Please Help the World's Rarest Butterfly

[Paul Cherubini]

Some posts have asked me to provide 
supporting evidence that conservationists sometimes personally profit 
from "saving habitats".

How many examples does everyone want?  I'll give one for
starters:

At Calif State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif. there is a
professor Kingston Leong 
http://www.calpoly.edu/~bio/BioSci/Faculty/Leong/Leong.html.
This web page http://www.butterflypalace.org/page4.htm (near the 
bottom) states that Professor Leong is a:

"Published author on numerous.... environmental 
impact reports on "The Monarch Butterfly Habitat in California."

This is true and his (publicly disclosed) consulting price has been 
in the five figures. Sorry, I do not have access to 10 years worth of
tax returns for Prof. Leong to document exactly how much consulting 
money he has made.

The bottom of this web page http://www.butterflypalace.org/page22.htm
states that at what I consider a small, low quality monarch aggregation site: 
"$500,000 will also need to be raised in developing and overseeing 
management of the [monarch] site, in which Cal Poly [Professor Leong] 
is expected to be involved."  Obviously Prof. Leong would get paid some 
portion of that $500,000.

The bottom line issue here is whether or not monarch butterflies have 
directly benefitted from the tens of thousands of consulting dollars
various developers have given to Professor Leong over 
the past 10 years to "manage and enhance" monarch sites?

I know of no cases where the monarch population has increased
substantially at any of the the monarch eucalyptus or pine groves
where Prof. Leong was hired to study and manage the sites.

By contrast, for a tiny fraction of all the thousands of dollars spent
on Professor Leong over the past ten years, many new high quality
monarch overwintering sites could have been created from scratch 
(nearly all of them are man made to begin with).  It takes only
a few hundred dollars worth of blue gum eucalyptus trees, purchased
at a wholesale tree nursery, to create a new monarch site. And it
should not cost anything (except time churning through red tape)
to plant them on the extensive existing government
owned land along the coast of California. Sadly, most 
conservationists are not  interested in this idea in which the 
BUTTERFLIES, (not the conservationist/
consultants) would directly benefit from the money spent. Perhaps that
is because there would be no big need for consultants if volunteers go 
to the nursery, buy and plant the trees. 

By the way, the web page that we were just at
http://www.butterflypalace.org/page4.htm gives a resume of sorts
for Prof. Rudi Mattoni's consulting activities, including consulting for
the Palos Verdes Blue. Paid consulting work obviously. Since about 1975
it has been common for professors to supplement their university
job income with outside environmental consulting such as this.

Paul Cherubini