Second Mexico monarch butterfly activist found dead

[nomad]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-51356265

A second activist campaigning for the conservation of monarch butterflies and the woods in which they hibernate has been found dead in Mexico.

[exoticimports]

Going up against logging concerns has gotten a lot of people dead worldwide. Don’t forget, for every local that makes a few bucks off monarch conservation there are ten who live off logging. So typically the locals dummy up. Besides which the cartels make money off logging, and the ecosystem of corruption goes from the local cop all the way to the Mexican president.

If USA really cared about monarchs, USFWS would be sent to care for them.

[Adam Cotton]

If the monarch overwintering site is destroyed the butterflies will find themselves an alternative site which may not be as suitable and result in higher mortality, but they will survive.

Adam.

[ciervo]

Im too scared to comment

[wollastoni]

Unfortunately protecting the environment in the Third World is a very dangerous activity. Many environmentalists have been killed in Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia (at least) in these last years...

In developed countries, they are not killed, they are sued in tribunals...

[nomad]

R.I.P. Raúl Hernandez and Homero Gomez, two brave guys who cared about the environment and Monarch butterflies. A sad state the world today is in, if we cannot protect one patch of forest for a very good reason, and those who try to protect it, have to pay with their lives. 

[jmg]

Ten years ago, it was the French entomologist Pierre Jauffret who was killed in Santo Antõnio de Tauá (65 km North of Belem, Para, Brazil) because he was protecting a piece of forest (and its butterflies). See this page:

www.lepidofrance.com/lassassinat-dun-entomologiste-francais-au-bresil/

In this same Brazil (and many others countries), nowadays, the big owners of land destroying forests, prosper with the blessing and the complicity of the authorities. What a shame !

[nomad]

Another very sad story.  The state of the forest in Brazil must concern us all. I doubt if Wallace and Bates, and the other pioneer naturalists would have ever thought that  such threats would face the forest in the Brazil and in most places on the planet. Without doubt in the not too distance future it will be all gone, just a memory.

[exoticimports]

Feb 7, 2020 12:01:51 GMT nomad said:

Another very sad story.  The state of the forest in Brazil must concern us all. I doubt if Wallace and Bates, and the other pioneer naturalists would have ever thought that  such threats would face the forest in the Brazil and in most places on the planet. Without doubt in the not too distance future it will be all gone, just a memory.

The only reason Wallace and Bates could have thought that is because Asia and Brazil may have appeared to have an inexhaustible supply. By their time Great Britain had been denuded, as had large swaths of Europe. New England, particularly New York, was clearly on its way and would be almost devoid of original growth within 40 years of their deaths. I wonder if either had remarked on the future of the rainforests given what had happened in the populated northern hemisphere; perhaps those better studied on these explorers can share insights.

On the monarchs, Adam makes a good point. In the most recent copy of Leo Soc an article point out that the monarch in Eastern North America certainly exploded in population with deforestation. Both in that area and Australia the monarch has been known to evolve new migration routes and mechanisms.

Chuck

[nomad]

I think that the wildwood was  long gone in Britain by the time Julius Caesar and his legions arrived  here in 55BC.  When Wallace and Bates hunted bugs in Britain, the woodland were in a far better state than they are today and much richer in species. So I do not suppose he worried about Britain's wildwood that vanished over two thousand years before. However, when Wallace died in 1913, much of the worlds rainforest was intact, but since then look how much as vanished and continues to do so. I wonder if Wallace and Bates, thought that humans would destroy their own planet in such a short space of time. 

[jmg]

In Europe, at least in France, the maximum of deforestation, begun centuries ago (for a long time, it was proclaimed that the great clearings dated from the Middle Ages; nowadays, historians have shown that Gaul was already largely deforested before the arrival of Julius Caesar - 58 BC), was reached in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, agricultural areas have been abandoned and reforested. Very well ! Although we could argue fiercely about the type of reforestation with often only one species of tree. However, France and other European countries) continue to import tropical timber (legal but often illegal) from Africa or Asia. Without even mentioning the massive imports of transgenic soybeans and meat from Brazil, palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia, etc. If Europe were truly environmentally virtuous, it would ban these imports which generate deforestation.

In France, a few years ago, we had a controversy about "Nutella" (a chocolate paste appreciated by children and stuffed with palm oil). What a scandal when an environment minister mentioned the ecolongic problem that represents Nutella!

And this is how if you walk around with a butterfly net, you will be probably insulted by passers-by accusing you of destroying biodiversity while these same people force-feed their offspring of Nutella and products of the food industry stuffed with soy. Brazilian !! The world is definitely going wrong.

[nomihoudai]

If you look at the Wikipedia article of Wallace you see that he was very well aware of the changes that man brings.

Personally, I hope (and think) that advances in green houses and food production will make the exploitation of land in tropical areas less interesting. At the moment it is just too cheap to cut down everything and turn it into agricultural land and it is too expensive to create a vertical farm.