I Am Not Hamlet

Kill yer grass! That's not what Doug Tallamy calls for directly in Bringing Nature Home , but he might as well have. According to his research there exists in the continental U.S. only 3-5% of undisturbed area left. Now, he doesn't quite define what this means (I take it as areas of no permanent human activity), but his point is that we have plowed under most of the habitat that used to exist here. We have plowed it under for farmland and malls, for highways and hospitals, but we've eradicated the majority of space that non-human creatures use as habitat. To make things worse in the place of native plants--which are absolutely necessary to life on this spherical rock (all plants are necessary in their proper place)--we have planted ornamentals that have no enemies here (meaning the U.S.) nothing to check their spread and therefore nothing to feed on them, plants that don't support the life that is supposed to be here. I've covered Tallamy's doom and gloom s...

Earlier this month while attending a conference I had the pleasure of listening to a speech by Doug Tallamy, author and entomologist at the University of Delaware. His talk, about creating a balanced community i.e. between the natural world and the built world of man, started out horribly depressing. In the U.S. we have 62,500 sq. miles of turf grass; one-third of all bird species in the U.S. are in decline or endangered; "Birds lost 50% of their habitat because we're mowing and raking the world," he quipped. 96% of bird species eat insects. We've left only tiny habitats in our suburban landscapes and many of those contain plants that aren't native, hence the insects that birds, amphibians, and mammals would be feeding on, just aren't around. Only tiny populations can exist in tiny habitats, and tiny populations are vulnerable to extirpation and extinction. Our remaining natural areas--in too many places--are not large enough to sustain creatures. What to...