“We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post on interpretive design and planning to bring you this important message from Douglas Tallamy…”
Not too often, but occasionally, a book comes along with a powerful conservation message that crosses boundaries and speaks to a wider than usual audience. Nature’s Best Hope, by Douglas Tallamy, is one of those books.
“Millions of acres now covered in lawn can be quickly restored to viable habitat by untrained citizens with minimal expense and without costly changes to infrastructure.”
This book grapples with the challenge of convincing people to value something they do not currently value – and it’s for their own good and the good of the planet. Tallamy want folks to discover the rewards of responsible landscaping to reduce vision-clouding tribal loyalties to the artificial lawn culture that, on the surface, appears to be self-sustaining. What is being advocated is a new national pastime to refocus our current denaturing of neighborhoods to one of renaturing our urban and suburban environments.
Ignorance of nature has led to indifference about its fate. It is tempting to garden only for beauty and choose plants for decorative value, without regard to the many ecological roles our landscapes can perform. The result: vitality is drained from the surrounding ecosystem. Introduced species take over, and complex food webs are not supported.
By understanding human behaviour, the author underpins his book with examples of indulging our need for immediate, short-term gains rather than acts of sacrificing in order to fix problems. As Tallamy says, “Humans are not genetically programmed to care about the future.”. He proposes a selfish approach but for ecologically good reasons, where people begin to wholeheartedly accept their role as citizens of the natural world rather than its conquerors or at best “oblivious -of – consequences” destroyers. Small efforts by many could deliver enormous physical, psychological, and environmental benefits for people, plants and animals by contributing to a homegrown national park.
Tallamy drills down to one’s backyard and focuses on homeowners. Individual action is front and centre - this is not about reduce, reuse, recycle behaviour. This is about planting behaviour and a conscious shift away from traditional landscaping. One would be building a powerful connection to place -that personal feeling of identity, comfort and special meaning. “We can never truly own nature, but a sense of ownership, creates a strong sense of stewardship ethic, something this land we occupy desperately needs.”
Image courtesy Bill Reynolds
Humans have explored, mapped and colonized virtually all of land-based planet earth. “We crave new experiences, new horizons, and uncharted territories…most of us still yearn to discover.” Could we enhance the thrill of discovering new places with the same exhilaration by discovering new things? Would bringing natural wonders to our backyards open up a new thrill of discovery? Many people have discovered during COVID how the existing natural world, that was always there, surrounds them with delight and captivation once they start noticing.
The convincing gets easier when you combine this with the research detailing numerous mood enhancing, attention enrichment, and stress reduction medical benefits that arise from nature exposure. Author Richard Louv has coined this balm Vitamin N. However, Tallamy points out that these benefits are short-lived and realized only from repeated exposures. He stresses that a two-week vacation trip to a national park cannot fulfill this, but your yard or neighbourhood “national” park can.
Organized school trips, community hikes, and even family picnics are social events involving large and small groups of people. The author explains that typically these are highly structured and regulated events (and usually never at dawn or dusk when much of nature is most active). They are far too infrequent to help children and adults develop a sense of seasonal changes or a sense of the un-noticed natural cycles of life. These experiences lack the unhurried exposure and repeated solitude enhancing opportunities that could come from expeditions into our own yards - if planted with native passengers from the local bioregional community. We can enter this natural world 365 days a year having simple, commonplace encounters resulting in a sense of nurturing responsibility and harmonious relationship. Might the human race take this on as a life value?
The aim is to reverse the impact of invasive plant species (3300 in North America) that are displacing our native plant ecosystems, causing major disruption and spreading like a tumour. The intent of this collective effort would be to help preserve ecosystems in all bioregions and biomes that have been decimated by the fake “aesthetic” culture of a monoculture sod lawn and non-native ornamental plantings. Here is how Tallamy sets the stage for a land ethic development:
“Just as we are not free to throw garbage into our neighbour’s yard, we are no longer free to release countless propagules of invasive species onto our neighbour’s landscape. We are no longer free to flood our neighbours with stormwater that our huge lawns cannot absorb; nor are we free to deplete our neighbours’ aquifer by watering our thirsty grass. None of us have the right to destroy the diversity of life that once thrived on our properties-life that is required to run the ecosystems that keep us and our neighbours alive. We do not have the right to starve our local pollinators by removing the native flowers on which they depend. We do not have the right to heat up our neighbour’s airspace by cutting down the trees on our property.”
image courtesy Bill Reynolds
The book explains why ignoring these “rights” have led to an ecological catastrophe that could be reversed with individual action. Individual efforts will determine whether “…we live in a world thriving with life or in one in which little stirs.”
As many of you know, increasing the number and biomass of plantings in yards and public spaces provides great benefits. Plants pull carbon out of the atmosphere and also pump that carbon into the soil via their roots. However, through misguided purchasing preferences, the public has reinforced the landscaping industry’s focus only on the aesthetic value of plants, rather than the plant’s role as an ecological backbone supporting an interrelated web of life. The underappreciated consequences have wreaked havoc by severely reducing biodiversity. Nature’s Best Hope provides a recipe for reversal.
Tallamy makes a point that: “…even our greenest cities have missed the most critical aspect of nature-conscious urban design: PLANT CHOICE MATTERS” (my caps). The type of plants we use in our landscaping determines how much energy is passed on to animals from that which is captured by them, thus effecting the carrying capacity of the area. Native plants differ in their ability to do that because of the evolutionary traits they have developed and are incredibly better at it than introduced species.
Replacing native plant communities with introduced plants compromises ecosystem functioning making it less stable and less productive, primarily by reducing the number of species and the number of interacting species. This is “…akin to throwing a monkey wrench in a machine.” Non-bioregion species can interact in a negative way and prevent other native bioregion parts from interacting effectively. When introduced plants replace natives the caterpillar community and the associated reliant insectivore community become severely diminished (96% less food available). Most birds rear their young on insects, especially caterpillars, and non-native ornamental plants are nowhere close to being as caterpillar friendly.
image courtesy Bill Reynolds
“Not only is it easy to create a world in which insects can coexist with humans, it is easy to create landscapes in which they can actually flourish.” We just need to choose the right kinds of plants that support the two groups of insects (caterpillars and native bees) that “…contribute the most energy to local food webs- that is, the insects that are larger, more numerous, more edible, and more nutritious than others- and those responsible for most of the pollination.”
And now a word from our sponsor -EID: Tallamy’s manifesto and strategic approach is highly relevant to interpretation as a helpful blueprint for wildlife preservation that our visitors could take home and apply immediately after their visit to your site. (some follow up “doing” post the “presentation”).
The endgame is to enrich lives: “…more pollination services, more cost-free pest control, more carbon safely tucked away in the soil, more rainwater held on and within land for our use in a clean and fresh state, more bluebirds, orioles, and pileated woodpeckers in our yards, more swallowtails and monarchs sipping nectar from flowers.”
I had no idea the extent of damage caused by inappropriate landscaping choices until reading this book and being exposed to the research data that Tallamy has pulled together. The current habitat loss could be modified and thus be reduced from the present damage already inflicted on our native populations, and hopefully prevent the need for further reversal in the future. This is critical and provides the ecological basis that will allow the window dressing of beehouses and bird feeders to actually make a difference.
We’ll continue this conversation in the next blog post by trying to answer Tallamy’s question: So, how do we move beyond “preaching to the choir to reach the tens of millions of people who, through no fault of their own, remain clueless?” Stay tuned for some shocking and mind- boggling facts along with the on- the-ground strategy to move forward.