About 30 people sit as Dr. Doug Tallamy, Chair of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at University of Delaware, flicks through a vivid array of slides — plants, gorgeous and fascinating insects, moths, butterflies, birds — as he makes the case for biodiversity as imperative to our own species’ survival.
“It’s not THE environment,” he points out. “It’s OUR environment, the only one we have to sustain us. It’s our water, our air, our food.”
Dr. Doug Tallamy at his lab
Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants (Timber Press), is a man on a life or death mission that includes all of us since he is talking about our endangered food web and the part we as a species have played in its creeping demise. His delivery is funny and fast-paced, (particularly if you’re trying to take notes — he flings out one critical fact after another), and is laced with truly scary statistics.
We are losing 50,000 acres of forest per day on the planet (which is what both sequesters carbon and helps produce the oxygen we breathe), have paved an area 5 times the size of New Jersey, which means the surface is not only non-productive but ups the ambient summertime temps. During the course of a still-incomplete species survey, scientists have learned that there are 4,252 imperiled species. Pollinators are particularly endangered. (China, whose environmental policies have killed off a huge portion of their pollinators, must hand-pollinate many of their food crops now).
Development itself is a big part of the problem, but of key importance is the way we’ve developed our spaces so far. Our penchant for sterile swathes of lawn combined with horticulturists’ and landscapers’ bent toward exotic plants, which offer no food to native wildlife is ultimately deadly. Wildlife isn’t just pretty, quaint or cute. Biodiversity actually fuels and protects all life on the planet.
Native Goldenrod (Solidago) and Cerceris wasp
And a lot of it starts here with the least of these – bugs, the bane of many gardeners’ existences. In our eagerness to kill off all bugs so we can have show-off-able landscapes, we’ve killed off biodiversity that will ultimately come back to majorly bite us in the backside. (The destruction of the barrier islands that protected New Orleans is a big reason for the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.).
Tallamy’s message is a little like the old saw: For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of the shoe the horse was lost; for want of the horse, the rider was lost; for want of the rider the message was lost; for want of the message the battle was lost; for want of the battle the war was lost, and ALL for the want of a nail. Bugs and caterpillars are the nails in Tallamy’s scenario. Without them, birds cannot eat and raise the next generations since 96% of terrestrial birds raise their young on insects. Protein. (Pollen is protein too). Birdseed, which is much more carb than protein, isn’t enough. Moving up the food chains several layers, is us, who will be affected – even if we don’t care about birds.
Tallamy’s science- and personal experienced-based plea – since he owns 10 acres or so in Pennsylvania that is now home to lots of wildlife — is for individuals to each take the spaces they control and plant them with a collection of native plants.
“We could create a suburban park,” he says, “that would be larger and more productive than [all the parks in our nation] combined.”
Doing that might actually save our piece of the planet and cost way less than so-called remedial programs. A build-it-and-they-will-come approach.
“We’ve been sending money to the rainforest for years and it’s not helping; it’s still getting cut down,” he says. “Save the money and spend it at home and plant your property with natives.”
Large trees, understory trees and shrubs are the start. They let serendipitous growth take hold and renew the self-sustaining organism that is our environment.
He signs his books, “Garden as if your life depended on it,” because he knows that ultimately, everyone’s does.
For a list of native and life-sustaining native alternatives to the sometimes invasive exotics we have been shoving into our landscapes go to:
https://bringingnaturehome.net/native-gardening/woody-plants
https://bringingnaturehome.net/native-gardening/herbaceous-plants
The list is arranged in descending order of how many species each plant supports.
For a property survey to see what you already have and how you might add beneficial natives to your own little bit of the earth, contact Hather Buritsch at University of Maryland Master Gardener program
https://bringingnaturehome.net/
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