ATLAS OBSCURA: The Migrant Quilt Project Remembers Lives Lost Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

The 14 quilts that make up the Migrant Quilt Project are each unique. One looks like a large American flag, one shows silhouetted cacti against an orange sunset, one is quilted with rows of small white skulls. But all of the quilts share one feature: long lists of names, such as Jose Lara Avila, Margarita Rios Rodriguez, or Rufino Hernandez. But the most common name, listed again and again on every quilt, is desconocido, unknown.

The Migrant Quilt Project is a folk art memorial to the hundreds of people who die each year attempting to cross over the border from Mexico into the United States. Alongside the lists of names, small scraps of jeans, handkerchiefs, and other personal items found in the desert are sewn into each quilt to symbolize the human side of illegal immigration. Though illegal immigration to the United States has slowed in recent years, routes taken by migrants have become increasingly dangerous. The organizers of the quilt project hope to bring attention to the continuing issue of migrant fatalities.

“When [the quilts] are hung en masse, they are stunning and it’s overwhelming,” says Jody Ipsen, the project’s director, as she prepares for a showing of the quilts at a church in Oro Valley, Arizona. “More than anything, people say, ‘I had no idea. I had no idea people were dying in the desert.’”

A quilt from the Migrant Quilt Project is displayed at a church in Oro Valley, Arizona. The quilts list names of migrants who died in the Arizona desert and incorporate personal items found along migrant routes such as jeans and handkerchiefs.

Ipsen has lived in Tucson, Arizona, about 60 miles north of the border, since the 1960s. She says for years she’s watched the border become more militarized. But it was on a camping trip in 2005 that she really started to think about how dangerous and politically charged it had become.

Ipsen was hiking in the Arizona desert when she came upon a trail covered by discarded clothing, diapers, water bottles, and tuna cans. “At first I was appalled,” she says. She thought that the items were just litter, carelessly abandoned in an otherwise pristine natural area. But when she realized she was looking at the remains of a migrant camp, her concerns changed.

She began volunteering with humanitarian groups that provide water and aid to people crossing the desert. She learned more about the challenges faced by undocumented migrants, often fleeing violence in Central America. She also volunteered with desert cleanup organizations, with whom she’d sometimes dispose of clothing or trash left by migrants.

“I felt really compelled, like, maybe there’s something we can do with this migrant clothing we find in the desert to speak to the issues in a more in-depth way,” Ipsen says.

Ipsen knew of the NAMES Project and its AIDS Memorial Quilt, with its thousands of six-foot-long quilted panels made by volunteers to remember loved ones lost to the AIDS epidemic. She wondered if she might be able to launch a similar memorial for undocumented migrants who had died on their journeys to Arizona. But Ipsen had spent her career in the publishing industry and had never made a quilt. So she partnered with nonprofits, church groups, and individual volunteers from around the United States and started what would become a years-long, collaborative sewing effort.

Each quilt represents one year of fatalities that occurred within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency’s Tucson Sector, which covers most of Arizona’s border. For some years, the quilts list around 100 people, both named and unknown. Other years, they list nearly 300. The quilts incorporate personal items found in the desert, believed to have belonged to migrants.

Though the quilts are meant to memorialize those who have died in the deserts, the scraps of clothing used do not come from sites where bodies were found. Rather, they are items that have been abandoned under the desert sun, usually found in trash heaps along with food scraps and other garbage. On the rare occasion Ipsen and her volunteers find a backpack or piece of clothing with some form of identification on it, they will hand the item over to the Consulate of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or appropriate country.

Jody Ipsen, left, and Peggy Hazard, right, stand in front of a quilt from the Migrant Quilt Project. The quilts memorialize the hundreds of migrants who die each year attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

Peggy Hazard is a retired gallery curator who now helps Ipsen coordinate the Migrant Quilt Project. She also helped make one of the quilts.

“The whole experience was emotionally fraught,” Hazard says.

She has been a quilter most of her life, but says working with pieces of worn-out jeans and sun-faded bandanas felt different. The quilt she worked on also included a set of hand-embroidered cloth napkins.

