Thursday, February 13, 2014

Milkweed for Valentines Day

The David Suzuki Foundation has a good idea on how we can celebrate sustainability on Valentine's Day. If you purchase an e-card for your loved one, they will plant milkweed for monarch butterflies. Milkweed  (Asclepias spp.) also supports a variety of native bees, so it's a good plant for your garden, and the pollen morphology is very unusual.

From the David Suzuki Foundation website:


Every fall, monarchs make an astonishing, 5,000-kilometre trip from Canada to Mexico—one of the longest insect migrations on Earth.

But monarch populations have drastically declined, due to habitat loss, pesticides and severe weather. This year there are fewer monarchs overwintering in Mexico than ever before.

In late February, the survivors will start their multigenerational journey northward, arriving in Canada early summer.

Your eValentine will help us plant milkweed—the plant where monarch moms lay their eggs and the monarch caterpillars’ main source of food—to welcome them back to Canada*.



Valentine's Day is also a great day to celebrate peace and love for humanity as The Valentine Peace Project continues to create dialogue around the flower industry and other "chains of trade".

Transforming gifts of love into agents for peace involves investigation into the nature and history of brands and romance commerce.  Global Witness has worked for more than a decade to track links between corruption, war and trade.  How can we reverse these damages and create peace products, chains of trade, with sensitivity and sensibility to human rights, environmental concerns, and conflict resolution?

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