Doug Tallamy Wants All Our Yards To Be A Home-Grown National Park

Transcript of Interview for Writer's Voice

We want to increase the area of habitable space. And every bit of conservation we do outside of a formally preserved place is going to help conservation inside that formally preserved space. And that conservation is going to happen on our yards. 78% of the country is privately owned, and 85.6% east of the Mississippi is privately owned, which means most of the property is privately owned, which makes private landowners the future of conservation.

When he came out with his bestseller, Nature's Best Hope, A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard, ecologist Doug Tallamy awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: Wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing.

His solution? Plant more natives.

Now Tallamy has come out with a middle-grade adaptation, Nature's Best Hope, How You Can Save the World in Your Own Yard.

The book outlines his vision for a homegrown national park composed of millions of urban, suburban and ex-urban yards, a grassroots approach to conservation that everyone can take part in regardless of age.

He covers a lot of ground, so to speak, and does so in such an engaging manner that concepts such as the carrying capacity of the earth, carbon sinks to combat climate change, and the threat invasive species pose to birds, bees and other beings are easy to grasp. In this way, Tallamy empowers kids to help their families make change in their own backyards.

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware.

FR: Doug Tallamy, welcome to Writer's Voice.

DT: It's a pleasure to be here.

Nature's Best Hope originally appeared in a version for grown-ups, but this edition is pitched for young readers. It's about how to create a yard that's a real part of the natural world. And you say it's the kind of yard where if you look closely, something is moving. Talk about our typical notion of what nature is and why that needs to change, how this book addresses that change.

Well, you know, our typical yards are designed for beauty. They're designed for aesthetics. Typically most of the yard is dedicated to lawn. And then we have a few ornamental plants, ornamental trees or bushes, almost exclusively from Asia or some other country.

These are plants that have not co-evolved with the natural systems in this country, which means our animals are not adapted to using them. So that primarily is focused on insects. If you want to have birds in your yard, you have to have something for them to eat. That's why they're there. And typically birds are eating insects, particularly when they're making more birds, when they're reproducing.

Those insects are typically caterpillars. It takes thousands of caterpillars for one nest of birds to reach maturity. So they're not going to be in your yard unless you have those caterpillars. Caterpillars are really fussy about what they eat.

They're only going to eat the plants that they are adapted to. And there's no way they can be adapted to a plant from Asia. They haven't been exposed to that plant long enough.

So when we load our yard with non-native plants, we have very few caterpillars. We have very few birds. You can go outside and nothing's moving. That's the point there.

So which means your yard is very uninteresting. No child's going to go out and explore nature on a giant lawn with a few plants where there's nothing happening. That's boring in two or three minutes, as opposed to having a yard that is filled with native plants that actually support a lot of the caterpillars that the birds need.

They support healthy communities of pollinators that are buzzing around. You can look under the leaf litter that you would leave there and find all kinds of things, maybe a box turtle walking by. Animals will visit your yard if there's something for them to eat. They spend all day long looking for something to eat.

And that becomes really interesting to a child, which is really important because our children are the future stewards of the planet. And right now they don't know that.

As a matter of fact, right now we spend most of our time scaring them about nature. They're afraid to go outside. Something terrible is going to happen to them. So we've got to get past that. And that's what this book is all about.

You know, I love that you go into some of the history of the conservation movement. You talk about some of the guiding lights, Aldo Leopold and E.O. Wilson. Now E.O. Wilson, I think his last book was Half Earth. And this book is in a way a kind of different iteration of Half Earth. It's about creating Half Earth, and I'd like you to explain what Half Earth means, with what you call the homegrown national park. So tell us about how E.O. Wilson may have inspired some of your thinking and what that Half Earth notion is and the homegrown national park.

Very happy to.

E.O. Wilson was a giant in the conservation movement. He, of course, was an entomologist, actually a myrmecologist. He studied ants. But he loved biodiversity. He studied for more than 60 years at Harvard.

And he wrote Half Earth to explain that if we don't save natural systems, if we don't save nature or functioning ecosystems on at least half of the planet, they're going to disappear from the entire planet. So that means all the animals, all the plants and humans. And that's certainly not what we want to do.

He spent most of the Half Earth book talking about the science that supports that very bold statement. But then he ended the book. He didn't spend a lot of time telling us how we were actually going to put half the Earth aside for nature.

You know, to a conservation biologist, sounds like a wonderful idea. But when you think about it, half of terrestrial Earth is already in some form of agriculture. And then we've got 8 billion people in the other half with all of our airports and roadways and houses and detritus. We don't have a third half to put aside for nature. So how can we possibly do this? And that's where my ideas come in.

The old idea of having humans here and nature someplace else. We've got to abandon that. There is no someplace else anymore. So the only way forward is for humans and nature to coexist. And that's where the idea of Homegrown National Park comes in.

We have to design our living spaces, the places where we play, the places where we farm, our corporate landscapes, our roadsides. All of these places have to be designed in ways that welcome nature rather than expel her. And that's how we can reach that half Earth goal.