She will never know to whom those belonged, but she says, “Those particularly moved my heart because I knew somebody had spent the time to stitch those and then send them with their loved one.”

What troubles Ipsen and Hazard is that migrant fatalities have not declined over the past decade. The clandestine nature of illegal immigration makes data difficult to accurately collect, but the numbers that are available suggest the percentage of migrants who die crossing the border is growing.

The Missing Migrants Project of the UN’s International Organization for Migration reports more than 250 migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border so far for 2017, slightly more than the same period in 2016. Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports a nearly 40 percent decline in apprehensions of migrants this year, a signal that fewer people seem to be making the journey than in prior years.

“Even though fewer migrants are crossing, they’re taking more risks,” Julia Black, project coordinator with the Missing Migrants Project, says in a phone interview from her Berlin office. “The data indicates that it is more dangerous for migrants crossing into the U.S. this year than last year.”

Since 2012, the Migrant Quilt Project quilts have been displayed at border issues conferences, museums, churches, and universities around the country. Ipsen says she hopes showing the quilts will honor those who have lost their lives, and also inspire policy change to bring an end to border fatalities.

Those kinds of efforts to raise awareness are crucial, according to Reyna Araibi, a spokesperson for Colibrí Center for Human Rights.

“What’s really going to change policy is these really human-centered narratives,” Araibi says. Her organization provides resources for families searching for migrants who have gone missing crossing the border, and currently has more than 2,400 open cases. “You cannot make any type of progress on this issue if we’re not talking about both the numbers and the humans behind it.”

The idea of using quilts to spark political conversation is nothing new, Hazard says. Abolitionists, suffragettes, and leaders of the temperance movement are known to have used quilts as a form of activism. “For a long time women didn’t have many rights, so women used the power of the needle, whether embroidery or making quilts, to get their point across,” Hazard says.

Ipsen says she hopes the quilts illustrate a problem that anyone can relate to, even while border policies and immigration issues have become more politically divisive.

“Whatever your feelings are, whether they’re illegal or not, these are human lives, people with families,” Ipsen says. “Human life is sacred.” She says she and her volunteers will keep making quilts “until there are no more deaths in the desert.”

Read this story on Atlas Obscura

REUTERS: Federal judge refuses to overturn Trump pardon of Arpaio

PHOENIX (Reuters) – A federal judge on Wednesday upheld President Donald Trump’s pardon earlier this year of 85-year-old former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, rejecting legal challenges by outside groups.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton said that she had considered the petitions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona and other organizations, including one staffed by lawyers who worked for former Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration, but found no legal grounds to overturn the pardon.

Bolton did not rule on a request by Arpaio’s attorneys to take the further step of vacating his conviction.

Trump, a Republican who has promised to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, has praised Arpaio’s crackdown on illegal immigrants in Maricopa County, Arizona, that drew condemnation from civil rights groups.

Arpaio was convicted in July of willfully violating a 2011 injunction barring his officers from stopping and detaining Latino motorists solely on suspicion they were in the country illegally. He had not yet been sentenced when Trump issued the pardon in August.

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NEPR: ‘Balancing Act’ As UMass, Holyoke Community College Respond To White Supremacist Fliers

Hate groups are on the rise in the U.S. and they increasingly see college campuses as prime recruiting ground.

UMass Amherst and Holyoke Community College are just two of dozens of college campuses to have been targeted by white nationalist propaganda in recent months. But finding the right way to respond to these groups can present a challenge to college administrators.


The fliers that appeared recently in a parking lot at UMass Amherst and on bulletin boards at Holyoke Community College showed black and white photos of European statues — like Michelangelo’s David — with slogans like “let’s become great again” and “protect your heritage.”

It’s the white nationalist group behind the fliers that has the schools concerned. They call themselves Identity Evropa, require members to be of European, “non-semitic” heritage. They take extreme views on immigration and promote pseudo-scientific theories about differences between races.

“Many of these groups are feeling emboldened by the current political climate and they are using the environment as a way to attempt to recruit college students,” said Robert Trestan, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.

The organization recently issued a report showing white nationalist groups have scaled up their recruiting efforts at colleges and universities. Racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim fliers have been found on more than 100 campuses across the country since last fall.

