From Lawns to Life: Embracing Native Plants with Doug Tallamy

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Doug Tallamy, an American entomologist, ecologist and conservationist. He's a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware and he's written and co-authored several books, many of which you've probably read or heard of, as well as many papers. The books you're probably familiar with are “Bringing Nature Home”, “The Nature of Oak”s and “Nature's Best Hope, a New Approach to Conservation that Starts in your Yard”.

Andy:

Doug, thanks so much for coming on. I think many people listening are aware of your work, but for those not familiar with your name, could you just give us a brief background?

Dr. Tallamy:

Well, I'm Doug Tallamy, a professor at the University of Delaware, and have been since 1981. So it's been a while.

Andy:

Seen a few things.

Dr. Tallamy:

You know my work recently is focused on conservation issues, starting with plants, the insects that eat those plants and transfer the energy to the animals that need that energy so that we have functioning ecosystems. How do we keep all that intact?

Andy:

It's not an easy question, and you've written several books on the subject, which are all fantastic, by the way.

I think I've read most, if not all, of them at this point and it's refreshing to see some of the things you're saying and kind of the research that you're finding. Now, as an advocate for native plants, there tend to be kind of like three major areas where people who are concerned with these things focus their energies, and those are kind of like industrial agriculture and those impacts, invasive species and the impacts that have, and then like the general, like ecological change and destruction, whether that's you know clearing, you know wetlands to put up a mall, or you know suburbanization, you know all these different ways that ecological destruction takes place.

But, it's not as simple as just saying there are these three areas, they overlap a lot, right? So let me ask’ we understand these things are bad. We still have to put up houses and things like that, right? So what are some of the things we can do for non-plant people to, I guess, be a little bit more ethical about this?

Dr. Tallamy:

Huge subject. I'm going to go back to something you just said. We still have to build houses. Right there. We have what's unsustainable on this planet. We cannot continue to grow forever on a finite planet. So if we do that, there's nothing we can do. Native plants or not. We're all going to go down the tubes because there are finite resources. If we outstrip them, we're all going to suffer.

So, assuming we get a handle on that, how do we share the planet? How do we share other species on the planet with our own needs? And before we talk about that, let's talk about why we have to share those resources, because that, you know, those are the ecosystems that provide the life support to keep us around. So, yes, we can keep taking from nature. There's still more nature out there. We can take absolutely all of it, but that will do us in.

So there's a big, big misconception right there that we're separate from nature. We don't need it. It's fun to visit, but it's just there for our entertainment, not true? It's there to keep us alive on this planet. So how do we sustain it? And, by the way, partially sustainable is not good enough, because that's still unsustainable. Sustainability is an uncompromising word. You have to reach sustainability or it's unsustainable, and unsustainable is not an option.

All right, we share our spaces by including as many of the things that make those ecosystems run in our landscapes, in our corporate landscapes, our residential neighborhoods, our roadsides, and even our agriculture, as many of those as possible. So sure there's going to be, you know, those places are never going to be as rich as an untouched place. But we can do a whole lot better than we're doing right now. I mean, that's kind of an intro. I don't know how long you want me to just spout off here, but we can do a whole lot better than we're doing right now.

Andy:

You and I don't have a say in how our food is grown, right, there's a limitation to what we can do in terms of, again, unless you're rich, you can't choose to buy local for all of your food, right? And even then it's not as simple as it sounds, because you buy local pasture-raised poultry, for example, well, they're still getting fed chicken feed that is probably coming from some monocrop someplace. And then, like I said, you don't have a say in if builders are building a house. So I think that can be overwhelming and for an individual and to kind of gear the question a little bit, the only thing that I can do, because I can't control the houses being built, I can't control where food is being produced on a mass scale that's affordable for me. I can control the invasive species to an extent in my neighborhood, right?

