Author urges gardeners to form one big `national park’
Imagine if all the back and front yards — and even patio container plants — across the country were seen as one magnificent patchwork quilt, a ``Homegrown National Park.” Home gardeners would join forces to bring back a variety of native plants to protect and nurture struggling birds, bees and other pollinators.
That’s wildlife ecologist and entomologist Doug Tallamy’s vision, as laid out in his most recent book, “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard” (Timber Press).
Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, is urging everyone — in cities, suburbs and rural areas — to pitch in.
“This enormous new national park can absolutely make a difference,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press, especially east of the Mississippi River, where the vast majority of land in the U.S. is privately owned.
While one home garden can have a welcome effect, he says, it would be a game changer if lots of people pitched in on different, connected parcels of land, replacing traditional lawns, imported ornamentals and invasive species that fail to provide habitat for native birds, butterflies and other pollinators with ecologically crucial trees like oaks and other native species, he says.
And even a single person acting boldly with this goal in mind could be a crucial source of inspiration for others around them.
Despite climate change, or perhaps partly because of it, Tallamy optimistically envisions the coming decades as “The Age of Ecological Enlightenment.”
“I am an ecologist who makes this claim with confidence, because it is the only option left for Homo sapiens if we want to remain viable in the future,” he writes in his book.
The pivot, he says, must start at home. You can make changes slowly...
