Our modern civilization can claim myriad technological achievements and wondrous architectural accomplishment. Unfortunately the wealth and comfort our advances have brought have also wrought untold damage to the natural world that supports us. Hundreds of years of decision making based on convenience and commerce has plundered much of our natural resources and left us depending on unsustainable systems that do direct and indirect damage to the ecosystems that surround us.
Using native plants for landscaping is not just a sentimental exercise based in nostalgia. It is an attempt to remedy the damage our past and current ways of life are inflicting on our habitat. The clear-cutting of the expansive hardwood forests; the transforming of streams to sewers; the ever-expanding accretion of asphalt and concrete; and finally the importation of alien plants to use as ornament in our landscapes, has rendered great parts of our communities sterile and toxic.
It is a seldom considered aspect of our socialization that influences us to equate aesthetic pleasure and idyllic comfort with daffodils, tulips and turf lawns bereft of weeds. Unfortunately this landscaping motif undercuts the very biological systems that support life on our planet. Ridding our world of insects, bacterium, and plants that don't fit current fashion destroys the food webs and biodiversity that ultimately support us all.
Do not despair! There is something we can do! We can mitigate some of the natural degradation caused by our development, and use what green space remains to support the surviving ecosystem. In other words, gardening for habitat as well as beauty! In order to halt further extinctions, we need to use the plants that co-evolved within our local ecosystems. Native insects and micro-organisms evolved adaptations to subsist on the chemistry of native plants. They simply do not poses the ability to have the same relationships with European or Asian plants. If we start treating our yards as part of a greater habitat, including native plants in our gardens could help our populations of endangered wildlife coexist with us sustainably.
Please click on the volunteer opportunities above to see local organizations involved with the preservation and re-creation of native habitat through native plantings and alien removals!