trees that seemed to reach all the way to heaven. We surfed at Asilomar Beach and marveled at both how small we are in our place in nature, yet how connected we all are. And, a privilege of living in Pacific Grove specifically, we got to witness the migration of western monarch butterflies.
Those monarch butterflies are just a fraction of the weight of a feather. Yet, they were so numerous when I was growing up that they would bend and bounce the tree branches as they landed on them by the tens of thousands.
According to Natalie Johnston of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, “Accounts in Pacific Grove as late as the 1990s showed 45,000 monarchs, which we do not see today.”
To say those numbers have shrunk significantly since then would be an understatement. At the same we used to see tens of thousands of monarchs, this past season, Pacific Grove saw just 228. A site in Santa Barbara that saw more than 33,000 monarchs as recently as last winter this year saw just 198.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation says, along the California coast, 4.5 million monarchs overwintered in the 1980s. That number was down to 1.2 million by the late ’90s, 293,000 by 2015, 30,000 by 2019, and in 2020, it was less than 2,000.
And while factors including climate change-fueled droughts have likely led to the decline in migrating monarchs in coastal California, other human activity has led to similar declines in other parts of the country. For example, in the upper Midwest, use of herbicides has led to the loss of milkweed, an essential host plant for monarch larvae. In Iowa, milkweed shrank in abundance by 58% between 1999 and 2010. As a result, monarch reproduction declined by 81% in the Midwest over that time period.
The numbers are startling. And that is the kind of math — basic subtraction — everyone can understand.
In December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed protecting monarch butterflies under the Endangered Species Act. The agency estimated that the eastern migratory population of monarchs declined by around 80% over the past four decades. As for the western population I grew up with, that has declined by more than 95% since the ’80s. According to Fish and Wildlife Service, that means the western monarchs stand more than a 99% chance of extinction by 2080.
The nosedive in the populations of this iconic species and vital pollinator should be setting off alarm bells for all of us. This is the extinction crisis in action.
Because species typically go extinct over many years, and because many of the species going extinct are not the ones we see everyday, most people do not realize we are in an extinction crisis arguably worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs. A catastrophic meteor impact and other natural events caused that mass extinction. The mass extinction we are now in — the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event — is being caused by us.
Under natural circumstances, species go extinct at a rate of about one to five species per year. Right now, we are at 1,000 to 10,000 times that rate. It is a wide range, to be sure. But even the low end of that range is terrifying.
The human-caused changes to our planet that are driving the crisis include pollution, habitat destruction like deforestation, industrial-scale agriculture land use and, of course, wrapped up in all of it, climate change.
The two existential crises facing our planet and the human race — the extinction crisis and the climate crisis — are closely intertwined. Global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels worsens all the threats contributing to our modern mass extinction event. High temperatures themselves can play a role in whether or not a species declines. And experts say falling short of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by enough could result in the extinction of between a third and half of all animal and plant species.
It is time to act. The solution to this crisis begins simply with us moving to embrace a more sustainable future. That means leaving the fuels that powered us last century in the past and completing our transition to the one that is already fueling much of America: clean energy. In doing so, we will reduce pollution and can conserve and restore as much land and as many ecosystems — both land and marine — as we can. Our kids and our grandkids deserve the clean water in which to swim and surf as we have enjoyed and the pristine forests that touch our souls and awaken our splendor in our natural world. They deserve a world full of critters of all kinds; to witness an abundance of species, each playing their vital role in the ecosystems on which we all depend.
Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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