“It’s important for leadership on campuses to make it very, very clear that their campuses do not represent these views, and these kinds of views are not welcome on their campus,” Trestan said.

But how schools choose to respond can raise concerns too, according to Azhar Majeed, with FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free speech watchdog group.

“What I hope not to see on college campuses, is for universities to respond by saying certain types of speech, even though they’re protected by the First Amendment, will be subject to censorship or punishment,” Majeed said.

Finding a balance between rejecting discrimination while allowing for free speech is exactly what Holyoke Community College faced when fliers appeared on its campus this month.

“Some students are very concerned about how safe this campus is for them, especially students who belong to underrepresented group that are being targeted by these organizations,” said Yanina Vargas-Arriaga, the college’s vice president for student affairs. “And other students are concerned about whether we’re going to be taking an approach where we’re going to be silencing ideas.”

Ultimately, Holyoke Community College decided to address the incident with a school-wide email from the college president, which outlined a commitment to diversity and respectful exchange of ideas. Vargas-Arriaga said HCC also plans to host events on campus to reiterate those messages.

And colleges around the country facing these situations have had a range of reactions.

When white supremacist fliers were left outside the offices of African American faculty at Indiana University, the school notified the FBI. The president of UT Austin hosted a town hall meeting in response to anti-Muslim fliers that appeared at that school.

At UMass Amherst, the student affairs office reached out privately to multicultural groups on campus. UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said university leadership considered the group that left the fliers probably wanted to get attention and create controversy.

“There is a balancing act,” he said. “You want to denounce — absolutely — the message, but you don’t want to create so much public notice that you’re advancing that agenda.”

At both UMass and Holyoke Community College, most of the fliers were left in places where fliers aren’t allowed to be posted, regardless of content, so they were quickly removed. Neither school knows who posted them, either.

And Vargas-Arriaga said there’s a big difference between that kind of messaging, and students backing up their own ideas and presenting them respectfully.

“Anonymous speech has no standing in our community, but when you stand behind your thoughts and your ideas, then we will sit down and engage,” she said.

Exchanging ideas, Vargas-Arriaga said, is what college is all about.

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

NEPR: Will Hampshire College’s Flag Fight Affect Enrollment?

Enrollment matters a lot for a school like Hampshire College, with just about 1400 students and a relatively small endowment. So Hampshire had some budget problems this year, when the student body came up about 60 students short.

“We under-enrolled,” said Meredith Twombly, dean of  enrollment and retention at Hampshire. “We missed when we guessed what our yield was going to be.”

Twombly said the 51-year-old college changed its admissions process over the last few years, trying to become more selective.

“These are just things that happen when you make a dramatic shift in your strategy,” she said. “It takes a while for things to get predictable.”.

At the time, the school also cited campus protests over racism as a potential factor in the decline. Fewer applicants chose to attend, and more students than expected decided not to return.

This year, Twombly and her team changed their strategy again. They made more conservative estimates and hoped to see enrollment pick back up next fall.

But right as application season kicked off, Hampshire College was all over cable news.

A few days after the election, the American flag at the center of campus was burned. The school president later had the flag taken down, saying it was distracting from a larger conversation about the school’s values.

Veterans protested, politicians complained, the flag went back up and the situation drew a lot of attention to the small college.

Discussing the situation on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly made this prediction:

“Well, they’re done. The college is done,” O’Reilly said. “It’s a laughing stock.”

But could a controversy like this actually have an impact on Hampshire’s enrollment?

Jonathan Smith is an assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University. He’s the co-author of a new research paper that measures how a scandal on a college campus can impact applications to the school.

“Students certainly do respond to scandals negatively,” Smith said.

Smith’s research shows that just one negative mention of a college in the New York Times can reduce applications 5 percent. A long-form article can cause a decline of 10 percent.

“So there’s sort of this increasing relationship where you see the more media attention there was around a particular scandal, the fewer applications the school would get the following year,” he said.

But they key word in Smith’s research is “scandal.” He’s focused on serious crimes like sexual assault or violent hazing. The situation at Hampshire, though controversial, doesn’t quite fit the bill.