Dr. Tallamy:

Well, right. So what you're doing is outlining global issues, and you're right. I can't ask somebody, hey, take care of all of this. That gets overwhelming and you just get depressed. But I can say it's your responsibility to take care of the land that you quote.

Own the piece of the earth that we own. If we own that piece of the earth, we own the responsibility of taking care of it, and that means keeping the ecological integrity of that piece of property. That means so there you just focus on the problems. Are there invasive species on your property? If so, yeah, we have to get rid of them. What's the percentage of native plants on that property? I bet we can increase it. How much lawn do you have? I bet we can decrease it. Are the lights you have on at night that you probably don't need at all? Can we put yellow bulbs in there instead of the white bulbs that attract and kill insects? Do you hire Mosquito Joe to kill everything that's out there?

All of these things are things that you can control yourself, one person. You don't need a team, you don't need an army. It doesn't mean you do it overnight, but you can pick at it to improve the ecological integrity of your little piece of the earth and if everybody did that, we'd be done. So this focuses the problem into something manageable. It empowers you because now there's something you can do. It's not just talk, you can do it and you get to see the results. Because when you do those things, life will come back to your property and that's a lot of fun, it's very healthy and you're part of the solution. You get to see, hey, this is happening. So if you let's say, all right, you really fixed your property, then maybe you can branch off to a local park or something else. But let's keep the objective small and doable so that you don't feel overwhelmed in the beginning. Because that's what we want to do. We want to get everybody on board a grassroots solution to this global issue.

Andy:

Yeah, you come at it from a bunch of different angles depending on the book you wrote. So, as you talk about oaks in one particular book, I believe it's called “the Nature of Oaks”, and in it, you make like a lot of arguments about why oak trees belong on our landscape and we should be doing much more. And in it, you know, while you do profess the value of oaks, you also talk about some other key species that I don't think we recognize maybe as native or like as prominent in our landscape but have like a lot of value.

Black cherry, willows, things like that, that can do a whole lot for our local ecosystem and I think for a lot of people that can be a lot easier than, like you know, trying to put native pollinators like flowers, annuals, short perennials, things like that, because it's you put the tree in the ground, you water it a couple of times so it doesn't die right away, and then, like that, that's pretty much it, and that's really in a world where people want instant gratification and they don't want to like to be tied down for a long period, like if that's the minimum everyone did, we'd be in a lot better shape.

What I also think is interesting to kind of go on a little bit of a tangent is that the value of oaks has been historically significant, right, whether it's indigenous people utilizing them for food or game and I think you still see this in the hunting community is that they're highly valued for game, but we don't have that relationship to them as much as we used to. So I want to ask, as somebody who does spend a lot of time talking about flowers, what drew you to oaks in particular and how do you see them kind of fitting into like an increasingly uncertain future?

Dr. Tallamy:

Well, what drew me to them was our research that you know. What we've shown is that caterpillars are really important insects because they transfer most of the energy that plants harness from the sun to other animals. And it's a convenient index. If you know the number and diversity of caterpillars you have in a food web, you know how healthy it is, how productive it is, and how stable it is. So that led us to what plants are producing the most caterpillars. So that led us to what plants are producing the most caterpillars.

What we did was go through the literature for the last 100 years, really looking at host plant records. So this caterpillar is recorded on this plant, on and on and on over 4,000 references. And we built this database for every county in the country that ranks the plants in terms of their ability to make caterpillars. So that's where oaks come out. Number one they support over 950 species of caterpillars nationwide. So in the mid-Atlantic states 557 species, and cherries are great and willows are great too, but more than 100 species fewer than oaks.

And then you get down to most other plants and oaks and those keystone plants are orders of magnitude more productive than many of our other plants or trees and plants. So that's why I talk about the Keystone Plant issue. We've got to have them in our landscapes if we're going to have functional food webs. And you might say, well, I don't want all those caterpillars on my tree, the tree would be all eaten up. No, it won't, because you've got birds eating those caterpillars all the time, hundreds of caterpillars every single day when they're feeding their young. So it takes thousands of caterpillars to make one clutch of one bird.

