ESC received over 20 applications from non-profits for the partnership and each organization was ranked by the company on aspects such as transparent accountability, species impact, and social outreach.  AWF and Xerces applications received the highest rankings from the company.  As a previous partner, AWF has already experienced how ESC’s 10% GiveBack donation can boost species conservation endeavors.

“AWF is thrilled to be selected as a 10% GiveBack partner of Endangered Species Chocolate for the period 2013 through 2015,” said Patrick Bergin, AWF CEO. “The continued support of our good friends at Endangered Species Chocolate – along with their growing numbers of loyal customers – is tremendously important for enabling AWF’s field staff to carry out projects to conserve Africa’s wildlife and wild lands.”

Bergin noted that the 10% GiveBack collaboration with ESC will continue to advance AWF’s African Apes Initiative. This program protects key habitats for Africa’s four great ape species (chimpanzee, bonobo, mountain gorilla and lowland gorilla). The 10% GiveBack will also provide additional momentum to AWF’s Rhino and Elephant Campaigns that are combating the escalating poaching of these two iconic African animals.

Established in 1971, the Xerces Society is at the forefront of invertebrate protection, harnessing the knowledge of scientists and the enthusiasm of local citizens to implement conservation and education programs.

“Insects and other invertebrates are vital for pollination, provide food for fish and birds, and help keep our environment healthy in a myriad of ways,” said Scott Hoffman Black, Executive Director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. “We are very excited to partner with Endangered Species Chocolate to engage a broader audience in a dialogue about how we can best protect these important animals.”

The GiveBack will help fund Xerces programs that focus on conservation education.  The Bring Back the Pollinators campaign trains farmers and others to protect and restore habitat for bees and other beneficial insects. The aquatic program provides advice and resources to watershed stewards for monitoring the health of streams, rivers, and wetlands. Xerces endangered species program works with land managers and citizens to survey for and conserve disappearing butterflies and bumble bees

ESC’s current 2010-2012 10% GiveBack partners are African Wildlife Foundation and SEEtheWILD. For more information, or to place an order to help support the company’s 10% GiveBack visit www.chocolatebar.com.

About Endangered Species Chocolate

Indianapolis-based Endangered Species Chocolate is a mission-driven company that is passionate about chocolate and the environment.  Endangered Species Chocolate is committed to providing chocolate-lovers with premium, natural and organic chocolates that are ethically traded and sustainably grown. Adding to the impact of each chocolate bar, Endangered Species Chocolate donates 10—percent of net profits to fund species and habitat conservation.  A top selling brand in the natural food category, Endangered Species Chocolate offers more than 30 products.  For more information, visit www.chocolatebar.com

Danny Serfling knew he was in trouble in July. Tiny white worms in the soil had eaten away the anchoring roots on half of his corn, and in one big storm last summer, the stalks toppled like sticks.

“All the corn around here went flat — from Spring Valley to Mabel,” said Serfling, who farms a few hundred acres here in southeastern Minnesota. He waved a tattooed arm toward stubbled hills that rolled away to the gray October sky, resigned to the next step. “We will have to use more insecticide,” he said.

Read the full article in the Star Tribune

In October Steve Ellis counted his losses.

The air was thick with the sound of buzzing bees and the smoke he used to keep them calm as, one by one, he pulled wooden trays from dozens of blue and white boxes. Some held a moving mass of bees. But in too many, the hexagonal spaces were empty.

“I lost 500 hives this summer,” he said.

Ellis and other beekeepers across the country say they know why they are facing astronomical losses of bees: agricultural insecticides. The companies that make the chemicals disagree, but they don’t dispute the problem. On average, beekeepers are losing 30 to 40 percent of their bees every year.

Read the full article in The Star Tribune

As we gather around the Thanksgiving table this year, perhaps we can take a moment to thank the hardworking pollinators that helped most of our food grow.

According to the U.S.Department of Agriculture, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination. Even the plants that cows eat (alfalfa and clover) to make milk, cheese, butter, ice cream and beef, depend on pollinators.

Read the full article at Citizen-Times.com

Growers interested in promoting native bee populations as a back-up to honey bee pollination can now tap into new “how-to” information resources, according to speakers at a Native Pollinators in Agriculture field day held on Sept. 11, in Orange County, CA.

