Celebrate Earth Month by Helping Us Save the Monarchs!
For all of us at ECOLIFE Conservation, every day is Earth Day! We never stop our efforts to protect the monarch butterfly, but we’re ramping up this Earth Month with our Save the Monarchs campaign. Together with La Monarca Bakery, we’re working to raise money for our Patsari stove project. Keep reading to learn more about the campaign, our Patsari stoves, and how you can contribute!
Our Partnership With La Monarca Bakery
La Monarca Bakery is a Los Angeles-based and Latin-owned bakery dedicated to bringing people the authentic flavors of Mexico through baked products and beverages like Cafe de Olla, Mexican hot chocolate, Oaxaca reserve coffee, and champurrado. La Monarca also creates employment opportunities for the communities where they’re located. All products from La Monarca Bakery are made only with the highest quality and freshest ingredients with no preservatives, artificial colors, or flavors.
Since 2008, La Monarca Bakery has been in partnership with us to donate 1% of all proceeds from packaged goods to ECOLIFE. This helps us maintain our conservation efforts to protect monarch butterflies!
Save the Monarchs Campaign
As you know, April is Earth Month, so as part of La Monarca Bakery’s dedication to caring for the environment, they’re working with us to raise $20,000 to support our Patsari stove project!
Through the entire month of April, La Monarca Bakery will have monarch butterfly circles all over their bakeries in celebration of donations toward our Save the Monarchs campaign. During this campaign, proceeds from sales of milkweed seeds, ECOLIFE gift sets, and other packaged goods will be included in this campaign as well.
Our goal of $20,000 will allow us to build 133 stoves in the area surrounding the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. This cost includes staff time, training, materials, supplies, overhead, and classroom education. By educating children about protecting forests and providing job opportunities for local individuals, we’re not just building and implementing stoves; we’re building the foundational knowledge they’ll need to sustain the habitat for years to come.
Your donation to our Save the Monarchs campaign protects the monarch butterfly’s migrational forest while simultaneously bringing healthier options to the people that live there.
What ECOLIFE is Doing to Save Monarchs
In the area surrounding the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, many families cook on open fires in their homes. The kitchen should be a place where families gather to cook dinner, share meals, and pass down stories, but for these families, cooking is putting them at risk.
Indoor air pollution from open fires leads to pulmonary disease, eye injuries, burns, and four million premature deaths per year. In addition to these risks, the amount of fuelwood needed for these fires is a major contributor to deforestation.
Around the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (MBBR), deforestation is severely impacting the winter home of the monarch butterfly. Each year, millions of monarchs rely on an intact oyamel forest for overwintering hibernation at the end of their migration. Even small-scale tree removal affects the microclimate and the butterflies’ ability to survive storms.
ECOLIFE’s Patsari stove project is our culturally appropriate solution to protect community health and the monarch butterfly. Patsari stoves provide families with cleaner air and reduce their fuel dependence, allowing the children in these communities to grow up healthier.
Our Patsari stoves have been designed using feedback from actual stove users. This feedback has led to the inclusion of five essential features:
- They are designed for traditional cooking methods using a flat-surfaced comal for cooking tortillas and two burners for heating.
- The sides are made to stay cool with an enclosed fire to protect children and adults from accidental burns.
- Each stove features a chimney to funnel air pollution out of the home.
- Locally sourced materials, indoors, trackable, and permanent.
- Patsari stoves eliminate 90% of smoke from homes and use 60% less wood, reducing carbon emissions and deforestation.
In addition to these features, we employ local masons in each community to build and maintain the stoves, and local students work as our promoters to spread the word about the benefits of our stoves throughout their communities. Even the children in the community learn about the health and environmental impacts of cooking fires, so they can grow up with the knowledge they need to help themselves and their environment thrive.
Help Us Save the Monarchs!
This Earth month, we encourage you to join us in our mission to help humans and nature prosper together. We need the support of people like you to build life-saving stoves for the families surrounding the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.
Your support allows us to build more stoves, improve more lives, and continue to expand our protection of Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Donate to our Save the Monarchs campaign today!