The Michoacán highlands were once heavily forested, but in recent decades these forests have been cleared and degraded at an alarming rate for the extraction of timber, agricultural conversion, and domestic wood harvest by a rapidly growing population of peasant farm families living in and around the monarch butterfly reserves, as well as around the culturally, economically and environmentally important highland lakes. Many of the mountain people eek out a living from the steep slopes by planting corn and harvesting wood for domestic needs from nearby forests. Forests and their wood products have long sustained the people who have lived among the butterflies for untold generations. The pressure on the forest is high as the demand for wood is great. Wood is used for cooking, building, and for cash income. It is estimated that domestic wood use in the area averages 35 to 50 cubic meters per year per family, not counting commercial uses of wood, which translates to an estimated 100,000 commercially mature (20 year-old) pine and oyamel fir trees per year. With this high demand as a reality, we offer the people a different choice, an alternative for a brighter future where they will not have to continue to degrade natural forests to meet their wood needs.

The Forests for Monarchs approach is to help local landowners benefit economically from sustainable timber harvest and non-timber forest resources on lands where they actively participate in restoring degraded forests and establishing forest plantations, as a strategy to help conserve remnant native forests.

Many of our reforested sites are still too young to have provided timber harvests, although some campesinos have already started benefiting from sustainable harvesting and all have harvested firewood and other products from thinnings and branch prunings.

This project is directly creating sustainable economic opportunities in the communities, and indirectly helping to sustain eco-tourism to the monarch reserves. As their reforested sites mature and gain value, participants may find they can remain in their communities and still provide the improved standard of living that draws so many Michoacános to travel north seeking work – at huge economic and physical risk.