Roger Tory Peterson was an American naturalist, conservationist, citizen scientist ornithologist, artist and illustrator, educator, and a founder of the 20th-century environmental movement, where he was an inspiration for many.
The Xerces blue is a recently extinct species of butterfly in the gossamer-winged butterfly family, Lycaenidae. The species lived in coastal sand dunes of the Sunset District of the San Francisco Peninsula in California. The Xerces blue is believed to be the first American butterfly species to become extinct as a result of loss of habitat caused by urban development. The last Xerces blue was seen in 1941 or 1943 on land that is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is a non-profit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates considered to be essential to biological diversity and ecosystem health. It is named in honor of an extinct California butterfly, the Xerces blue.
Galway Mills Kinnell was an American poet. His dark poetry emphasized scenes and experiences in threatening, ego-less natural environments. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993, he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.
John Burroughs was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the conservation movement in the United States. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871.
Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
Hibiscus moscheutos, the rose mallow, swamp rose-mallow, crimsoneyed rosemallow, or eastern rosemallow, is a species of flowering plant in the family Malvaceae. It is a cold-hardy perennial wetland plant that can grow in large colonies. The hirsute leaves are of variable morphology, but are commonly deltoidal in shape with up to three lobes. It is found in wetlands and along the riverine systems of the eastern United States from Texas to the Atlantic states, its territory extending northward to southern Ontario.
Nature writing is nonfiction or fiction prose about the natural environment. It often draws heavily from scientific information and facts while also incorporating philosophical reflection upon various aspects of nature. Works are frequently written in the first person and include personal observations.
Butterfly gardening is a way to create, improve, and maintain habitat for lepidopterans including butterflies, skippers, and moths. Butterflies have four distinct life stages—egg, larva, chrysalis, and adult. In order to support and sustain butterfly populations, an ideal butterfly garden contains habitat for each life stage.
Heather McHugh is an American poet. She is notable for Dangers, To the Quick and Eyeshot. McHugh was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program and Griffin Poetry Prize.
Asclepias speciosa is a milky-sapped perennial plant in the dogbane family (Apocynaceae), known commonly as the showy milkweed and is found in the western half of North America.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Andrew Hudgins is an American poet.
David Rains Wallace is an American writer who has published more than twenty books on conservation and natural history, including The Monkey's Bridge and The Klamath Knot. He has written articles for the National Geographic Society, The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and other groups. Wallace's work also has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, Sierra, Wilderness and other periodicals.
Robert Lacy is an American writer whose short stories and essays have been published in a large number of publications including The Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Gettysburg Review. He has also published several books of fiction and essays.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Peter LaSalle is an American novelist, short story writer, and travel essayist.
Asclepias viridis is a species of milkweed, a plant in the dogbane family known by the common names green milkweed, green antelopehorn and spider milkweed. The Latin word viridis means green. The plant is native to the midwestern, south central and southeastern United States, as well as to the southeastern portion of the western United States.
Monarch butterfly migration is the phenomenon, mainly across North America, where the subspecies Danaus plexippus plexippus migrates each autumn to overwintering sites on the West Coast of California or mountainous sites in Central Mexico. Other populations from around the world perform minor migrations or none at all. This massive movement of butterflies has been recognized as "one of the most spectacular natural phenomena in the world".
The U.S. state of California has instituted numerous conservation programs, policies, laws, reserves and Habitat restoration projects throughout the state to facilitate the health and migration of the western population of the monarch butterfly. The population of western monarchs require very different breeding and overwintering habitat when compared to the eastern population of monarch butterflies. They require specific micro-climatic conditions to survive the winter and they are sensitive to habitat changes at the overwintering sites. The large aggregations of butterflies are seen as the most vulnerable at their overwintering locations along the coast. Many monarch overwintering sites are contained within the "coastal zone"; an area defined by the Coastal Zone Management Act to be 1000 yards inland from the high tide mark. Large number of overwintering sites are outside the coastal zone. There are more than 450 overwintering sites in California.
