Butterfly group calls for Mexico to protect forest
By Susan McDonough, STAFF WRITER
Oakland Tribune
!(image-right)/images/monarch.jpg(Monarch butterfly)!ALAMEDA—Local butterfly preservationists are leading a national campaign to pressure the Mexican government to intervene against increasingly violent loggers they say are illegally deforesting the region of Mexico the group seeks to protect.
Bob Small, director of the Alameda-based Michoacan Reforestation Fund, said Monday hostile Mexican mobsters are illegally logging in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a protected stretch of forests 100 miles west of Mexico City, where Monarchs arrive by the millions each winter to roost.
Government protections have limited logging in the mountainous region, but, Small said, gangs of so-called “talamontes” (literally “strip the mountains”) enter whatever areas they like whenever they want to cut down trees.
“They’re taking down whatever … trees they want,” he said. “These outlaws are destroying the forests at an alarming rate, and the people of the communities are deeply afraid and frustrated.”
The reforestation fund has replenished the butterfly roosting grounds with as many as 1.3 million trees since 1997.
Small said recent beatings by the talamontes gangs against Mexican environmentalists have created an immediate need for public outcry. “The people there are fearful,” he said.
Dozens of accounts of violence against Mexican farmers and environmentalists by loggers have been reported in U.S. publications in recent years. Illegal deforestation continues in the region despite years of efforts by the Mexican government and private organizations such as Michoacan to stop it.
Scientists have said nearly half the land where the butterflies hibernate has disappeared as locals clear the land for domestic wood use and farming.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded Small’s group $17,500 in 1999 for its reforestation efforts that enlist the help of thousands of Mexican farm families.
In 2002, Smithsonian Magazine gave the group its conservation award, bringing national attention to the fund.
Small and scientist Lincoln Brower, a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Florida who has studied Monarchs for nearly 50 years, are urging U.S. schoolchildren, teachers and the public to send Mexican President Vincente Fox telegrams and letters calling for a stop to the illegal logging and violence.
“President Fox has employees (who) are constantly monitoring the world press, and any articles will be picked up by his staff … hopefully he will act decisively,” Small wrote in an e-mail sent as a call to action to reforestation supporters.
Fox has called stopping the deterioration of Mexico’s environment a national priority.
Under the country’s new environmental policy, Mexican Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources Victor Lichtinger has said “no stone will be left unturned in the fight against environmental crime and impunity.”
But some reports have said only a few dozen inspectors enforce forestry laws in the 133,000-acre butterfly biosphere region.
The Michoacan Reforestation Fund can be reached at 337-1890 or online at www.michoacanmonarchs.org
Contact Susan McDonough at smcdonough@angnewspapers.com .
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Posted by: noble on May 26, 2004 at 20:08:51