"In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty.  But the serious truth is that in order for US TO SURVIVE, they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators and manage water."  Doug Tallamy

Doug Tallamy is an entimologist at University of Wisconsin. He is the founder of

Homegrown National Park.

Chances are, you have never thought of your garden - - indeed, of all of the space on your property - - as a wildlife preserve that represents the last opportunity we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common throughout the U.S.  If this is news to you, it’s not your fault. We were taught from childhood that plants are decorations and our landscapes are for beauty; they are an outlet for expressing our artistic talents and an oasis for having fun and relaxing in. And, whether we like it or not, the way we landscape our properties is taken by our neighbors as a statement of our wealth, our social status, and our willingness to follow cultural norms. 

But no one has taught us that we have forced the plants and animals that evolved in North America (our nation’s biodiversity) to depend more and more on human-dominated landscapes for their continued existence. We have always thought that biodiversity was happy somewhere “out there, in nature,” in our local woodlot or perhaps our state and national parks. We have heard little about the rate at which species are disappearing from our neighborhoods, towns, counties, and states. Even worse, we have never been taught how vital biodiversity is for our own well-being.

We Have Taken It All

The population of the U.S., now over 330 million people, has more than doubled since most of us were kids, and it continues to grow by 4800 people each day. All of those additional souls, together with cheap gas, our love affair with the car, and our quest to own ever larger homes, have fueled unprecedented development that continues to sprawl over 2 million additional acres per year (the size of Yellowstone National Park). The Chesapeake Bay watershed has lost 100 acres of forest each day since 1985. We have connected all of our developments with 4 million miles of roads, and their combined paved surface is nearly five times the size of New Jersey. Somewhere along the way we decided to convert most of our living and working spaces into huge expanses of lawn. So far, we have planted over 62,500 square miles -some 40 million acres - in lawn. Each weekend we mow an area the size of New England to within one inch and then congratulate ourselves on a job well done. And it’s not as though those little woodlots and “open spaces” we have not paved or manicured are pristine. Nearly all are second-growth forests have been overtaken by invasive Asian plants like autumn olive, multiflora rose, oriental bittersweet, porcelainberry, buckthorn, privet, and bush honeysuckle. 

To nature lovers, these are horrifying statistics. We share Professor Tallamy's important facts so that we can clearly understand the challenge before us. We have turned 54% of the lower 48 states into a matrix of cities, suburbs, roads, airports, power and pipelines, shopping centers, golf courses, infrastructure, and isolated habitat fragments, with 41% more of the U.S. into various forms of agriculture. That’s right: we humans have taken 95% of the natural world and made it unnatural. But does this matter? Are there consequences to using almost all of our land to meet human needs without considering the needs of other species? Absolutely, both for biodiversity and for us.  Our fellow creatures need food and shelter to survive and reproduce, and we need robust populations of our fellow creatures because they are what run the ecosystems on which we all depend. Although we like nature, we have always felt apart from it; humans are here and nature is someplace else. The idea that we could coexist in the same place at the same time has never been part of the vast human cultures.