The real issue is we don't have enough caterpillars, it's not, we've got too many. And right away you can say well, what about the gypsy moth? I'm not talking about non-native caterpillars. I'm not talking about invasive species, because they're here without their natural enemies. The birds don't eat them and they do cause a whole lot of trouble. I'm talking about the native caterpillars that are co-evolved with our plants and the things that eat them, as being vital to functional ecosystems.

So oaks are not only the best in terms of making caterpillars, but they're also the longest-lived and very densely built. In other words, they're sequestering more carbon than almost any other plant and they're holding it longer and they've got big root systems. So they're managing our watershed better than most plants. They're pumping more carbon into the soil better than most plants. They even help pollinators, even though they're wind-pollinated. Our early spring bees go to those catkins and get that pollen. They're not moving it and they're not pollinating, but they are using the pollen, so they're functional in that regard too. What's the sequestered carbon? Manage the watershed, and help the food web and the pollen. Okay, so those are the four things that oaks do well, and those are the four things that every landscape has to perform if we're going to reach a sustainable relationship with Mother Nature. So if you can pick one plant, that does it all. That's why I focus on.

Andy:

Oaks breed so well and like. It's cool to see how wide you know from a chestnut oak to you know a burr oak, to a burr oak that grew up in swamplands, where they have these acorns that are like the size of a fist, almost Like it's just it's wild to see it all be in the same you know genetic pool. Basically.

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah, there are 91 species of oaks in North America, and that doesn't count all the viable hybrids. By the way, there are 200 species of oaks in Mexico. Mexico is a hotspot for oaks and 435 species across the world. That genus has the largest distribution of any tree genus in the world.

Andy:

Yeah, so it shouldn't be surprising then that we have this historical innate connection to them, because if they're a keystone species and they are everywhere, how could we not? And I think part of the reason why we don't value them is because they're just everywhere, so we don't think anything of it, which is unfortunate because they were so revered for so long. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how we rebuild, and rekindle that relationship and that awe that we deserve to have for the oak tree.

Dr. Tallamy:

Well, that's exactly why I wrote that book was to try to get people to appreciate all the things that they do In terms of supporting biodiversity. A lot of things happening on the oak in your yard that people don't know about, and if you don't know about it, you don't go out and look for it. Your yard that people don't know about, and if you don't know about it, you don't go out and look for it. So I always say that knowledge generates interest, and interest often leads to compassion, and that's what you're talking about having more compassion for the natural world.

You know, the thing that attracted Europeans to oaks and North America was the wood, the value of the wood. They have so many uses. It's still an issue with white oaks. In Kentucky, for example, you have to make your bourbon barrels out of white oak, and it goes for wine as well, and they're over-harvesting. We had a lot of us eating, drinking a lot of bourbon, a lot of wine, and they're taking more oaks than are out there. So nothing, no resource, is inexhaustible. It isn't. If we're going to use it as an agricultural product and that's really what you're talking about we're going to have to manage it that way and get a lot of more oaks back into the landscape. The big problem now? Two big problems.

Oaks are a fire climate species. They like small ground fires, and the Native Americans did that for a long time and managed the landscape in a way that promoted oaks. Well, we Europeans came over and didn't like fire, so we said no more of that, and right away that started to shift the dominance of oaks out of our forest. The second thing, though, is we've got an overabundance of deer white-tailed deer that not only eat oaks, but they eat all the native plants that come up and leave the non-natives, which creates, really exacerbates, this invasive species problem, because it tips the competitive balance against our native plants.

So you're not getting natural oak regeneration because of the loss of fire and the overabundance of deer, which means you do that for 100 years and you don't have any more oaks again in the forest anymore. So, this is why people say we're we're gardening the world, and it's true. What we really mean is we're managing the world in a way that we can manage it productively, or you know an unproductive way. But oaks are important. We need them in our forest and we need to manage them in that regard. We want other plants too, but to manage in a way that eliminates the oaks is not going to be a good thing.

