H.O.P.E. (Helping Our Planet Everyday)
By Melissa and Denis Kania
Would you like to spend less time cutting your lawn? Would you like to reduce the money you spend watering your lawn? Then please keep reading.
Douglas W. Tallamy is a Professor of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Delaware. He has written numerous books including Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope. The information presented here is based on a YouTube video titled “Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas Tallamy.
We are currently in the 6th extinction crisis on our planet and unlike other mass geological extinction crises, this one is almost solely attributable to humans. There has been a global insect decline. Human life depends on insects. If insects were to disappear, most flowering plants would disappear which would cause the collapse of the food webs that support amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. The environment would rot due to the loss of insect decomposers. Human life would cease to exist. We can save our insects and the rest of nature by changing the way we landscape.
When redesigning our landscapes, we need to start with plants and the pollinators necessary for their reproduction since they are the ones that contribute the most to ecosystem function. Through photosynthesis, plants make food that support almost all the animals on the planet. However, most vertebrates don’t directly eat plants. They eat something that eats plants. Caterpillars are the most important plant eaters that transfer energy to other animals, so when designing landscapes we need to provide habitat for caterpillars. Unfortunately, most plants do not support caterpillars, so we need to make sure that what we plant is something that caterpillars can eat. For example, the caterpillar that becomes a monarch butterfly can only eat milkweed. A scarcity of caterpillars in the landscape will result in a decline in birds since most birds rear their young on caterpillars.
There are four keys to success when creating a landscape that will help to save nature.
- Reduce your lawn, which is an ecological desert, by 50% and replace it with native plants.
- Plant keystone plants in place of your lawn. Keystone plants are those plants that are best at supporting food webs. These would be plants that support caterpillars and pollinators. Only 14% of our native plants provide food for 90% of our caterpillars. Go to the National Wildlife Federation’s website at http://www.nwf.org/nativeplantfinder/ to find the best keystone plants for your location.
- Reduce light pollution at your home by putting a motion sensor on your security lights and using yellow light bulbs because they are less attractive to nocturnal insects. Light pollution is one of the main reasons there has been a 45% decline in the insect population.
- Create a landscape that is conducive to allowing caterpillars to complete their development. Although a few caterpillars pupate on trees, the majority of them (94%) pupate in the soil. They finish growing as caterpillars on the tree and then fall from the tree into the soil below where they burrow underground or in the leaf litter under the tree to pupate. This means that when creating your landscape, you need to plant native plants such as ferns or ground cover under your trees which will create a soft landing of noncompacted soil for them and will enable them to easily burrow underground.
If we replant half of the current 44 million acres of lawn in the United States, this will create a 22-million-acre homegrown national park which would be larger than any other national park in our country. When you have completed changing your lawn from an ecological desert to a thriving ecosystem, you can join
homegrownnationalpark.org where you register your property. Please help save our planet for future generations.
