Book Review: Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard, by Douglas W. Tallamy. Timber Press Inc., 2019. Review by Phil Johnson
This is a book about the critical importance to our ecosystem of native plants - the plants that have grown in a specific region for eons, and have co-evolved with the vast diversity of native wildlife. In this book we learn just how important that relationship is for the continuation of all life on this planet. We learn what is going wrong, but more to the point, what we can do to set it right.
Douglas W.Tallamy, Professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, focuses on the relationship of plants with insects in particular – “the little things that run the world”. Insects run the world by pollinating 90% of all flowering plants, by being food for birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and freshwater fish, and by acting as predators of other insects and thereby keeping the ecosystem in balance.
We have lost our balance. The wild things are disappearing. Currently, there are 8500 species of plants and animals at risk of extinction in North America. We have too much appetite for sterile monocultures of annual crops and lawns, for Eurasian ornamental plants that provide no wildlife food, and a mad passion for pesticides that kill insects whether beneficial or pests.
This book offers an alternative to despair
Tallamy is at his most ambitious when he envisions a linking of private yards and parks into what he calls “Homegrown National Park”. These linked landscapes of diverse native plants would be wildlife corridors, and homes, way-stations, food-stops for migrating and nesting birds, foraging bees and egg-laying butterflies.
To build the park, the final chapter lists ten things we can do in our garden and community to help restore nature, even in an urban setting. We already know some of them: shrink the lawn and stop spraying poisons. Most intriguing for me is the evidence that adding just a few carefully selected keystone native plants can remake our yards into healthy habitat for wildlife while meeting our own human needs too.
For keystones here in Saskatchewan, think willows, green ash, saskatoons, dogwoods, goldenrod, asters, giant hyssop, milkweed, and little bluestem. There are many others. They provide food and shelter for the wild things. They are beautiful. And they are available at garden centres!