Andy:

You're talking about this concept of regeneration and I live in a like right on the edge of the Pine Barrens in New England. This area has been clear-cut and is is basically a white pine monoculture, and then the understory is white pines that are 30 feet tall and there's a couple of scraggler oaks here and there and a handful of cherries if you're lucky. And that's about it and it speaks to exactly what you're talking about. We're seeing the repercussions of hundreds of years of stewardship, poor stewardship, and because our lifespan is so short, we don't understand. What we're seeing is not normal.

My neighbor happened to clear-cut his property last week and it was mostly white pines and there were a couple of really beautiful white oaks and a couple of red oaks and I was like, hey, you know you should keep those white oaks. They're really great trees. If you get rid of the pines like, they'll really fill out and be these beautiful trees. And the tree guy came through and just cleared them out and was like, hey, do you want to buy this for firewood? And I'm just like, oh man, like I'll take it but like also like this is such a waste of something that was a beautiful resource. Engaging those conversations without coming across as a tree-hugging hippie is difficult, and even as somebody who does this all the time, it can be really difficult to get people to see the damage that has existed in what we're doing and how that relationship that was so fundamental to being human has been so severed.

Dr. Tallamy:

We do not value the ecosystem services that various parts of those ecosystems provide. I just heard yesterday that the Biden administration says, hey, we're going to start to, we're going to put price tags on these things and we're going to start to preserve the things that protect our coastlines. You know talking about talking about big aspects of ecosystem function, but it's a necessary thing. We bite the hand that feeds us by eliminating our support system, taking down oaks for firewood, we're doing worse than that. We're taking down oak forests to put up solar panels. Now, solar panels are great, but I can think of a lot of places I could put them where you don't have to take down an oak forest. That is a solar panel. You know it's sequestered carbon, is doing all the things that those panels are supposed to be doing, actually more than that. So you know, I don't know, we're supposed to be a smart species, but sometimes I wonder. You know?

Andy:

Yeah, and I think it speaks to that we're missing this very generalist knowledge that you know this is going to sound I think it might upset some people but like we put kids in school and they learn all of these great things, but we act like as if before school, before, we were sticking kids in classrooms or you know, wherever that they weren't learning anything, but they were. They were going around with their parents.

If we go further back to hunter-gatherers, early agricultural societies, they were learning about their landscape for their entire childhood, so they knew what plants did and the value of them and watched them grow, because they would see them all the time and then understood how the ecosystem functioned, even if they didn't have the understanding of the taxonomy or anything like that. Not to say we need to go back to that, but there's a lot more nuance to it than pre-education that we weren't learning anything and we need to bring some of that back, I think.

Dr. Tallamy:

Well, we still learn outside of school, but what do we learn? We learn what's on our iPhone and learn what's on TV and we learn what's in the video game. We're not outside in nature anymore parents or kids so there is no exchange of knowledge of the natural world. That's that disconnect. 82% of us live in what we call cities, and you can define that in lots of different ways, but we've lost the basic knowledge that you're talking about, and that's a very dangerous thing because, again, we've lost the basic knowledge that you're talking about. Yeah, and that's a very dangerous thing, because, again, we've lost the basic knowledge about our life support systems. Got to fix that.

Andy:

One of the things when this episode comes out, we'll have already done it, but we're giving away native seed packets for wildflowers, and one of the plants in it is goldenrod, and a lot of people have been like you put goldenrod in, it takes over everything. I'm like, well, yeah, that's a good thing because it's out-competed. It's one of the only native plants that can really out-compete a lot of invasives and if you were working in a very small aggressive setting, you need goldenrod. It's an incredible plant that does so much, not just for out-competing those invasives, but also just as you know, I think it's if it doesn't have the most pollinator support. It's pretty close to the top for a forb, right?

