Guess it's time to stop all agriculture, pomoculture, viniculture, pasturing of animals, and managed silviculture, since all of those things impact "biodiversity" far, far more than what people grow in their own gardens.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

Not sure how we are going to support the population we have, much less 1/10th of it, if all the yellow, brown, and pink squares are converted back to blue - national parkland or protected areas - which is pretty obviously what 'special use' blue is. Look at Yellowstone.

It would be far more effective to just pledge not to reproduce and/or to sterilize your children LOL. But you know, as pseudoscientific feel-good claptrap goes, this is fairly innocuous. It's not as though these people are denying the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, right?!

But seriously, now that I'm almost done being sarcastic...yes in an ideal world, most people who live in the US east coast would, for example, convert their yards back to native woodland. (people in the midwest could convert their yards back into prairie) I'd be totally for that, except for the obvious reality that most everyone's backyard would just become a big pile of poison ivy, asian celastrus and honeysuckle, and poorly pruned junk natives like red maple. Sorry...most Americans are just too stupid and lazy to handle that approach. I'd rather MOST of them just keep scalping their hideous lawns of (invasive, btw) crabgrass and microstegium. If someone in my neighborhood actually planted "completely native" and kept it up, and it didn't look like crap? Go for it. I totally support that. But u know what? I'll believe it when I see it happen on a large scale!!! In Australia, a continent that actually has a pretty interesting native flora, there were yards with - guess what - mostly or entirely native plants. There were also yards with the bizarre combination of non-native, Northern hemisphere plants found there...Yucca elephantipes next to Betula jacquemontii next to Prunus 'Yoshino'. Guess what? It's all taken care of! The native pittosporums are nicely clipped and not covered in weedy vines, native or otherwise. I am happy with either approach! Just don't judge my garden for NOT being 100% NATIVE, when I spend 10X per unit area taking care of it than you, and quickly stamp out any nuisance/invasive plant, whether it's native or not! Poison Ivy gets the dreaded more-dangerous-than-plutonium roundup, and will continue to!

I also shared a link to one of his talks. I will look for it-it may have fallen off the first page. :-( Only two people responded. I was so surprised. I would have thought gardeners would be able to see the benefit of planting more natives and trying to stop the loss of insects and birds.

There are so many issues to address. The loss of humans on the planet would have less negative impact than the loss of insects without which we cannot survive, no matter what some say.

Here is my link .

Doug Tallamy

I love it. I already saw a couple monarchs and a monarch caterpillar in my yard.

If you break down the message he says to have 60% of the trees or woody plants on your property be natives and plant some native groundcovers under them and/or mulch under them with fall leaves. Turn off outdoor lights at night or put them on motion sensors or timers. Next step reduce your lawn by 50%. Most people have huge lawns around here.

It's hard to find MOST native perennials in the wild around here, that seems odd to me.

Agrimonia striata

Senna hebecarpa

Sabatia angularis

Cirsium pumilum

Thanks cyn427 for the link.

Thanks Skip1909 for the pictures of some of your results.

davidrt28, the concept is not taking over land, but to make gardens support biodiversity. You're entitled to your opinions but words like 'risible' (different post) and 'claptrap' makes it hard for me to pay attention to them.

I think the point of Tallamy's writing is to share your garden, not to create a literal national park. It has its own rewards. Loris, I bet you know what this is.

Thanks for sharing this. I totally believe in the world park idea. It's a good start to, what will be a long process. I've been converting my whole yard to natives, and I'm starting to do the same to my front lawn.

Perennial morning glory Ipomoea pandurata.

I don't like clean edges, and let the seeds grow where they fall. I like surprises growing in cracks, and I hate hostas all lined up in a row like soldiers 🤮. I've come close to dying a few times and in those moments, dandelions and spotted spurge were so beautiful, that I couldn't bare being forever separated from them. Obviously one can tell from all the litter that apathy is a plague these days, but I still would like to leave this planet, better off than I found it.