“We are working with USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) conservation grants to develop installation guides customized for different agricultural conditions,” reported Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director for the Xerces Society.

Read the full article at Growing Produce

California growers can tap into new information resources and several USDA programs to incorporate native bee habitat in their conservation efforts, according to bee experts speaking at a Native Pollinators in Agriculture field day in Orange County.

Cost-benefit analysis projects are getting under way to quantify how pollinator promotion can benefit yields of crops like almonds, apples, blueberries, and squash, according to Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director for the Xerces Society.

Good data already demonstrate that California hedgerows support native bee populations, Vaughan reported, noting that farmers across the country are incorporating pollinator habitat into their conservation practices. For growers, the greatest need has been for practical “how-to” information on encouraging native pollinators.

Read the full article at California Farmer.

HUGH McKENNA — For The Daily Astorian
Celeste Mazzacano from the Xerces Society, photographs a dragonfly during BioBlitz 2012. The Xerces Society is an international, nonprofit organization that protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitat. Mazzacano and others from the society were manning the Dragonfly Pond Watch station by the lake on the Yeon property near Sunset Lake Saturday.

How diverse is our ecosystem?

How do educators best engage the public’s interest in conservation?

Nature and science were the focus at Sunset Beach Saturday, as the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park and North Coast Land Conservancy presented the 2012 Clatsop Plains BioBlitz.

The day-long event was best described by organizers as “part biodiversity festival, part scientific endeavor and part outdoor classroom.” Working as citizen scientists, the public joined teams of science specialists to document as many invertebrate species as possible, including beetles, spiders and bugs.

It’ll take months to compile the data and draw conclusions, but it’s clear that Clatsop Plains is alive with a variety and abundance of less-studied organisms. There were no new species to announce, but a rare worm was identified through use of a sand-sifter. A rare beetle was also unearthed.

To citizen scientists like 10-year-old Malena Weller of Astoria, the day was one of discovery. “I found a dragonfly,” she said.

Where it took place

The event kicked off at the National Park Service’s Yeon property, located a 15 minutes’ walk from the Fort To Sea trailhead parking lot. The 100-plus-acre site houses a large rustic beach cabin, now used as a retreat. The house is actively being restored as a work in progress.

Norman Yeon, who died in 2004, bought the house from Clatsop County in 1958 for $25,100. Yeon was a philantrophist who lived in San Francisco.

North Coast Land Conservancy Executive Director Katie Voelke said Yeon intially placed a conservation easement on the property to protect it for the public. He bequeathed the property to the Trust for Public Land. Through a lengthy process, it came into the hands of the North Coast Land Conservancy, which in turn conveyed it to the National Park Service.

Lewis and Clark National Historical Park Education Specialist Cathy Peterson said Yeon was a philantrophist, collector of Asian art, merchant, and real estate investor.

This is a wonderful way for people to engage in science and also learn about the place that we live in, said Peterson about BioBlitz.

The outdoor setting stretched from the forest, dunes, and wetlands to the open water and beach. Discovering and documenting nature walks were held to look at lichens, birds and mushrooms.

Highlights also included dragonfly observation, nature photography demonstrations, scientific illustration demonstrations and native plant identification. Oregon State University scientists led the tours, accompanied by students from OSU and Lewis and Clark College. A steady stream of citizen scientists trickled in throughout the day.

Interactions

Andy Moldenke, from OSU’s Department of Botany, specializes in the interaction between arthropods and pollinating plants and arthopods’ role in decomposition. Saturday’s event was intended to engage more people in the study of biodiversity “rather than just waving a flag and feeling good and fuzzy about it,” he said, “unless you take honest to goodness measurements from now to next year and next year and what not, the world is so complex you can never use that information unless you do that in a systematic way.”

Moldenke said a disconnect has occurred as the world has become urbanized; BioBlitz works to counter that and bolster conservation. He said public participation helps scientists better describe the world to determine whether the world is getting better or “falling into the rock heap.”

He said 99 percent of knowledge gained about bugs in Oregon is the result of scientists’ study in Europe, where events likje BioBlitz are more prevalent. “You can always get unusual discoveries.”

Moldenke also studies bees. “The bees that live here have to deal with these terrible temperatures and humidity, so the only bees that live here are the same bees that live way up high in the Alpine Mountains and that go on up to Alaska and the Yukon.”

