An Escondido man with a passion for the bright orange-and-black monarch butterfly will play a key role in the restoration of the butterfly’s winter home in Mexico’s Sierra Madre as a result of a bi-national initiative announced last week at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate summit.
Bill Toone’s California nonprofit environmental group ECOLIFE is aiming to plant 1 million trees a year in the lofty mountain range where an estimated 750 million monarch butterflies winter.
“We’re trying to repair decades and decades of damage,” Toone said, in a telephone interview. “Trees are leaving illegally at a very unsustainable rate.”