Dr. Tallamy:

It depends on where you live. But then, yeah, in most of the counties of the US, goldenrod is right at the top in terms of supporting both caterpillars. So where you live, they support about 110 species of caterpillars, but they also support more species of specialist bees than other plants. So asters are high and sunflowers are high as well, but goldenrods are really up there.

And the reason that's important is that when we plant a pollinator garden, we want to support the specialist bees because the generalist bees use those plants as well. If you only plant for the generalist, you've lost your specialists, and we've got over a thousand species of specialists in this country. We can't afford to lose them. So a lot of people you know they put in zinnias and butterfly bush and other non-natives and they see pollinators come in. They say, oh, helping the pollinators. Well, most of what they see come in are honeybees, which are non-native too, and it's good, we want to help them, and a few bumblebees, but it's a very small percentage of the bees that could be coming in there and any one locality has hundreds of species of native bees that are really when you look at all the plants out there, they're doing most of the pollination, so we've got to support them and the best way is to put in the plants to support the specialists and Goldenrod is the best at doing that. In most of the places, particularly certainly where you live, they are.

Andy:

Yeah, I've never seen someone get so much hate for talking about butterfly bush the way you have, so could you explain that a little bit, kind of what's going on with the butterfly bush and its misunderstandings?

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah Well, you know its name is misleading. It suggests you're going to support butterflies and it is. A great nectar plant, makes lots of nectar and butterflies do go to it and that's why people enjoy that. But where do the butterflies come from? You have to make butterflies to have them go to your butterfly bush and that means you need butterfly host plants.

Butterfly bush in a growing number of places has become an invasive species. I've got grandkids in Portland, Oregon. You should see that butterfly bushes everywhere. It's escaped and it's a serious invasive species. Out there in the West, it's taken over entire islands. In Hawaii, it's a big invasive species.

In restorations near the Palmerton zinc smelter that was on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border, butterfly bush and Ailanthus are the two big major problems. So here it's the same old thing. Now we know that it has invasive qualities, just like all the others that became invasive over the years, and yet we're still selling it like crazy. It's pretty, it's beautiful and it makes the butterflies come. So the average homeowner says, oh, that's great, or I'll deadhead it. Ok, but I know how that goes. You do it a few times and you get tired of it, and so those are the issues.

It's got pluses, but it also has minuses that we need to. When we're looking at what a plant does, we need to look at the net value. All plants do something, and I could put some in the positive column, but you have to look at the negatives too, and if the negative is that way, the positives and the net value of that plant a negative, and that's what people aren't doing I always hear about. You know, oh, this one plant does this and therefore I should plant it. And it indeed does that, but it does lots of other things that give you reasons not to plant it, and you've got to consider those as well.

Andy:

So one of the things that as an outsider I'm not an ecologist, one of the impressions that I get from these discussions about invasive species is it kind of feels like the climate change debate in the sense that, as both sides argue for of studies are backing that, like invasives have a net positive not just one species but like as a whole for the ecology. Is it just like a handful of people? Whenever I try to find studies that people cite, they seem to either be non-peer reviewed or come from somebody who doesn't have any formal education in ecology. So I'm going to give you an opportunity to kind of talk about that.

Dr. Tallamy:

Okay, well, there are trained ecologists who say that they're not as bad as we think. The first thing they'll say is yeah, some plants are problematic. We're not talking about those. Then they'll talk about the others and kind of blend it all together as if they're all the same. They're all botanists, so they're looking at plants and not at what the plants are doing. They're not looking at the food web that is associated with those plants. So none of those studies are looking at the food web.

There is a study out there that asks do birds care if a berry is native or not? And the answer is no, they don't care. Well, they do care. Further studies have shown that if you give birds a choice between native berries that are high in fat and that's what birds need during migration when those berries are around versus non-native berries that are high in sugar and all of them are high in sugar, none of them are high in fat the birds will take the high-fat berries all the time they do choose.