He said colleague Dave Madison was surprised to find Alpine-Arctic insects at Sunset Beach. All the insects gathered at BioBlitz will be preserved at Oregon State University. Results of the study will be posted eventually on the National Park Service website.

Madison is director of the Oregon State arthropod collection. He and students scoured ponds with nets Saturday where high school and middle school groups had located diverse insects just the day before.

Madison said insects, worms and crustaceans divide the world more finely than larger creatures. “So an elk roaming through here, this would all be one big territory. But to the little guys, each little microhabit is very distinctive to them.”

Yellow pan traps are used to sample bees, wasps, and flies. Ultraviolet light is used to lure insects at night.

Dragonflies

Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation staff scientist Celeste Mazzacano said the Portland-based society is chairing and coordinating a migratory dragonfly partnership.

“We are on the West Coast in one of the main flyways for dragonfly migration. Many people do not even know that dragonflies migrate like birds do.” Mazzacano said the society is partnering with organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to involve and educate the public in dragonfly migration studies.

Sixteen species migrate in North America but there are a “big five” that migrate annually. The “variegated meadowhawk” is a red species that is located at Sunset Beach.

The perfect location

Organizers saw the Yeon property, located near the Fort to Sea trailhead that’s the start of the 6-mile long trek to Fort Clatsop, as perfect for the project. Gearhart resident Bob Webb was among those who marveled at the Yeon property’s pristine beauty.

North Coast Land Conservancy Executive Director Katie Voelke indicated that purchase of the Yeon site by the National Parks Service is a great fit with Fort Clatsop and the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park.

“We talked about the potential and what could it be out here, that could probably reach our mission, too, because Lewis and Clark talk about going through the prairies, and it’s relatively close to the Fort Clatsop unit,” she said.

Voelke said the house is a great resource for children, education, and use as a retreat. The sprawling beach cabin is located in the middle of the 107-acre site.

BioBlitz events have been sponsored nationwide and all over the world, allowing the National Park Service to discover and document thousands of species on public lands. North Coast Land Conservancy Stewardship Director Celeste Coulter said Saturday’s BioBlitz was planned for more than a year by both agencies.

“It’s a beautiful day, and it’s a lot of fun,” concluded OSU’s Moldenke.

Read the article in the Daily Astorian

A controversial type of pesticide linked to declining global bee populations appears to scramble bees’ sense of direction, making it hard for them to find home. Starved of foragers and the pollen they carry, colonies produce fewer queens, and eventually collapse.

The phenomenon is described in two new studies published March 29 in Science. While they don’t conclusively explain global bee declines, which almost certainly involve a combination of factors, they establish neonicotinoids as a prime suspect.

“It’s pretty damning,” said David Goulson, a bee biologist at Scotland’s University of Stirling. “It’s clear evidence that they’re likely to be having an effect on both honeybees and bumblebees.”

Neonicotinoids emerged in the mid-1990s as a relatively less-toxic alternative to human-damaging pesticides. They soon became wildly popular, and were the fastest-growing class of pesticides in modern history. Their effects on non-pest insects, however, were unknown.

In the mid-2000s, beekeepers in the United States and elsewhere started to report sharp and inexplicable declines in honeybee populations. Researchers called the phenomenon colony collapse disorder. It was also found in bumblebees, and in some regions now threatens to extirpate bees altogether.

Many possible causes were suggested, from viruses and mites to industrial beekeeping practices and climate change. Pesticides, in particular neonicotinoids, also came under scrutiny.

Leaked internal reports by the Environmental Protection Agency showed that industry-run studies used to demonstrate some neonicotinoids’ environmental safety were shoddy and unreliable. Other researchers found signs that neonicotinoids, while they didn’t kill bees outright, affected their ability to learn and navigate.

Those results came from laboratory situations, with no guarantee of real-world applicability, but they were troubling.

“Bees’ ability to navigate is very important. When they leave their nest, they fly miles to gather food. Anything that makes them even a little bit worse at navigating or learning could be a disaster in those circumstances,” said Goulson. “The research suggested effects on their learning ability, but it was all done in confined situations. What we and the French group did is something more natural.”