“I think what happened at Hampshire College has the potential to attract some applicants, but also deter some applicants, so it’s not exactly obvious what’s going to happen on net,” Smith said.

It’s an out-of-the-ordinary situation and Hampshire is an out-of-the-ordinary college. The school has no majors, no letter grades and it was founded on a philosophy of alternative education.

Adam Metsch is president of a private college advising company called College Advisor of New England. He’s helped students and families through the process of picking colleges for more than 20 years. Metsch said a school’s atmosphere is one of the most important things for applicants to consider.

“It’s not about elite kids getting into elite schools; it’s about understanding what the dominant culture of a school is,” he said. “Not just size, location, major, but political climate, for example.”

Metsch said Hampshire College is not the kind of school just any student would want to apply to, and those who do apply are probably expecting something a little different.

Dana Maple Feeney is a third-year at Hampshire and the unique atmosphere is exactly why she decided to enroll.

“I showed up and I just felt so much different than I felt anywhere else — just hearing people talk about what they were studying,” Feeney said. “And I don’t think anything really would have changed that feeling.”

Feeney said her younger brother is looking at colleges right now and she’s encouraging him to consider Hampshire.

Meanwhile, Twombly hopes that — for new applicants — Hampshire’s distinctive campus culture will outweigh recent criticisms of the school.

Hampshire’s first two admissions deadlines, for early decision and early action candidates, have already passed. Twombly said so far, those show about a 5 percent increase in applications over last year.

“That was my first indicator that, you know, this might not have a big impact,” she said.

The protests at Hampshire have dispersed. The news trucks have left. Pundits have moved onto the next subject.

And, Twombly said she feels optimistic looking ahead to the college’s biggest application deadline in mid-January.

 

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

NEPR: A ‘Metaphoric Outside Park,’ Inside An Old Mill Building

Easthampton, Massachusetts, was a thriving mill town during the industrial revolution, but when manufacturing left the city, its industrial landscape remained. In recent years, Easthampton’s old mill buildings have been turned into loft-style apartments and art galleries. And now, an indoor park.

Mill180 Park is inside one of Easthampton’s old mill buildings. Owner Michael Sundel chose Easthampton for his first indoor park partly because of the city’s industrial real estate.

At the east end of the Pleasant Street mill district in Easthampton, there’s an imposing, red brick, factory building. But walk through the doors, into Mill 180 Park and you feel the crunch of artificial turf under your feet, you hear kids playing, you see natural light streaming through the windows.

The whole thing has visitors like Patrick Sullivan feeling a little surprised.

“You don’t expect to see this when you walk in a mill building,” Sullivan said.

His friend, Mark Plazcek, agreed.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I was impressed when we came up here and walked in, it’s beautiful.”

The 14,000-square-foot space opened its doors in early September. In the middle, a cafe serves snacks and small plates along with beer and wine. Hydroponic planters throughout the room grow vegetables for the restaurant. Visitors can sit at picnic tables, stretch out or play lawn games.

Michael Sundel is the owner of Mill180 Park. He has a background in software design and has always had a fascination with parks, so he decided to combine his interests to create a technology-driven indoor park.

 

“It’s a metaphoric outside park, so even though you know you’re inside there’s enough detail and features to make you slowly forget that,” said Michael Sundel, the owner and creator of the park.

Sundel lives in Virginia, where he runs a software company. But he’s always had a fascination with city parks. About two years ago, he had an idea to try to combine his interests to create a futuristic public space that would be usable year-round, regardless of weather.

“So I thought…obviously we don’t have thousands of acres, but if we use technology and good design, we can possibly put it in a building and it would be as useful as a large park,” he said.

Sundel became familiar with Easthampton when his daughter was going to boarding school nearby. He said he specifically chose the city for its perfect combination of empty industrial space and a population that has a history of supporting community projects and the arts.

“Even around here there are cities with huge empty mills and they don’t have the population to fill it. I think Easthampton is fortunate in that respect,” Sundel said.

