The Mexican NGO, Alternare, says its mission is to save Monarch butterfly habitat. From news sources, the non-profit is setting about to accomplish that objective the right way. The group examines the practices and the needs of local, impoverished communities first. Then it offers practical solutions that just happen to relieve pressure on the nearby Monarch wintering grounds.

In an area 100 miles west of Mexico City is the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, mountain forests where millions of Monarch butterflies end their winter migration every year. Some 200,000 people share that land. Unfortunately, their rural ways also take a toll on the forest. Studies show that over the past three decades nearly half the forest was degraded or destroyed. For generations cooking is done on an open fire. Four horse-loads of wood are needed each week to cook the family meals. Twenty-five trees are used to build each home.

Enter five-year-old Alternare. With no preachy sermons about saving butterflies that made the local farmers believe their lives were less valued than the winged insects, Alternare offers a rudimentary wood-burning cook stove to each family. Cooking is simplified and the wood consumption halved. Help in building longer lasting homes from adobe cut the 25-tree per home usage to a single tree. Similarly, Alternare provided hands on labor to demonstrate how feeding the earth with composted waste – corn stalks, grass, horse manure, etc. – cut costs of chemical fertilizers.

Keeping things simple and effective is secret of Alternare’s success. Without dictating how the locals should live, Alternare shows simple ways of improving crop production and farmer time, cost and energy. From a corn monoculture, the farmers have diversified their crops to included beets, broccoli, onions, chilies, spinach and more. Terracing fields prevents erosion. Enclosing cows and chickens reduces time spent hunting down the animals and gathering eggs etc. Next on the list of “new” items are toilets that separate liquid from solid waste for eventual processing into fertilizer.

Alternare is doing things right. The non-profit, working at the village level, is incorporating benefits to local people into benefits provided to the butterflies. It’s a model similar to that employed by the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources (IFCNR) where assessments of resource usage by locals and global corporate traders and proposed strategies include ways of extending economic and environmental profits to everyone concerned.