Thanks maackia,

I think I'm seeing THREE host plants! Way to go! Correct any that are wrong:

Blue False indigo (Baptiista australis)

Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium maculatum)

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)

-- loris

Thanks Jay for the reply and pictures. Sorry to hear death came near you. Finding surprises in my yard is one of my favorite things. Based on these and other posts of yours I've seen I think you'll meet your goal.

-- loris

the only thing that makes Earth significant is the presence of humans

Loris, you got it!

Was the Earth not significant for the first 4,597,000,000 years of its history, but then just got good 300,000 years ago?

As a geologist, I'm amazed by this incredible planet every day. Humans have done a lot of damage in a very short time. Any steps that folks take to ease our burden on the planet is very welcome. Gardening is such a personal connection with the Earth!

loris thank you for posting this, I'm a big Tallamy fan. Whenever I hear him speak it seems like the other people attending care very much about the environment. Listening to the evening news is becoming frightening. People in California are stealing water, songbirds are dying, every year a new, introduced insect pest. Our native diversity is disappearing quickly. I have found one of the best ways to learn is to join a botanic/entomology/ornothology group and go on fieldtrips.

"If half of American lawns were replaced with native plants, we would create the equivalent of a 20 million acre national park, nine times bigger than Yellowstone or 100 times bigger than Shenandoah National Park." - Doug Tallamy

He's working in concert with the National Wildlife Federation's backyard wildlife habitat/sanctuary program. In my youth I interned with NWF and worked in suburban wildlife education. At my age, I'm now introducing the concept of stewardship to our third generation. One of my mentors (who just died at 96 last year) had a saying, "Nothing matters unless somebody cares." Humans are the only animal capable of doing such global levels of damage, but also the only animal capable of understanding long term ecosystem management issues and doing anything to repair the damage they have done. We are the only animal capable of figuring out how to repair nature . . . why waste this miraculous ability which sets up apart from all of creation? Ya got me, but I see people wasting God's gifts every day (or the astounding good fortune of intelligence and evolution, with our without a Creator in your mindset.)

maackia,

Thanks for the confirmation of the plants.

Maybe I've been looking at natives too long but I think your picture could be an example of an attractive garden with native plants (but hold the common milkweed unless you have lots of room)!

karin_mt, sam_md, Skip1909 and I pinkmountain,

Thank you all for the replies. I read the posts about only humans making earth special last night but didn't feel ready to reply. You have taken care of that for me.

The only other thought I'd had was about animals which seem to be in or near the same tier as us in terms of social caring and/or intelligence such as elephants, dolphins and octopuses. Many animals amaze me, but the plight of elephants in particular due to our actions seems especially important to me to fix.

This book may get more people thinking if they read it:

How Animals Grieve link on Amazon

I pinkmountain,

Great post!

An easy way for me to feel like I'm helping a bit is by using this link, and signing up for updates from them:

Audubon take action page

I'm signed up use other organizations but this one is national so anybody could use it.

Yes Audubon is great too, great trips and Jr. Audubon in some places. They had a couple of nice sanctuaries in PA that I am familiar with. My most recent contribution was working with the local Jr. Garden Club but right now I am on sabbatical and focusing on my own yard . . .

Great post I PinkMountain! And Loris, too. I'm definitely on your wavelength. Thank you for this discussion. Nurturing a plot of Earth is a nice way to learn more about how we can be less destructive to the planet. And nowadays, gardening is one of my main mental health boosters, even if under a sky filled with orange wildfire smoke.

Thank you for a great post, ipinkmountain.

"I've come close to dying a few times and in those moments, dandelions and spotted spurge were so beautiful, that I couldn't bare being forever separated from them. Obviously one can tell from all the litter that apathy is a plague these days, but I still would like to leave this planet, better off than I found it."

Jay - that post touched my heart. I hope when the Good Lord calls me I'll be in my garden putzing around and just keel over and go -- and be ushered in by a parade of wildlife, butterflies flitting around and flowers lining the path...