Sundel and his wife have invested more than $2 million in the project so far. That has gone toward things like custom-designed furniture and high-end hydroponic gardening systems — everything designed to make the space feel bigger and more outdoorsy.

“We weren’t trying to rush it,” he said. “We were trying to get it right.”

Anyone can come spend the day at Mill 180 Park, use the free Wi-Fi or lie on the turf, and no one has to buy anything. There is the cafe, but Sundel isn’t counting on much revenue from food and drink sales.

“Running a restaurant is horrible, I’ll be blunt,” Sundel said, with a laugh.

That’s especially true in comparison to the highly efficient world of software that he’s used to, he said. And software is more what Sundel expects to keep the park open. He’s designing a program to manage his employees along with the indoor gardening equipment and the restaurant inventory. He hopes to turn a profit selling that software.

He’s also hoping the park’s hydroponic planters might inspire visitors to try indoor gardening, in which case, he could market some of that equipment.

But Sundel emphasized his main goal is to keep the space feeling like a public park and encouraging visitors to relax and interact. So far, that seems to be happening.

“I think it’s serving it’s purpose as an indoor park,” said visitor Samantha Battaglia. “There are people here lounging on the turf as though it’s a grassy lawn outside.”

Battaglia stopped by for a cup of coffee recently with her friend Caitlin Dwyer-Huppert, who said they’d likely be back.

“There’s potential for how we could use this, you know, coming and playing games to blow off steam,” Dwyer-Huppert said .

Michael Sundel said whether the business model will work or not is still an “open question.” But if it does, he hopes to bring more indoor parks to other cities around the U.S. in the near future.

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

NEPR: In Academia, A Push For More Generous Parental Leave

New England has long held a reputation as a hub for higher education. Just in Massachusetts, colleges and universities employ more than 120,000 people.

The experience of working at a college can vary greatly campus-to-campus, and that includes employee benefits like parental leave for staff and faculty. One college in the Pioneer Valley is trying to set a new standard.

“This is my first child and it’s been a roller coaster ride,” Amanda Huntleigh said with a laugh.

Huntleigh works as a choral director and lecturer works as a choral director and lecturer in the music department at Smith College. But since August, she’s been focused on her new son, Aramis.

“He’s only at the point developmentally right now where he can sometimes be away from me,” she said last month at her home in Northampton. “And the thought of having to drop him off for 40 hours a week is horrifying.”

But Aramis isn’t headed to daycare just yet. Huntleigh is one of the first Smith College employees to take advantage of the school’s new parental leave policy.

This summer, Huntleigh was pregnant when the private women’s college announced it would extend paid leave for a child’s primary caregiver. Staff, who had eight weeks paid leave before, now get 12 weeks paid. And faculty who previously had been relieved of teaching for a semester, now get a break from administrative duties, too.

The policy also extends leave times and reduces teaching loads for non-primary caregivers.

“My first thought was, ‘This was awesome before and now it’s even better,’” Huntleigh said.

As of 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 14 percent of university, college and junior college employees had access to paid family leave. That’s slightly higher than the U.S. workforce as a whole.

And that number has an impact on the profession, according to Mary Ann Mason. She’s a law professor at UC berkeley and co-author of the book, Do Babies Matter: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower.

“The baby issue is the main reason why academics drop out of the pipeline,” Mason said. “Often at the graduate school level.”

In the last decade, Mason said, she’s seen more universities catch onto the trend of increasing family leave time, which she said is important for keeping women in academia. But she said traditionally, in this competitive profession, women have been expected to keep up with male colleagues at any cost.

Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College, knows that first-hand.

When I was an assistant professor, there was no parental leave policy,” she said. “I did ask for a course reduction, and I was told it would not be fair to the men in my department.”

Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College sits in her office. McCartney decided to expand the parental leave policies at the college after writing an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the issue.

In the three decades since, McCartney said, not enough has changed. That concerns her not just as a mother and grandmother, but as a researcher. She’s spent the bulk of her career as a psychologist studying early childhood development.

“In the United States, there is really no guarantee of paid parental leave…although some businesses do offer it, but not enough and not for long enough,” she said.