When you have an understory of bush honeysuckle or autumn olive or any of the others that take over everything, and you see the birds eating them, you say well, they're eating those berries? They are, it's the only berry there and they're doing the best they can Do. They prefer it. No, does it help them in their energy balance for what they have to do? No, so that was a study that made a statement and it's incorrect. But I can just talk about each one of them and say, well they're no, I love it. I mean species of non-native plants, in this country at least, that are enquote “naturalized”.

You can say they're invasive; there’s 3,300. And they say, well, okay, you've increased the diversity of plants in the US by 3,300, and diversity is a good thing. Well, diversity is a good thing, but you don't measure diversity on a continental scale. You measure it on a local scale, and when you go to a local place where a plant has taken over go to a place where you've got porcelain berry, go to a place where you've got bush honeysuckle or barberry or all these other things that have taken over. Plant diversity dives; you know there are very few things there because these other plants phragmites, kudzu you know there are not more plants there, there are fewer plants because ecosystems function locally. So that's where you have to measure whether or not you've got increased diversity and in all cases, you have way less diversity when you've got a plant invasion.

The public often confuses what an invasive plant is, period. I hear them talk about native plants, like things like Virginia creeper, as being invasive. What they mean is they're aggressive. We do have aggressive native plants and they, you know they grow. That's what plants do.

But the definition of an invasive plant is a non-native. That's aggressively taking over, pushing out native plant species like callery pear, like all the other things we've just talked about. They escape and then that's all you have. When those plants are not contributing to the local food web and none of them do, by the way, in any substantial way you have lost the food web value. That's the big missing link. I've been on debate panels with these guys and they get really quiet when I talk about that. They never talk about what is the consequence of these invasions. But there is a serious consequence. Look at the number of breeding birds, not birds eating berries, when there's nothing else but the number of breeding birds in an area where you've taken away all the bird food. They're not breeding there. They can't.

Andy:

Like I said, I live right on the edge of the Pine Barrens in New England and if you cross over, if I drive 30 miles down the road and I go into Pine Barren territory, the first thing you see is a wall of black locust, which is native to North America but not native to this area. And then if you make it past that, you might see a little bit of actual Pine Barren territory and then you'll see autumn olive everywhere little bit of actual pine barren territory and then you'll see autumn olive everywhere. And I still hear people talking about “I live in sandy ecosystem. You know autumn olive is great because it fixes nitrogen” and I'm like well, that's the problem. It fixes nitrogen and those ecosystems evolved without it. There's this conflation that, like healthy soil, is like nitrogen, like is very similar to what we might think of as garden soil and it's not that simple, right?

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah, North American soils, particularly in the north, where the glaciers came down, are historically poor. They're nutrient-poor and our plants have adapted to that. You can kill North American plants by over-fertilizing them, and I've done it because I was ignorant in the beginning too. You fertilizing them, and I've done it because I was ignorant in the beginning too. You fertilize them. They grow so fast that their bark splits and then they die. You look at prairie plantings. They're adapted to nutrient-poor soils and when you fertilize, what you get is a whole bunch of weeds that need high nitrogen fertilizer or high nitrogen soils, and they outcompete the native plants. So too much nitrogen is not a good thing. But the point is okay, they fertilize themselves.

Autumn olive fertilizes themselves and it grows there. Why is that a good thing? Just because it's green and it's there. It's not passing on the energy that it's harvesting. It is occupying a space that used to be occupied by a young oak or by something else, and the reason that the autumn olive is there instead of the oak is that the deer has eaten the oak and left the autumn olive. They won't touch it. So that's that competitive balance I was talking about. They won't touch that. They won't touch the bush honeysuckle. They won't touch barberry. They won't touch burning bush. These things that have taken over New England are promoted by too many deer and they're not providing that energy to the food web. So that's one of the reasons we got 3 billion fewer breeding birds in North America than we had just 50 years ago. The explosion of these invasive plants all of which, by the way, have come from the horticultural trade. We brought them over because we thought they were pretty and all right.