This is a video about how a man exercised 50 years of stewardship and conservation on his property in N. CA. At some point, he says something to the effect that he has the satisfaction of knowing he did what he could and that his place is going to go on after him, he's seen to that. He also mentions it was "so much fun." That was the reasoning I gave a friend 35 years ago. He said given what we were up against, efforts to spread conservation and a stewardship ethic were bound to fail. I said, "Well, we're going to be here anyway, and at least trying is fun and you get to meet the most excellent group of people." Even if you don't have money, there are ways to contribute by volunteering. I'm going in Sept. to a memorial for my mentor, she conserved several hundred acres and she didn't have any of her own money, she was just a charismatic leader and she got people together to turn dreams into action.

There's an ad before the video starts . . .

Thanks I pinkmountain, karin_mt, and mxk3.

karin_mt, your words 'a sky filled with orange wildfire smoke.' is so, I don't know, sad, serious....

I pinkmountain,

your mentor has in common with Doug Tallamy as you put it a a 'charismatic leader' who got 'people together to turn dreams into action'.

I watched the video. His enthusiasm was a joy and he's been able to do so much good.

It is sad, Loris. I've worked my whole career on environmental issues and I'm a pretty upbeat person, but this summer in Montana is brutally hard. We've had only 4 days in July that haven't been above 90. Normally in an entire summer we'll have fewer than 10 days that hot.

Almost no rain - smoke day in and day out, brown sky and brown landscape. Our outdoor air is considered "unhealthy" and we don't have AC, so we just close the windows, draw the blinds, and try to wait it out. We have about 6 more weeks of fire season to go.

The worst part is our political culture that has zero interest in preserving Montana. I feel like I'm just resigned to watch it burn down. Yesterday I actually just started crying when someone asked how our weather is.

It's the garden that's my sanity! Even in the heat, I have a few spots that are super nice right now. Our veggies are loving the heat, for example. So more than ever, I feel the importance of the connection between one's garden and the rest of the planet. It's a lifeline in many ways.

maakia, I don't think Dr. Tallamy's point is to share your garden, although that is obviously a lovely and generous thing to do, but rather that by concentrating on planting natives in our yards and gardens rather than having lawns we are creating what amounts to changing what is now sterile lawns into what could be the equivalent of national parkland.

I put this idea of creating a wildlife oasis into action in what was a postage sized row house backyard at my last place, and I saw a dramatic difference in my quality of life and the quality of the yard in just about five years. There was actually immediate improvement but the whole picture really came together after a few years of establishment. I was able to enjoy a diversity of birds, butterflies and other wildlife in what was a very urban situation. Also my yard went from hot, dry, windy and sterile to much cooler, with enjoyable ambiance and we spent a lot of time out there, particularly in the evenings after work and early mornings for coffee on weekends and days off. It became another room for our tiny home. It really doesn't take much money, just a little thought, hard work and creativity and you can see dramatic results. I was lucky in that I had a fantastic native plant nursery a few miles away, started by some wonderful former colleagues of mine. I used a lot of non-natives but they were cousins of the natives that could thrive in that environment. A lot of them were dwarf varieties due to the small size of the yard. I had a raspberry plot in the back that the birds loved. They loved the native musclewood that I planted too, which is shown below, that was on the others side. The yard was an homage to my native beech maple forest, with the "blue beech" small tree standing in for the full sized one, and the Japanese maple standing in the for other maples.

Here's a transition, the before, immediate after, and five years later. That little orange plastic pot thing became a tiny birdbath fountain. The beautiful fireglow japanese maple died though. The native musclewood on the other side of the patio thrived, it became a showstopper.

There was a small dwarf hemlock below the musclewood. "Snowmageddon" in 2010 did it in, sadly. I have zero luck getting the dwarf hemlocks to survive.

Wow, I pinkmountain. What a difference!

It's not the same thing, but I was amazed at how much wildlife Robert F Wagner Park and adjacent parks in New York's financial district was able to attract. People don't think of it as possible, but downtown Manhattan was where I saw such birds as scarlet tanagers and common yellow throats.