In 2015, McCartney published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe arguing just that, and that op-ed prompted her to reconsider Smith’s policies. Now, she said, she hopes Smith’s change might lead the way for other schools.

Among the Five Colleges — Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass — family leave policies vary widely school-to-school, from a few weeks to whole semesters, unpaid to fully paid, and with different benefits for faculty or staff.

Amherst College, for example, offers staff four weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child. Staff could get to 12 weeks at full pay, but they would need to combine benefits such as the school’s short-term disability program, sick time or vacation days.

Mason said there are plenty of reasons why institutions are hesitant to adopt lengthier leave policies.

“It is expensive for universities to offer lavish absences,” Mason said. “It does slow projects down. There’s no easy way to say that everything’s going to be the same when someone’s out for six months or six weeks.”

That’s especially true in higher education, where there’s already pressure to keep research output high and tuition prices low. But McCartney said she’s optimistic Smith’s new policy will accommodate new parents without too much disruption to the classroom — or the budget.

“In most cases, we’re not replacing faculty and staff, instead other people are taking on other responsibilities,” she said.

Amanda Huntleigh said she is grateful for that flexibility.

“Planning to have a baby rarely fits in with the academic career path, so we finally just decided we were doing it whether it made the most sense or not,” Huntleigh said.

Huntleigh is 35, and she and her husband waited a few years to have a child. She said it’s just a coincidence that Aramis arrived right in time for Smith’s policy change.

“Having never done this any other way,” she said, “I don’t know how people who don’t have this time manage it.”

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

NEPR: Recognizing Gap In City’s Archive, Holyoke Aims To Collect Puerto Rican Stories

When Eileen Crosby began working as the archivist at the Holyoke Public Library four years ago, she said she found great resources about the city’s early industrial history, and the waves of Irish and Polish migrants who settled in the town generations ago.

“We had materials on all those groups, but what we didn’t have in the archives, very much of, was any really rich material about any groups that arrived in Holyoke after about the 1950s,” Crosby said.

Specifically, Crosby said, the archive had very little information about the thousands of Puerto Ricans who moved to Holyoke in the second half of the 20th century. So Crosby and her team sought out a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“We really wanted to use it to try to start capturing this missing piece, and I say start because we’re really just scratching the surface,” she said.

The grant project is called Nuestros Senderos: Our Journeys and Our Lives in Holyoke. Its aim is to identify some of the Puerto Rican families who have built their lives in Holyoke. Among them — Julita Rojas, who moved to New York City from Puerto Rico in the 1960s. But when she took a trip out to Holyoke to visit her sister in the summer of 1969, everything changed.

Julita Rojas holds up family photos that she shared with the Holyoke Public Library’s new archive project. The project, “Nuestros Senderos: Our Journeys and Our Lives in Holyoke,” aims to gather information about Holyoke’s Puerto Rican communities.

“I said, ‘Oh, I love this place!’ And then six months later…I moved to Holyoke with all my family,” she said. “Ever since, I’ve been here.”

Rojas raised her four children in Holyoke. She now has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild who also live in the area. And it’s important to her to share her story with them, and with future generations.

“I want them to know the roots,” she said. “I want them to know where I came from and all the things that’s happened in Puerto Rico, yes.”

Rojas brought three family photos with her to the library’s community digitization event on Saturday.

Crosby and her team of volunteers made digital copies of photos and documents that community members brought in to share. They also had a booth set up to make audio recordings of family stories. All those files will be saved in the archive to help fill out the story of the city’s diverse heritage.

“The reason we don’t have more family history materials in general is people think, ‘Well, it’s just my family who would be interested in that?’” Crosby said. “But there’s actually, in that material, the things we collect about our own families, there’s a lot social history…There might be information about the neighborhood, about schools, about cultural traditions.”

Just a handful of families shared their stories and photos at the first event. Crosby said the library is hoping to gather more as the project continues through next spring.

Listen to this story on New England Public Radio

CARING MAGAZINE: Nationwide, Pollinator Gardens are Creating a Buzz

With its gently rolling water and twinkling lights, San Antonio’s Riverwalk is well-known as a charming spot for a leisurely stroll. Each year, millions of visitors relax among its shaded patios, picturesque bridges, verdant landscaping—and as of late, its growing flocks of brilliant orange and black monarch butterflies who frequently skate through the air, drawn in by the flora found in the city’s nearby zoo, parks and even public schools.