Andy:

You know we're talking about ecology and like this idea of and this is like the underpinning of, like permaculture is like complex system science and like this idea of and this is like the impacts of invasive species on deer populations. And I know you guys are in the same boat as us, where I have a friend towards your way, and I believe they said that the population right now is like 50 per mile or something crazy like that, whereas the carrying capacity for most areas is like 10 to 15. So the entire northeast is just getting destroyed by deer right now and hunters are the ones that see that.

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah, that would be. That would be a good number. In my house, we've got about a hundred and 110 per square mile. There were nine deer in my front yard this morning. Jesus, you know, hunters are now the only predators. Hunters and cars are the only predators. They are the only hope of keeping deer populations in check, and it's not enough, because hunters cannot hunt where there are a lot of deer, which is suburbia. As a matter of fact, a hunter in Pennsylvania complained there aren't enough deer in the wild spaces. All the deer say we're going to the suburbs where nobody can hunt us all the deer say we're going to the suburbs where nobody can hunt us.

Andy:

It's a weird selective pressure that's happened where the smart deer have figured out not to go into the woods.

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah, pretty much.

Andy:

So I do want to talk quickly about your work with Homegrown National Park. It's a really great project. I think a lot of folks should be familiar with what you're doing with it, because it speaks to, I think, the core of what we're talking about, with the responsibility to steward the land where we live.

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah, we started out talking about this. How do we fix this? We do have these global issues, but there's 8 billion of us and if all of us recognize the responsibility we have to good earth stewardship and I argue that all of us need to recognize that because we all need good earth stewardship Everybody depends on healthy ecosystems, whether they know it or not, and unfortunately most people don't know it, but that means everybody's got the responsibility of taking care of them. Right now, we have a very weird situation where we have a few ecologists and a few conservation biologists. Everybody else has a green light to destroy the planet. That's not working and we can turn that around by just explaining no, you got to take care of that piece of the earth that you own.

So that's the grassroots part of Homegrown National Park that we talk about. There are 135 million acres of residential neighborhoods out there and 44 million of those acres are lawn at this point, which is a low hanging fruit Lawn, doesn't you know? It's not doing anything for us ecologically. So we talk about reducing the area of lawn, putting the powerful natives into those areas and rebuilding ecosystem function right where we live and recording what you're doing by registering your property on what we call the map. It's a map of the US and you say, okay, I live here, I'm going to reduce my lawn area by this much, or I'm going to plant this oak tree and take up this many square feet of lawn with this important plant. You put that on the database and your little piece of your county will light up with a little firefly and you get to see everybody else who's doing this around you. So it becomes a social network.

The object is to get the whole country to light up, as this idea that everybody is responsible for good earth stewardship goes viral. That's what we want to do and it's free. That's the important thing. We're not competing with any other conservation organization, so we're not trying to draw membership away from Audubon or from National Wildlife Federation or Sierra Club or anything else. You still are a member of those things, but you're doing lots of very valuable conservation on your property and it's not being recorded.

We're talking about Biden's 30-30 initiative. We're going to save 30% of the US by 2030. We could do it, but you're never going to record it and understand that we've actually done it, unless you're recording successful conservation on private property, because 78% of the whole country is privately owned. 85% of the country east of the Mississippi is privately owned. So if we do that conservation on private property, we will make big head roads towards actually getting some ecosystem function into our human dominated landscapes. The idea that humans and nature cannot coexist is gone. That's out of there. We've got to coexist. It's our only option left, and Homegrown National Park is our small nonprofit to help push that along. That's what it boils down to.

