The Monarch is on the brink of extinction in the USA in 2014 due to loss of the wild milkweed plants that it needs to reproduce and survive, from droughts and lack of protection of those habitats from modification by herbicide spraying, tilling or weed invasions. Recent survey estimates that the public in the USA is willing to spend over $4 billion for this effort (http://www.popsci.com/article/science/americans-would-pay-4-billion-save-monarch-butterflies). The question is, are there any groups or individuals starting that process, to purchase the hundreds of thousands of acres that would need to be protected as milkweed-native grassland preserves, then start the process of replanting or restoring the milkweed and native grasslands in a weed-free condition on those protected lands?
The feasibility of having that much land put aside is probably quite limited. However, because so much land is private, if we can campaign to get everybody to play an active role by including at least a handful of Asclepias species on their properties, then we are talking a landscape level effort.
Scientific American magazine had an article about saving the Monarchs in their October issue at http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v311/n4/full/scientificamerican1014-22.html and the magazine is going to publish my letter to the editor in response to that article, where I am suggesting the massive scale of effort that must be started, to save the species.
Scientific American letter publish February 2015, link attached https://www.researchgate.net/search.Search.html?type=publication&query=monarch+dremann
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