In the first study, led by biologist Mickaël Henry of INRA, a French agricultural research institute, free-roaming honeybees were tagged with RFID chips that allowed researchers to track their movements. When dosed with a neonicotinoid, bees were more than twice as likely as non-dosed controls to die outside their hives. They seemed to get lost.

When the researchers added their results to computer simulations of honeybee dynamics, the model populations crashed.

Penn State entomologist James Frazier, who was not involved in the study, called it “the best study to date” on neonicotinoids’ real-world effects on foraging.

The result dovetailed with the findings of Goulson’s group, who exposed developing bumblebees to varying neonicotinoid levels and set them loose to forage in an enclosed field. Measured after six weeks of growth, pesticide-dosed colonies were stunted, weighing about 10 percent less and producing 85 percent fewer queens.

“Nests have annual cycles. They start with a single queen, and the nest grows through the season. If it doesn’t get big enough, it doesn’t have the resources to pour into rearing queens,” Goulson said. “The French study shows that exposure to neonicotinoids make honeybees less likely to find their nest. That’s likely the mechanism that led to our nests growing more slowly.”

However, biologist Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana was critical of the results. Goulson’s results were interesting but the researchers weren’t careful enough in verifying the doses given to their bees, and Henry’s group administered an unrealistically high dose, said Bromenshenk.

The latter’s dosing “is not what I would consider to be a field-relevant, low dose,” wrote Bromenshenk in an email, citing another recent study that used RFIDs to track bees given what he considers a more realistic dose. “At truly field representative, sublethal doses — no effect,” Bromenshenk wrote.

Both Goulson and Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director at the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation group, said neonicotinoids won’t be the only cause of colony collapse disorder.

“If it was as simple as that, the answer would have been discovered a long time ago,” said Goulson. “I’m sure it’s a combination of things. I’m sure that disease is a part of it, and maybe the two interact.” He noted a study in which honeybees exposed to neonicotinoids were especially vulnerable to a common bee parasite. Another study found that neonicotinoids dramatically increase the toxicity of fungicides.

Vaughan raised the issue of industrial-scale beekeeping practices, which have also been linked to bee declines. “We’ve potentially created a situation where behavioral impacts, compounded with a lack of genetic diversity and the food they eat, results in something like colony collapse disorder,” he said.

“My only caution is that farmers use neonicotinoids for a reason,” said Goulson. “If they were banned, farmers would have to use something else. The question is, what would that be? Would it be better? Would it also have harmful effects?”

While it’s unlikely that neonicotinoids will be banned outright in the United States, where they’re now used on more than 100 million crop acres and an unknown area of home gardens and urban vegetation, Vaughn said they could be used differently.

“I would call for a ban on their use without a demonstrated pest threat. If you have corn rootworm, and need to address that, then use neonicotinoid-coated seeds,” he said. “But if it’s a vague threat that you haven’t identified, you shouldn’t be using them. Maybe it makes you a few bucks, and certainly makes the seed companies a lot of money, but it’s potentially killing bees across the country.”

Heather Pilatic of the Pesticide Action Network recommended a return to pest management strategies used widely through the 1990s, when the rise of pesticide-treated seeds and genetically modified crops allowed farmers to change their growing strategies.

“When you plant the same crop, year after year, you’re creating the conditions for a pest infestation,” Pilatic said. “In the mid-1990s, we were doing a really good job of pest management with corn in particular. With the introduction of treated seeds, and in particular of genetically engineered corn, it all unraveled. But we know how to do it. We were doing it 20 years ago.”

Penn State’s Frazier said that the Environmental Protection Agency, which recently received a 1.25 million-signature-strong petition to ban neonicotinoids, is slowly becoming better at risk assessment, though the agency is still heavily influenced by chemical companies and opaque in its workings.

The fundamental problem isn’t neonicotinoids, but our society’s relationship to chemicals, said Frazier. “We’re making ourselves the guinea pigs,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what a rational society should be doing.”

Read the article in Wired Science

What does not kill them does not in fact make them stronger when it comes to bees and pesticides. Two unusual studies with free-flying bumblebees and honeybees find that survivable exposure to certain pesticides can lead to delayed downturns in bee royalty and a subtle erosion of workforces.

Pesticides appear as a suspect in widespread declines, sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, of the bees and other animals that pollinate crops and wild plants. And in one of the most dramatic still unsolved mysteries in those declines — why honeybee colonies suddenly collapse — one leading hypothesis combines chronic pesticide exposure with other stressors such as disease.

