Every year, students at Farnsworth Middle School in Guilderland volunteer to raise butterflies, tend to native plants, and educate the public about both.

Some years, the culmination of their labors — raising monarch butterflies from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly — is a gathering in the garden of their school’s courtyard where they chant, “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go to Mexico” as they release the bright orange butterflies they’ve raised.

They play a small part in a large miracle, and now the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is asking everyone to be part of the recovery of what the service calls “one of the nation’s most beloved species.”

The service has proposed listing the butterfly as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The monarch is not currently protected.

A comment period is now open that will close on March 12, 2025 for the public to make its views known.

Monarchs, which range throughout the Americas have summer breeding grounds in the northern United States and Canada and then migrate, through generations, thousands of miles to overwinter in Mexico.

In Canada, monarchs were listed as endangered last year. In Mexico, the monarch has a “special protection” status.

The Rocky Mountains divide two monarch populations: the eastern monarchs fly over 2,000 miles to winter in Mexico; the western monarchs migrate 300 to 1,000 miles to overwinter in groves on the California or Mexico coasts.

“Monarch butterfly populations are in peril,” the Fish and Wildlife Service says. Its species status assessment says migratory monarchs in North America are declining and are projected to continue declining over the next 60 years.

The probability of extinction for the eastern monarchs ranges from 56 to 74 percent by 2080. And in the west, by 2080, the probability of extinction is greater than 99 percent.

The service names these causes for the decline: the ongoing impacts from loss and degradation of breeding, migratory, and overwintering habitat; exposure to insecticides; and effects of climate change.

To conserve eastern monarchs, where we live, the Mid-American Monarch Conservation Strategy calls for more than a billion stems of milkweed on the landscape by 2038. Monarchs rely solely on milkweed during their egg and caterpillar stages while adult monarchs frequent many types of flowers for their nectar.

We see the monarch butterfly as a symbol — just as the canary in the coal mine warned miners of toxic gasses so they could escape, we need to take the decline of the monarch as a warning.

Its demise would show the hubris of humans for ruination of our natural world.

 We’ve written on this page before about our national symbol, the bald eagle, which we now also see as a symbol of resilience and of humankind’s abilities to right its wrongs.

Sixty years ago, the bald eagle was in danger of extinction, largely because of DDT. The pesticide, widely adopted after World War II, washed into waterways poisoning fish and, in turn, the eagle.

The eagles produced eggs with thin shells that cracked during incubation or otherwise failed to hatch. By 1960, only about 400 breeding pairs remained; the bald eagle was on the verge of extinction.

Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” in 1962, raising awareness of humans polluting the environment.

A decade later, the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT. Slowly but surely, the population rebounded, topping 70,000 nesting pairs in the 21st Century.

Here in Guilderland, we see the slow but steady recovery of the Karner blue butterfly as the same sort of local symbol. Development wiped out much of the pine barrens where wild blue lupine, essential to the butterfly, once grew. The Karner blue, too, faced extinction.

But, through state legislative effort, the Pine Bush Preserve was formed and public awareness of the worth of the barrens grew.

At the same time, scientists worked to repopulate the barrens with the Karner blue — and Guilderland schoolchildren were involved in that effort too.

The founder of the Butterfly Station, Alan Fiero, was honored this summer during the 25th anniversary celebration of the program. The now-retired science teacher had a passion for preservation and a penchant for securing grants that sustained the program for years.

We’ve covered the summer project, called the Butterfly Station after a once-famous train stop in the Pine Bush, since its inception. Over the years, we’ve talked to students who felt inspired by the hands-on project to become scientists. We’ve talked to others who had no intention of pursuing science but learned to be confident speakers and felt proud of educating community members about an important — some would say essential — subject.

“We are providing seeds and plants to restore the Pine Bush,” Karishma Mahta told us years ago when she was just 13. The hope, she told us, was that Guilderland residents would use the plants from Farnsworth to create native gardens throughout the community. 

Fiero, who worked for years with his students on projects to restore the beautiful and globally rare pine bush ecosystem, dreamed of having his students raise Karner blue butterflies. 

