Environmentalists petition feds to list monarch butterflies as threatened.

Victorian architecture isn't the only 19th-century throwback in Pacific Grove. The city's legendary monarch butterflies go way back, too, and now that history is getting play in a national campaign for monarch protection.

A coalition of environmental groups is pressing the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to list monarch butterflies as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The Aug. 26 petition was filed by The Center for Biological Diversity, The Center for Food Safety, The Xerces Society and Dr. Lincoln Brower, a monarch researcher known for his efforts to conserve the monarchs' overwintering and breeding habitats.

One of those key overwintering habitats: The Pacific Grove Monarch Grove Sanctuary.

Monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains, most of which migrate to coastal California, have declined to less than half their 20-year average since 1997, the petition states.

The petition makes several references to the importance of the Pacific Grove monarch habitat, including an 1874 Monterey Weekly Herald account of “millions” of monarchs “fluttering around…while overhead stout branches of firs dropped with their weight." And a description of trees near Monterey covered with monarchs, in an 1881 letter: "To say that there were as many butterflies as leaves upon the trees would not be a very great exaggeration."

The petition also mentions the 2004 tragedy in Pacific Grove, where a limb from an infected tree fell on and killed a visitor, resulting in a $1 million city settlement—and municipal pressure to prune diseased and aging trees. "Yet the removal of tree limbs may result in microclimatic changes that  make a site unsuitable for overwintering monarchs," the petition states.

As the Weekly reported in this week's print edition, a city plan to prune and thin trees in the Monarch Grove Sanctuary has gotten political. This November, Bob Pacelli—a dedicated butterfly activist with a complicated relationship with city officials—is running for City Council on a monarch conservation platform.

Pacelli planted many of the eucalyptus trees the city now proposes to thin. Petition author Brower has written to the P.G. City Council in support of Pacelli's efforts.