Both of the new studies, appearing online March 29 in Science, test the risks of foraging on flowers treated with common insect killers from the nicotine-inspired class called neonicotinoids. These pesticides course through the whole plant, killing aphids and a range of other nibbling and sipping pests, but also work their way into the nectar and pollen that bees collect.

To simulate pesticide exposures that bumblebees might encounter when a field of canola blooms, entomologist Dave Goulson, of the University of Stirling in Scotland, and his colleagues fed 50 Bombus terrestris lab colonies nonfatal doses of the pesticide imidacloprid. After two weeks of eating spiked pollen and sugar water, bees were set outside and allowed to forage around the Stirling campus at will. By season’s end, the pesticide-dosed colonies were an average of 8 percent to 12 percent smaller than 25 unexposed neighbor colonies.

More noticeably, the contaminated colonies managed to produce only about two young queens each. The other colonies averaged about 14. Pitiful production of new young queens bodes ill for bumblebees because all other colony members die at the end of the growing season. Young queens represent each group’s sole hopes for making new colonies the next year.

Ecotoxicologist David Fischer of Bayer CropScience, which markets imidacloprid products, notes that earlier research (with constrained rather than free-flying bees) did not find a drop in young queens. Goulson isn’t surprised that his bumblebees showed more of an impact. “Navigation isn’t important when you live in a box,” he says.

A drop in pollinator reproduction is the kind of finding that can get the attention of agencies regulating pesticide use, says Jeffery Pettis, research leader of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee labs who works in Beltsville, Md. Worldwide, growers commonly use five neonicotinoid pesticides for flowering crops. Amid these and previous studies, concerns are growing that usage rules may need to be tightened.

Goulson’s study ranks as the first test in bumblebees of pesticide side effects under natural field conditions, says Guy Smagghe of Ghent University in Belgium, who also works with these bees. Goulson notes that although bumblebees don’t get the press that honeybees do, many wildflowers depend on them, as do such crops as tomatoes and peppers.

For honeybees, earlier tests have raised the possibility that chronic, nonfatal exposure to neonicotinoids impairs learning, memory and other capacities that bees need for good flower hunting. To set up a test with bees flying freely outdoors, a research team in France (with substantial graduate student labor) used dental cement to fasten electronic identifiers onto more than 600 individual bees. Feeding bees low doses of the pesticide thiamethoxam in sugar water provided a realistic exposure, says coauthor Mickaël Henry of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Avignon.

After sipping the pesticide-tainted solution, the honeybees were moved up to a kilometer from their hives and released to find their way home. Researchers challenged bees with both familiar territory and landscapes the bees had never seen. Automated counters at hives logged the returnees.

By comparing the homing success of dosed versus untreated hives, researchers concluded that pesticides doubled the risk on any given day that a forager would not make it home. Computer simulations suggest that the population drop substantially weakens a colony, Henry says.

Honeybee research on whether pesticide exposure interferes with daily foraging could be relevant to other species, Goulson says. “If that is also happening in bumblebees, which is a reasonable guess, that could precisely explain our results.” If exposed bumblebees aren’t as good at bringing home food, then colonies might not grow or reproduce as well.

Bayer CropScience’s Fischer, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., questions the realism of the dosage. Researchers essentially fed bees all at one time the amount of pesticide they might encounter over a whole day.

For common pesticides now on the market, “there are obviously big question marks as to whether the safety testing that was done on these was really adequate,” Goulson says. Chronic effects may not show up without tests of free-ranging bees confronting real-world problems.

The new studies help to start filling in gaps in the research, but there’s even less known about the multitude of pollinating bees that don’t live in colonies, says entomologist Mace Vaughan in Portland, Ore., with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Most wild bees living around farms are solitary and thus especially vulnerable. “If an individual bee is lost, she cannot be replaced and her reproduction stops,” he says.

Read the article in Science News

This December, the Xerces Society celebrated its 40th anniversary. Not bad for a group that champions the spineless.

No, the Xerces Society isn’t a fraternity of bank executives or mortgage lenders. It’s a Portland, Oregon-based non-profit dedicated to the protection of invertebrates, animals that lack a physical (rather than metaphorical) backbone. Animals like earthworms, bumblebees, and beetles.

