BUILDING HISTORY FOR OVER TWO DECADES
THE STORY OF SYMBOLIC MIGRATION
Over 40 years ago, the migration of the monarch butterfly to the Transvolcanic Mountain Range in Central México and their overwintering phenomenon, has led to years of scientific research.
For over twenty years now, our environmental education program has aimed to provide a window to witness such a thrilling experience from a distance. The program was designed for school and citizen scientist audiences who were eager to become informed and to participate in this exceptional and complex migration.
Hundreds of teachers and students along the migrating corridor across Canada and the United States down to México, continue to design and send their Ambassador paper butterflies at the time the real massive migration south occurs.
Local Mexican students and teachers continue receiving and caring for their colorful hand-decorated Symbolic Monarchs during the winter as a sign of protecting the real monarchs hibernating in the legendary conifer forests spots in their own homeland. They send back in response beautiful hand-written letters of friendship at the beginning of the spring as the massive departure begins their journey back north.
Our environmental and educational program has greatly developed over the years. Nowadays, students from Canada, the United States, and Mexico have widely enriched this exceptional cultural sistership. They have developed content on the aspects of the monarch life cycle, habitat restoration, and preservation in the north. Mexican students share the way they and their Ejidatario families are proud heirs and guardians of this awesome natural Reserve. Their education and family life highly depend on their conservation efforts to protect monarch forests in this region of México.
The mysticism of the monarchs overwintering at these natural areas is strongly tied to a deep-rooted cultural heritage passed along for generations. This ancestral cosmovision considers the universe, the natural phenomenon, and human beings, a whole single connected existent unit, impossible without one another.
The urge to continue discovering, restoring, praising, and conserving the extraordinary resilience, and delicate equilibrium in which monarch butterflies find their breeding and overwintering habitats in our three countries, proves to be more vital as time goes by.
Since technology is a highly incipient resource at these small villages scattered within the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, your invaluable participation in continuing to send your Ambassador Symbolic Monarchs this season, your donations through the Monarchs Across Georgia Mexico Book Project, and your follow-up over the winter with this blog, is critical for the assurance of this cultural and natural treasure. Symbolic Migration will continue to bring face-to-face lessons on conservation in these rural areas during the hibernation time for monarchs.