That last part is no coincidence.

In recent months, San Antonio, which lies directly in the middle of the monarch’s annual migration path between Mexico and Canada, has launched a robust effort to support butterflies and other pollinators.

“We’re trying to create this ‘monarch highway’ through the city, so they have enough energy to make their migration,” said Ruben Lizalde, special projects and strategic initiatives coordinator for the San Antonio mayor’s office.

San Antonio is not alone. Across the U.S., cities, government agencies, school districts, nonprofit organizations and ordinary Americans are increasingly making space for pollinator gardens—plots of land filled with insect-friendly plants to support butterflies and bees. It’s all part of a massive, coordinated effort to save an essential and delicate piece of North America’s ecosystems.

Pollinators can be bees, butterflies, moths, birds or other wildlife that carry pollen from plant-to-plant—a crucial step in the lifecycle of many flowers and crops—and in recent decades, their populations have plummeted across the continent. Monarch numbers alone have shrunk more than 80 percent in 20 years, and some of North America’s 4,000 species of bees are already feared to be extinct. Loss of habitat due to urban growth, climate change, pollution and widespread use of pesticides are all linked to the staggering drop in pollinator numbers, and the rapid declines of these tiny creatures could have far-reaching impact.

“[This initiative] is so critical,” said Mary Phillips, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Garden for Wildlife program. “One third of what people eat would not be possible without pollinators.”

Many of the fruits, vegetables and nuts we commonly eat depend on pollinators, Phillips said. Their shrinking numbers could lead to food shortages and rising prices.

It may, however, be possible to reverse the trend.

“This is a challenge we all have the ability to do something about,” said Christine Casey, an entomologist with the Honey and Pollination Center at University of California, Davis. “Even if you live in an apartment and just have space for a flower pot on your front step, it’s still better than not doing anything.”

That message has made its way all the way to the White House. In 2014, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum calling on government agencies to do their part to save pollinators, which contribute an estimated $15 billion to the U.S. agricultural economy.

“The problem is serious and requires immediate attention to ensure the sustainability of our food production systems, avoid additional economic impact on the agricultural sector, and protect the health of the environment,” the president wrote.

First Lady Michelle Obama planted a pollinator garden at the White House, while the president’s memorandum called upon the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior, and other agencies to form public-private partnerships and implement programs to take on pollinator conservation projects.

The National Wildlife Federation was one organization that heeded the call.

“We realized we needed a very large public campaign to get attention to the issue,” Phillips said.

“Unprecedented” is actually how Phillips described the cooperation between her organization, the National Forest Service and dozens of gardening and conservation organizations. Together, the organizations have inaugurated two programs: The Mayor’s Monarch Pledge and the Million Pollinator Garden Network.

The Mayor’s Monarch Pledge was the collective brainchild of the National Wildlife Federation, the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the mayors of Austin and St. Louis. The program lists 24 suggestions (25 for California) for how cities can better accommodate butterflies, such as planting milkweed (monarchs’ favorite plant), changing lawn-mowing practices or introducing stricter pesticide policies.

More than 130 cities from coast-to-coast have signed on so far. Most have adopted three or four of the recommendations. San Antonio went a step further.

“I thought if we’re going to do this, let’s go all the way. I wanted to be the trendsetter,” Lizalde said.

San Antonio, so far, is the only pledge signatory in the U.S. to have adopted all 24 actions. Lizalde said most of the actions fit in with programs the city already had in place.

“I called the parks department and public works department, and they already didn’t use certain pesticides. In our city code, milkweed was already one of the plants to plant,” Lizalde said.

In addition, the city’s zoo hosted its first Monarch Fest this past March, Mayor Ivy Taylor has visited schools to talk to students about habitat restoration, and the University of Texas San Antonio has taken on pollinator research projects. Lizalde said next he’d like to see friendly competition between neighborhoods to encourage San Antonio residents to garden for pollinators at their homes.