Invertebrates are the planet’s soil tillers and pollen pimps, its gravediggers and stream cleaners; the animal kingdom’s working class. In fact, they represent 99 percent of life on earth. So what better time than now, during “Occupy” mania, for the Xerces Society to celebrate 40 years of advocacy on behalf of invertebrates, Earth’s industrious, but neglected, 99 percent?

Robert Michael Pyle, a scientist-poet with a weakness for butterflies, founded The Xerces Society in 1971. He named it after the Xerces blue (Glaucopsyche xerces), the first North American butterfly to go extinct due to human disturbance, in the hopes the insect would “make an apt symbol” and steel the group’s resolve to prevent more species losses, says Pyle in a recent issue of Wings, the Xerces Society’s biannual magazine.

The Society began as a small volunteer group of Lepidopterists committed to the conservation of moths and butterflies, the insect world’s gentle, winged ambassadors. They created the popular Fourth of July Butterfly Count (which the North American Butterfly Association took over in 1993) and the Monarch Project, through which the Society protects the butterfly’s feeding and overwintering sites along its migration route in Mexico and California.

But in the early 80′s, Xerces went pro, hiring a full-time staff, taking on eminent scientific advisors — including the great conservation biologist and insectophile E.O. Wilson — and broadening its focus from Lepidoptera to native pollinators, aquatic invertebrates, freshwater mussels, and endangered insects. The group’s work has involved myriad western species such as the Taylor’s checkerspot, a vibrant grassland butterfly from the Pacific Northwest; the Siuslaw hairy-necked tiger beetle, a rare predatory beetle that stalks Oregon’s beaches for prey, and the western glacier stonefly, a glacier meltwater-dependent invertebrate known from a single area in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

The Xerces Society was also one of the first organizations in North America to advocate for river bugs as biomonitors, stressing, with the cooperation of government agencies and other green groups, the connection between aquatic invertebrates (like the western glacier stonefly) and watershed health. And they have been instrumental in protecting native pollinators, creatures whose world economic value has been estimated at $153 billion. What’s more, according to researchers with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Forgotten Pollinators Campaign, pollinators make every third bite of food we eat possible. Yum, Yum, honeybee.

In her book Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, biologist and author Marlene Zuk mentions Xerces Society scientist Mace Vaughn and his 2006 attempt with fellow researcher John Losey to quantify the economic value of four ecological services rendered by insects, the most numerous invertebrates. The four were pollination, recreation (i.e. “the importance of bugs to hunting, fishing, and wildlife observation, including bird-watching”), dung burial, and pest control (insects play a huge role in controlling crop-pests). “The total bill?” asks Zuk — $57 billion in the U.S. alone.

What’s more, “the sheer magnitude of insect numbers means that they could not be eliminated without leaving a hole so large…that the rest of the world’s organisms would be unable to continue their lives,” says Zuk. For this reason, protecting and recovering endangered invertebrate species is one the Xerces Society’s top priorities.

But bears make better poster children than beetles.

Incredibly, in 1978, just a few years after the Endangered Species Act was established, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to eliminate ESA protection for all invertebrates! The Xerces Society wrote letters decrying the plan to every single member of the House. Eventually, Congress comprised, preserving ESA protection for invertebrates but limiting federal protection of “distinct population segments” to vertebrate species. Still, “the Endangered Species Act remains one of the most important environmental laws in the world for the conservation of insects and other invertebrates, and the habitat upon which they depend,” says Xerces Society Executive Director, Scott Hoffman Black in testimony to the House Natural Resources Committee. No other U.S. law, he says, specifically protects invertebrates and their habitats.

So, the next time you’re “Occupying” your local park for the good of society’s working class majority, take a moment to look around you for members of the planet’s 99 percent. They might not have cheeky signs or “human microphones” but, thanks to groups like the Xerces Society, their collective voice is loud and clear — even without a the clamor of a drum circle.

Marian Lyman Kirst is an editorial fellow at High Country News.

Image of the endangered El Segundo Blue butterfly, which the Xerces Socity lists as critically imperiled, courtesy Flickr user stonebird.

Image of bumblebee courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Image of the threatened Oregon silverspot butterfly, which the Xerces Society lists as critically imperiled, courtesy Flickr user USFWS Pacific.

Read the article in High Country News