Another wonderful story showcasing the strength and power of one person…and many, many butterflies:

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 binational initiative announced this week at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate summit in Los Angeles.

With the backing of California and Mexico officials, Bill Toone’s local nonprofit environmental group ECOLIFE Foundation 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 Thursday. “Trees are leaving illegally at a very unsustainable rate.”

Toone, a conservation biologist who celebrated his 54th birthday Thursday, said 200,000 to 250,000 oyamel fir trees are cut down every year in the range’s 140,000-acre Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve by people in nearby villages seeking wood for cooking and heating. And he said another quarter-million or so trees are cut down for sale in a black market believed to be supplying paper mills.

Toone figures he can’t do anything about the black market, but with some help his group can do something about the fuel-wood factor.

And, so, he has proposed planting 200,000 trees a year outside the reserve specifically for the purpose of supplying families with fuel for cooking meals and heating homes. Toone said the success of that effort will depend on donors worldwide.

But he said the reserve reforestation project will get a big boost from the binational agreement announced by California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams and Mexican officials.

California officials are banking on the reforestation initiative helping the state meet its mandate to lower emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases by 2020 to what they were in 1990.

Besides ordering the industry to reduce emissions, California plans to let factories, power plants, oil refineries and other large polluters reach their targets, in part, by buying so-called offsets. Companies would get emissions credits for pumping money into projects that slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Toone’s tree-planting initiative is one of those projects that California corporations will be able contribute to.

Source: North County Times