Monsanto may have just found yet another reason to be hated.
The Monarch Butterfly’s life cycle has always been in sync with the
seasonal growth of milkweed, which remains the only plant in the planet’s
ecosystem that the butterfly larvae will eat. The emergence of milkweed
across the world has made generations of monarchs travel from Mexico to as
far north as Canada in an effort to feed off of the spring-time plant.
The reason is simple: As Slate
reports<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/monarch_butterfly_decline_monsanto_s_roundup_is_killing_milkweed.html>,
the monarch population began to steadily sink as a result of grasslands
rapidly being wiped out in favor of corn and soybean fields—a rate of loss,
the report states, comparable to the deforestation of Brazil and Indonesia.
Monsanto Company’s well-known, utterly toxic Roundup Weed Killer is largely
to blame for the decline, since it kills everything around it including
milkweed, which is down by 80%.
“We have this smoking gun,” said Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist
at the University of Minnesota. “This is the only thing that we’ve actually
been able to correlate with decreasing monarch numbers.”
While there have been a number of other possible scenarios for the
butterfly’s disappearance (two years of unusual spring weather in the
United States, and fluctuating dismally cold and scorching hot weather
patterns), the substantial loss of milkweed seems to be the most likely
cause.
There are still places in the United States that have an abundance of
milkweed (there are only slight decreases in the number of monarchs in New
Jersey and northern Michigan) but if the general notion of how big business
agriculture is changing the landscape of our world’s ecosystem doesn’t
change—drastically—then the Monarchs may just be the be one among many to
go.
[permaculture] “We have this smoking gun”: Monsanto is killing the monarch butterflies - Salon.com,
Lawrence London, 01/31/2014