Monarch Protection Kicked Down the Road |
From Stephanie Feldstein, Population and Sustainability Program Director |
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Monarch butterflies were set to gain protection by December 2025. But the Trump administration failed to finalize it. The Center sued, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally agreed to protect the butterflies — five years from now.
That’s too long to wait. Right now monarchs are beginning to arrive in the mountains of Mexico, where their overwintering forests face destruction from orchards growing avocados to be sold in the United States. An independent certification program has stopped 90% of deforestation-linked avocado exports to the country, but monarchs need their winter home fully protected. To help them we need to keep sounding the alarm so that grocery retailers know we don’t want our avocados to come with a side of extinction.
Take action to make sure the avocados you eat don’t annihilate monarchs. Then read on for tips to keep Halloween safe for wildlife, the climate intervention hidden in healthy diets, and how the Center is fighting for gray whales. |
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Crowded Planet: As people’s appetite for seafood soars, whales and sea turtles are paying the price. Off the East Coast alone, according to a new Center for Biological Diversity analysis, at least 31 whales have been seen entangled in fishing gear so far this year. Pop-up (aka ropeless) fishing gear significantly reduces the risk of entanglement, but federal officials keep delaying stronger regulations requiring its use.
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Join Our Oct. 20 Webinar on the U.S. Just Food Transition |
The U.S. food system relies on the overproduction and high consumption of industrial animal products at the expense of people, wildlife, air, water, and the climate. We urgently need to transition away from this model to an equitable, sustainable food system that supports healthy and affordable plant-rich diets. A new food system is possible. To help us get there, the Center and more than 20 allies have put together the U.S. Just Food Transition Roadmap. It provides a framework for how people can shift governments and public policy in the right direction. Now we’re hosting a webinar bringing together a panel of experts representing labor, farmer, public health, animal protection, and environmental advocacy to discuss how the roadmap can be implemented to achieve a just food transition in the United States. Here’s one thing you can do: RSVP to join us for the webinar on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at noon PT/1 p.m. MT/2 p.m. CT/3 p.m. ET |
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Help Make Spooky Season Safe for Wildlife |
Halloween displays are full of fake spiders, bats, snakes, and other critters, but some of these decorations can be downright scary to real wild animals. Every October synthetic spiderwebs trap birds, opossums, and other small wildlife, causing injury and even death. If your Halloween display isn’t complete without cobwebs, build them with rope instead. In this new Medium piece, the Center’s Jennifer Molidor gives more tips and tricks for having fun this Halloween without terrorizing wildlife — along with a lovely story about how she celebrates with (and educates) her young son.
Here’s one thing you can do: Whether they're sold pinned in display cases or crammed into tiny fake coffins, painted woolly bats are collected from the wild to be killed, stuffed, and hung on walls thousands of miles from their homes. Tell Amazon to join Etsy and eBay and stop selling these bats so their populations can again flourish in the wild — where they belong.
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Watch the Food Justice Film Festival Oct. 22-25 |
Our seventh annual Food Justice Film Festival is right around the corner. This year’s free online festival takes place Oct. 22-25 and features four powerful films highlighting the links among Indigenous seed systems and seed sharing, food sovereignty and cultural heritage, and creating a more sustainable food system by phasing out pesticide use and shifting toward agroecological farming.
This year’s lineup includes Seeds of Sovereignty, Seeding Change: Farming Beyond Neonics, Toxic Harvest: The Hidden Truth About Pesticides, and Seed Is Life. During and after the festival, you can also watch prerecorded interviews with filmmakers, farmers, activists, and organizers.
Need help? Here are detailed instructions on how to sign up and watch.
Here’s one thing you can do (right now): Watch prerecorded interviews with this year's filmmakers, farmers, activists, and organizers. |
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Have a Wildlife-Friendly Fall Wedding |
The crisp blue skies and changing leaves of October make it one of the most popular months to tie the knot. Weddings are wonderful, but the average celebration produces more than 400 pounds of trash and 63 tons of carbon dioxide.
There are plenty of ways to celebrate your big day — or any party-worthy event — the Earth-friendly way. Check out our wildlife-friendly wedding blog for seasonal inspiration on wildlife-friendly venues, food, clothing, decor, and other tips to make sustainable choices that can help highlight your wildlife-loving values.
Here’s one (more) thing you can do: The winter holidays are just around the corner, and with them comes waste and overconsumption. Watch the recording of a recent webinar we hosted on how to simplify the holidays by swapping, fixing, and reusing. (Feel free to share it too!) |
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Food Is a Hidden Climate Intervention |
When it comes to actions individuals can take to fight climate change, recommendations range from driving and flying less to installing solar panels. These changes help the planet, but they’re not always easy — or affordable — for people to do on their own, and they don’t always yield obvious results. But as metabolism researcher Hana Kahleova explains in a recent article for The Revelator, changing diets may be one place where the climate and the individual benefit.
While conducting clinical trials to learn what happens to someone’s health when they change how they eat, Kahleova and her colleagues kept discovering that diets built around vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and legumes not only improved people’s health — they also lowered participants’ carbon footprints. The impact was immediate, without a sense of sacrifice for some future beneficiary. As Kahleova explains, “The benefit to the planet and the benefit to the body weren’t competing for the same scarce willpower — they were the same act, seen from two angles, landing on the same afternoon.” Here’s one thing you can do: Check out our favorite Earth-friendly recipes that support the health of people, the planet, and wildlife. |
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Wildlife Spotlight: Gray Whales |
Eastern North Pacific gray whales are beloved icons of the U.S. West Coast. They undertake one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal, traveling about 12,000 miles round trip between their feeding grounds in the Arctic and the warmer waters of Mexico, where they spend the winter and rear calves. Decades ago commercial whaling nearly hunted these 40-ton ocean behemoths to extinction. They were protected under the Endangered Species Act until 1994, when they were declared recovered and delisted.
But in the past decade the whales’ population has declined by as much as 50%, largely due to ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. This year there has been a catastrophic die-off of the whales along the West Coast, likely caused by global warming limiting their prey. NOAA Fisheries was required to decide by late August whether re-listing the gray whale under the Act was warranted, but the agency failed to issue a decision — so the Center and partners announced our intent to sue.
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Center for Biological Diversity
P.O. Box 710
Tucson, AZ 85702
United States
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