Andy:

It's really optimistic and it gives me a lot of hope that people can put aside our differences and recognize this very simple value and understanding that we've been living on borrowed time in the way we've been living, and we've lived off of the, to use a metaphor. We've been living off the fat of the past and we're getting pretty close to the bone now, so we got to make some changes. So I really value the work you're doing with that. Now, one thing I think a lot of people a good enough amount of people think about when we're talking about creating rewilded spaces is homeowners associations. Now, HOAs are a battle. We live in the Northeast so it's not as common, but I have lived in the South where it is much more common. But some changes have happened in the last few years around HOAs right.

Dr. Tallamy:

Yeah, I mean there's a big one in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. The title was we fought the lawn and the lawn lost. There was this Maryland couple that their HOA said you are not allowed to landscape with native plants, you must put in lawn. And they challenged it. They brought it to court. They ended up paying $60,000 to do it, but they won. They established a legal precedent that the HOA does not have the right to tell them how they can landscape. So that is going to. I mean, HOAs are changing on their own anyway.

I've been telling people for years join your HOA, educate them, get them to recognize that these rules we made in the 70 to make high status neighborhoods, that's fine. We can have high status neighborhoods no more rusty cars in their front yard. But to promote ecologically destructive landscaping to do that, it's not the solution. You can have pretty landscapes that are ecologically sound at the same time. That's why I don't say get rid of lawn, I say reduce the area of lawn.

Lawn is a cue for care. The lawn you keep should be manicured, keep it mowed, have that strip along the sidewalk or your driveway, outline your beds with lawn Lawn should be the place where you walk, because it's the best plant to walk on without killing it, and you can do that. Nobody will even notice that you have more plants in your yard than you used to. As long as you keep that lawn happy, and even if it's a smaller amount, it's okay. So it's not that we have to destroy aesthetic landscaping. It's just that we have to choose the right plants and use more of them. And HOAs are saying, oh okay, we get that. So people are emailing me saying this works. I joined my HOA and it works. So that's what I encourage people. You don't have to take them to court, just educate them.

Andy:

Yeah, take over the HOA, find a few like-minded people in your community and the reality is that it's one of those things that most people don't bother getting involved with. So if you do and this goes across, like all small politics generally speaking, it's more accessible to people that don't have to work 40 plus hours a week, which means it's disproportionately geared towards people that have a certain value in keeping things the way they are and that you know they want it to be how it's always been and there's no reason for them to want to change. You know, I know in my own town, like the Conservation Committee's got two open seats, just because. People don't value local politics and in many ways in HOA is basically hyper local politics right. It's at a granular scale of politics. Ask anyone who's had to fight with them. Like it is very political and I think we need to be afraid stop being afraid of engaging with those politics.

Dr. Tallamy:

I think you hit the nail on the head. It's time investment. Our lives are so hectic and frantic these days, nobody has the time. But you're right, we got to make the time. Make it up it in priority.

Andy:

Yeah, so Doug. For folks that either want to grab your book or want to follow along with what's going on with Homegrown National Park. Where can they find any of that stuff? Social media websites.

Dr. Tallamy:

Homegrownnationalpark.org is the website and really it's all there. It's all explained there. Then the books are on Amazon, so it'd be Bringing Nature Home, Nature's Best Hope and The Nature of Oaks, and I co-wrote The Living Landscape with Rick Dark. They're all on there. If you don't want to use Amazon and I get that get your local bookstore to carry them, because that works too.

Andy:

Yeah, and I believe Homegrown National Parks on Instagram as well. We'll include all those links in the show notes, but I thank you so much for the work you're doing, the work you have done and just keeping at it. You're prolific in reaching out to the public in any way possible, so I think, speaking of being involved locally, I definitely appreciate you doing the legwork to get people to have these conversations.

Dr. Tallamy:

Well, thanks for the opportunity to join your podcast. I mean, this is one of the ways I do it.

To hear this interview, tune into episode 167 of the Poor Proles Almanac.