“I think we’ve created somewhat of a template for other cities to follow,” he said.

The National Wildlife Federation also helped launch the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge in 2015. Phillips said the goal is to get one million pollinator gardens, large and small, added to a nationwide registry by 2017. Home gardeners, schools, garden clubs and all gardeners in-between can register their pollinator gardens online. So far, hundreds of thousands have registered.

At the same time, private businesses, especially those that rely on the agriculture industry, have been investing in pollinators in recent years. Whole Foods Market has launched an educational pollinator campaign as well as donated to the Xerces Society, a conservation group that works to protect invertebrates such as dragonflies, mussels and starfish. General Mills—makers of Honey Nut Cheerios, with that friendly bee mascot—also worked with Xerces on habitat restoration. The pollinator garden at UC Davis, meanwhile, is named after its big-name benefactor: Häagen-Dazs.

But for home gardeners who don’t have the resources of a government body or large business, the idea of creating and maintaining a wildlife habitat can often be intimidating. So increasingly, cities and organizations are offering demonstration gardens to lead by example.

Carol Bornstein, garden director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, calls the museum’s three-acre garden, filled with native plants and other pollinator-friendly features, “a training ground for citizen scientists.”

The museum is just outside Downtown Los Angeles—a field of concrete where Bornstein hopes to prove to visitors that urban spaces can double as wildlife habitat.

“If you plant it, they will come,” she said. The museum’s garden has only been open for about three years, but it is buzzing—literally—with pollinators. And none of the bees, butterflies and hummingbirds that frequent the garden were imported; they all found their way there past freeways and urban landscapes on their own, she explained.

With so many inspiring examples like that, Bornstein hopes the nationwide focus on pollinators in recent years will empower people to join the cause.

“Even though there are a lot of challenges, gardeners more than ever really have the opportunity to make a difference,” Bornstein said. After all, she added, “Gardening is an act of hope.”

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REUTERS: U.S. judge rejects plea deal for ex-L.A. sheriff who lied in probe

A plea agreement between U.S. prosecutors and former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who had pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in a corruption and civil rights probe, was rejected on Monday by a federal judge who said it “understates the seriousness of the offense.”

Baca, who had previously run the largest U.S. jail system, faced a maximum six-month prison sentence under the agreement in a case that clouded his 15-year tenure as sheriff. He resigned in January 2014 during the probe.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson introduces uncertainty over how the case could proceed. One possible outcome is for Baca, 74, to accept a harsher sentence at the next hearing on Aug. 1.

In February, Baca pleaded guilty to a federal charge of making false statements to investigators in 2013 when he asserted no prior knowledge of efforts by his deputies to intimidate a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and thwart a criminal probe of his department.

Baca’s plea made him the 18th current or former member of the sheriff’s department convicted of criminal charges that stem from a federal investigation of inmate abuse and other wrongdoing, including cover-up attempts, at two downtown Los Angeles lockups.

Baca’s attorney outside court expressed surprise at the ruling. “We were blindsided,” Michael Zweiback said.

At the Aug. 1 hearing, Baca could, if he decides against accepting a harsher sentence, withdraw his guilty plea and head toward a trial, Miriam Krinsky, a prosecutor-turned-law professor told reporters.

The plea agreement stated Baca admitted he actually was aware his deputies were going to contact the agent and he had directed them to “do everything but put handcuffs on her.”

“It’s one thing to lie to (federal prosecutors). It’s another thing entirely when the chief law enforcement officer for the county of Los Angeles is involved in conspiracy to cover up abuse,” Anderson said at the hearing in Los Angeles.

Baca has been diagnosed as suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a pre-sentencing memorandum filed by the government, though his diminished cognitive impairment was described as mild.

Prosecutors, who declined to comment on the ruling, cited Baca’s condition in their reasoning for seeking a penalty far less severe than the five-year maximum sentence he faced.

But Anderson said the proposed sentence “would not address the gross abuse of the public trust” the case represented. He did not indicate what sentence would be fair.

(Reporting by Katherine Davis-Young, writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; editing by Cynthia Osterman and Alan Crosby)

Read this story on Reuters