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Title: Chasing Monarchs

Subtitle: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage

Author: Robert Michael Pyle

Narrator: Gary Dikeos

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-09-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 1.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Environment

Publisher's Summary:

From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California.

California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. Its the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built the lucrative "Orange Empire" on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel, an industrial fruit. They lined their streets with graceful palms to announce that they were not in the Midwest anymore.

To the north the majestic coastal redwoods inspired awe and invited exploitation. A resource in the state, the durable heartwood of these timeless giants became infrastructure, transformed by the saw teeth of American enterprise. By 1900 timber firms owned the entire redwood forest; by 1950 they had clear-cut almost all of the old-growth trees.

In time Californias new landscape proved to be no paradise: The eucalypts in the Berkeley hills exploded in fire; the orange groves near Riverside froze on cold nights; Los Angeles palms harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds on the streets below. Disease, infestation, and development all spelled decline for these nonnative evergreens. In the north, however, a new forest of second-growth redwood took root, nurtured by protective laws and sustainable harvesting. Today there are more California redwoods than there were a century ago.

Rich in character and story, Trees in Paradise is a dazzling narrative that offers an insightful, new perspective on the history of the Golden State and the American West.

Members Reviews:

Love this book

I raise Monarchs and maintain a Monarch way station in central Oklahoma. This year I was able to release almost 300 butterflies back into the environment. We also raised 10 Queen butterflies and released them. No one could have explained to me the emotional response these little souls inspire to those willing to enter their world. Like the author you find them fascinating at every stage. Larvae, chrysalis and adult, each stage is captivating. Dozens of "citizen scientists" have heard the urgency in conservationist's warnings that we are losing them in mass quantities. Companies like Monsanto and the GMO crisis are causing a cataclysmic change in habitat and no one can predict how devastating the results will be. A whole ecosystem is being threatened by their recklessness. Have we learned nothing over the years? Groups all over the United States are planting milkweed and nectar gardens but will it be enough? This book follows the author through out the Western range of not only Monarchs but other animals and takes you into a magical world that most of us fly by in motorized comfort unaware of the beauty and life and death struggles all around us to our great loss. The book is a poetic, spiritual glimpse into this world and spoke to my heart. I cried through pages and laughed in some, became enraged in others at the reckless abuse of our fellow travelers through this world.