We can actually, what we're doing, we're actually creating functioning natural systems and we're right there with them. And when you look at it that way, then we have the entire Earth to play with. So that's the connection with the Half Earth movement.

And let's take the lawn. First of all, explain why our lawns, our typical lawns so bad. I mean, they're not just boring, they’re bad for other reasons. But you answer a very interesting question. What if half of every lawn in the US was covered with native plants instead of grass? Well what would happen?

Well, let's review what every yard needs to do.

If we're going to reach that half Earth goal, every yard has to be part of the local ecosystem, which means it has to sequester carbon. It has to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and tie it up in plant tissues and pump it in the ground. It has to support pollinators. It has to support a food web, meaning it's got to pass on the energy those plants harness from the sun to animals so that you have a viable community of plants and animals right there. And the final thing every yard has to do is manage the watershed in which it lies.

Lawn is terrible at doing all of those things. It actually destroys the watershed in which it lies. It doesn't support any pollinators. It doesn't support a food web. And it's the worst plant choice in terms of sequestering carbon.

So if we reduce the area in lawn and put in the plants that are good at doing those things, then we've achieved that goal.

So I suggest we've got 44 million acres of lawn in this country, which is an area bigger than New England. And right now, lawn is an ecological deadscape. So let's cut that area in half. That'll give us more than 20 million acres that we can restore right where we live. And if you add up all the major national parks in this country combined, there's still less than 20 million acres. So this new restoration that we do at home is going to be the biggest national park in the country, which we're calling Homegrown National Park.

And this will be a wonderful challenge for kids to get involved with. You go out and plant a tree. How can a little child plant a tree? You get an acorn and stick it in the ground. It's easy. You don't have to go out and buy $3,000 trees. And then you put a bed around that tree. You watch all the things that come to that tree. It grows up along the side of you. So there's lots of ways that children can get involved in creating Homegrown National Park.

I love that. But let me ask you a question about this, because one of the things you talk about in Nature's Best Hope, Douglas Tallamy, is that size matters when it comes to habitat.

You know, if a habitat is too small, and you give the example of the Eastern Box Turtle, which I'm very, very aware of because I live in East Hampton, New York, and we see fewer and fewer of these Eastern Box Turtles every year. In fact, I've seen none this year so far. The size of habitat matters to a turtle like this. Why? And then how would a lawn, which is usually a tiny habitat that is converted to native plants, how would that provide the habitat that these species need?

Well, of course, if you're the only person that joins Homegrown National Park in this country, it's not going to work. The object is to change the culture so that it becomes the standard form of landscaping. And what that will do would be provide habitat for that Box Turtle outside of parks and preserves.

So the Box Turtle population in the little woodlot that's preserved is tiny. It's too small, and it will disappear. But if the yards surrounding that woodlot all of a sudden become habitat themselves, then that habitat expands. It's bigger. You're building connectivity to the next woodlot, which is down the street somewhere.

Box Turtles can actually move around. They could lay their eggs in your yard, and they could hatch. I mean, that's what's happening in my yard. We find baby Box Turtles all the time. It's great because we're not doing the things that kill those baby Box Turtles.

So size does matter. We want to increase the area of habitable space. And every bit of conservation we do outside of a formally preserved place is going to help conservation inside that formally preserved space. And that conservation is going to happen on our yards. 78% of the country is privately owned, and 85.6% east of the Mississippi is privately owned, which means most of the property is privately owned, which makes private landowners the future of conservation.

If we don't practice conservation on the private property, we will fail. But if we do, we will succeed in a big way.

I feel that this is a movement that's gaining ground. I mean, just very recently we had the establishment of a local chapter of ReWild Long Island, which has been very active in getting the town to plant pollinator gardens and spreading the word on this.

And your book is so wonderful, Nature's Best Hope, because I think it really covers so much ground, so to speak, in a way that's totally accessible to children and really engages them in getting their parents on board.

Now you have some examples. You have one great example of this, as a matter of fact.You have a story of somebody who spoke to their father about monarch butterflies. And now I've forgotten the name of the person who did that. But tell us that story. I'm sure you know which one I'm talking about.

Yes, I do. I don't think I even used her name. It was a woman I met in Missouri, I believe. And she got very involved in the effort in this country to save the monarch.

The monarch is now red-listed because we've taken away milkweed in so many places, particularly in our agricultural settings. So there are monarch way stations. There's Monarch Watch. There's these organizations that are trying to get the milkweed back in as many places as possible.

And she was very active in that, so active that she asked her father to watch her kids a couple of days. And he said, OK. And finally, he said, what are you doing?

She said, “I'm planting milkweeds. I'm trying to save the monarch.”

Well, her father was a typical homeowner. He wanted to keep up with the Joneses, and that meant he had to have a perfect lawn. It had to be more perfect than his neighbors in exactly the old-fashioned way: Lots and lots of lawn, no native plants, all non-native plants, perfectly trimmed. So it was very, very neat and tidy, but it was a dead scape.

Well, finally, he said,” well, what would happen if I plant some milkweed along my fence? Would that be OK?”

