our wild spaces are not working in terms of conservation is because they are too small and too isolated. Even the biggest national parks are too small or too isolated.” Tallamy says people can create wild
Once-wild places may also need human
help to again become wild refuges. Te Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, where Hoffman saw the buffalo, “was once an arsenal for the production of extraordinary quantities of ordnance for a number of wars,” he says. Aſter hundreds of die-hard volunteers dug out invasive plants, scattered seed and documented wildlife on the 18,000- acre prairie, visitors can now walk among big bluestem and golden alexander, and listen for the sweet song of meadowlarks in the grasslands and chorus frogs in the wetlands. Conservation volunteers working to save
wild places hail from every state. In fact, nearly 300,000 volunteers contribute more than 6.5 million hours of volunteer service a year to the U.S. National Park Service, from leading tours to studying wildlife and hosting campgrounds. One doesn’t have to be an environmental
crusader to save wild places, Hoffman stresses. Exploring local wild places and sharing them with others can help save them, as well. “We can only protect those places that we love,” he says. “And we can only love those places that we know.” Sadly, roughly 100 million people,
including 28 million children, do not have access to a quality park within 10 minutes of home, according to Te Trust for Public Land. Projects, such as the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Program, which enables urban communities to create outdoor spaces, can help. Te U.S. Department of the Interior committed $150 million to the program in 2021. “Every child in America deserves to have a safe and nearby place to experience the great outdoors,” says Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
20 Central Florida
www.NACFL.com
A Homegrown National Park Tallamy says one of the most important ways to get people to appreciate and save wild places is to begin in their own yards. “We have wilderness designations. We have national forests. We have national parks. We have 12 percent of the U.S. protected from development,” he says. “Yet, we are in the sixth great extinction. Our parks and our preserves are not enough. My point is that we have got to focus on the areas outside of parks and preserves.” He urges what he calls a “homegrown national park,” in which homeowners, land managers and farmers create a habitat by replacing invasive plants with native species. Tallamy speaks from experience. He
lives on a 10-acre former farm in Oxford, Pennsylvania. “It had been mowed for hay and when we moved in, very little life was here,” he says. “We have been rebuilding the eastern deciduous forest here, getting invasive plants under control and replanting with species that ought to be here.” He’s now counted more than 1,400 different species of moths on his property and documented 60 species of birds nesting within the landscape. “We have foxes who raise their kits in the front yard,” he says. Lots of acreage is not required, he says. In
Kirkwood, Missouri, homeowners created a wild place on six-tenths of an acre on which they’ve documented 149 species of birds. “If one person does it, it’s not going to work,” he stresses. “Te point is to get those acres connected. When everybody adopts this as a general landscape culture, it’s going to help tremendously. By rewilding your yard, you are filling in spaces between the true wild places and natural areas. Te reason
spaces in their yards by reducing the amount of lawn they have or even getting rid of it. Tey can grow native plants and discontinue the use of pesticides and herbicides, which are disrupting ecological function of wild places the world over, as research shows. Hoffman agrees, “We’ve cultivated a culture of tidiness. It’s actually very easy to welcome wildlife into your home places, oſten by doing fewer things, by not bringing the leaf blower out and by leaving some dead wood where it fell, which creates important shelters for insects, for example. “Such wild yard spaces encourage
wonder. Suddenly, the kids are out there and they can be absolutely fascinated by a small glittering beetle. For me, to experience the wild is to go to the shore of a lake, to be present in the mystery, to be among the lake’s reed beds, to see a marsh harrier sleek out of those reeds and to know you’re part of something much larger,” he says. “Tere’s so much joy and beauty and complexity in being in the presence of other lives besides human.” Tat in itself is reason enough to save wild places.
Sheryl DeVore has written six books on science, health and nature, as well as health and environmental stories for national and regional publications. Read more at
SherylDeVore.wordpress.com.
LEARN MORE
Te Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative, by Florence Williams
Irreplaceable: Te Fight to Save Our Wild Places, by Julian Hoffman
A Life on Our Planet, Netflix documentary by David Attenborough
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts with Your Yard, by Douglas Tallamy
Te Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden, by Rick Darke and Douglas Tallamy
daniel prudek/
AdobeStock.com
gajus/
AdobeStock.com
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