Eventually, Farnsworth Middle School students, working with preserve commission staff under state and federal permits, hatched eggs from Karner blue females at the school. The caterpillars built their chrysalides and the emerging butterflies were released in restored Pine Bush Preserve sites.

Karner blues raised in captivity have given environmentalists hope that the Pine Bush population may become sustainable.

Humans are only beginning to understand the imperative interrelationships between species in the natural world. For example, the Karner blue butterfly has a symbiotic relationship with the black ant. Its cocoon secretes a sweet, sticky substance that the ant covets, and so the ant protects the cocoon from predators, even going so far as to carry a cocoon to its nest for the winter, returning it in the spring.

It’s time for us to realize that human beings, too, can have a symbiotic relationship with nature if only we pay attention to the world around us.

The middle-school students over the decades also worked with monarch butterflies. One year, we wrote about the Monarch Watch tags worn by the butterflies the kids had raised and released as part of a program run by the University of Kansas. People finding the tagged butterflies would notify the university program, which tracked the migration, producing an annual report.

The migratory butterflies live for seven or eight months whereas the four generations before them live only a few weeks. Guided by the sun’s orbit, the migrating monarchs will fly about 50 miles a day towards central Mexico.

The Farnsworth butterflies that reached their destination arrived with millions of others from the eastern and central United States and Canada to gather in a mountainous region of Mexico where they would hibernate through the winter months. Those that survived would fly from the mountains to mate in February, and then the trek northward begins again.

Over the years, we have learned from these children and their teachers.

What have we learned? That persistence pays off. That understanding the life cycle of an insect helps us understand how inter-related the natural world is — the Karner blue butterfly needs lupine to survive just as the monarch needs milkweed.

Most of all, we’ve learned that individuals can make a difference.

As we look ahead at the dark years we are now facing, with an incoming federal administration that will increase rather than curb the use of fossil fuels, it is easy to feel helpless, to feel that climate change and the destruction it will bring are inevitable.

But, if we look to the model provided by the children at Farnsworth Middle School, we can see that something as simple as planting native milkweed can make a difference.

We favor listing monarchs as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

While the service states that property owners will still be allowed to remove plants used by monarchs, it says, “Our goal is to substantially increase breeding and migratory habitat through voluntary efforts by encouraging land management and gardening practices that have a net benefit for monarchs. We expect localized removal of milkweed and nectar plants will be outweighed by an overall addition of these resources across the landscape, making broadscale public support for monarch conservation vitally important.”

We’ve written about local projects, like the Wild Ones initiative at the United Lutheran Church in Guilderland — directly across Route 20 from a shopping plaza — that is turning a vacant lot, which was a manicured monoculture lawn, into a vibrant pollinating garden.

But “broadscale public support” needn’t be financed by grants or part of a larger organization. It is something each one of us can undertake in our own backyards — literally.

The listing would not prevent homes, botanical gardens, or schools from doing smallscale rearing and releasing of monarchs, the service says, nor would there be any penalty for killing a monarch by hitting it while driving.

“Despite losses due to collisions,” the service says, “research suggests that strategic improvements to roadside monarch habitat can yield a net benefit to the species …. These much-needed pollinator oases can increase habitat connectivity across the landscape.”

The service describes in detail how anyone can create a pollinator garden.

“To bring back habitat on the landscape,” the service says, “everyone can help conserve monarch butterflies by planting native milkweed and nectar plants throughout the monarch’s range.”

We can, each of us, work to sustain the monarch and make it a symbol of resilience rather than a symbol of our failure to prevent climate destruction.

The iconic orange and black butterfly has also served as inspiration for nations to work together. In 1996, the wildlife conservation agencies of the United States, Mexico, and Canada signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing a Trilateral Committee for Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation and Management.

The wildlife agencies of the three nations are working together to conserve and manage biodiversity, ecosystems, and species of mutual interest — including the monarch butterfly. 

Natural needs should take precedence over human political differences.

Rejuvenating the monarch is a chance to show that human beings can work together for the greater good.

This task is not as impossible as a four-inch butterfly finding its way thousands of miles to a place it has never been. We must find a way.