And she said, “that'd be great.”

So she added a few milkweeds to the back of his yard. And then he started to watch what happened. The monarchs came right away. They laid eggs on those milkweeds.

And it captivated him. He got interested. He watched the eggs. The eggs hatched. He watched the caterpillars.

He called her up. He said, “we don't have enough milkweeds. We need more milkweeds.” So she added more, and then his entire back part of his property was milkweeds.

So he switched his energies from just making an aesthetically pleasing place to one that's actually interacting with nature, doing a great thing, saving a beautiful butterfly.

He became connected to that part of nature. That's the important thing, is build that personal connection.

I love that story, too, because he was the least likely person to do that, but one little interaction with a living monarch butterfly brought him around.

And now let's talk more about native species, because you really explain in this book, in Nature's Best Hope, Doug Tallamy, why it's so important to plant native species. Break that down for us.

Okay, well, since we're talking about the monarch, let's use that as an example. And it's just an example. It's not an exception. It's just like almost all of the insects that interact with plants.

Plants, remember, are the only things on this planet that can turn sunlight into food. They're capturing the energy from the sun, and through photosynthesis, they turn it into the food, the simple sugars and carbohydrates that supports just about all the animal life on the planet.

Well, now the food is in the plant. If you don't get that food to the animals, you don't have any animals.

But the plant actually wants to use that food for its own growth. So it protects it by putting nasty chemicals in its leaves. If you go out and you eat just about any plant, you're not going to like it. It's not going to taste good. It's got defensive chemicals.

Well, it doesn't taste good to the insects either. So they evolve adaptations that allow them to get around those chemical defenses.

Monarchs eat milkweeds. Milkweeds are toxic plants. They are filled with a compound called cardiac glycosides. If we eat a lot of milkweeds, it'll stop our heart. It's a very effective defense.

But the monarchs can eat the milkweeds. It doesn't stop their heart because they've got enzymes that store and excrete and detoxify those compounds.

Milkweeds also have sticky latex sap. That's where they get their common name. If you break up in a milkweed leaf, all this white goo comes out, and it gels on exposure to air. So if that sticky latex sap gets on a caterpillar's mouthparts, it glues them shut. And then the caterpillar starves to death. It's a very effective defense.

But monarch caterpillars have figured out how to eat a plant without gluing their mouthparts shut. They snip through the main, the midrib, the main vein of the leaf and block the flow of that latex sap. So everything below where they snip through that midrib doesn't have any latex sap and they can eat that.

So that's a behavioral adaptation combined with that physiological adaptation that allows them to eat a plant that's toxic to almost all the other insects. That's called host plant specialization.

And 90% of the insects that eat plants have specializations like that. They have adaptations like that that allow them to eat particular plants. But once they evolve all those adaptations, they're locked into eating that particular plant.

So if we take the milkweeds out of our yard and put hostas in there, the monarch can't eat hostas. It's only adapted to eating milkweeds. And that's where the native plant movement comes in.

Our native insects are only adapted to eating the native plants. When we bring in plants from China, from South America or Europe, they can't eat those. So if you load your landscape with plants from some other continent, you're shutting off that interaction between the plant and the insects in this country. That's why native plants are so important.

And then that goes on to the birds as well. You cite a study of chickadees. What did this study find? The study found that they eat a lot of caterpillars and they're not exceptions. They're just good examples. But they needed native plants in order to do that. Isn't that right?

You need the native plants to make the caterpillars that those chickadees depend on. It takes 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to get one clutch of a Carolina chickadee. That's the bird that weighs a third of an ounce, four pennies worth of bird to get that those babies to reach the point where they leave the nest. And after they leave the nest, the parents continue to feed them caterpillars another 21 days.

But they're flying all around so nobody knows. Nobody can count those. So you're really talking about tens of thousands of caterpillars required to make one clutch of one species of bird.

If you want all kinds of birds in your yard, you need a lot of caterpillars. And that means you need the plants that make those caterpillars.

And the very best plant to make caterpillars in most parts of the country is one of our oak trees. So if you said, I only have room for one tree in my yard, what should it be? It should be an oak. Because oaks are supporting across the country over 950 species of caterpillars. There's no other plant species that comes close to that.

In fact, you make mention of a neighbor of mine, a close neighbor of mine, Edwina van Gaal, who is, you know, she's a landscape designer par excellence, as she's internationally known. She has a wonderful project called Two-Thirds for the Birds.And what she's talking about is plant two-thirds of native plants for every one-third of non-natives. Why two-thirds?

Well, we did a study once. It was one of my grad students, Desiree Narango. And this was in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

She looked at what it took to sustain a population of chickadees. In other words, how many native plants are responsible, are necessary to sustain the food web that would enable chickadee populations to reproduce sustainably. And that's what she found.

You can have up to 30% of your landscape non-native without destroying the food web. But if it exceeds that, then there's not enough food to support those chickadees, and eventually that population disappears.

So that's where the two-thirds comes from. Two-thirds, you know, somewhere around 70% should be native. And the other third, so you can have ornamental plants.

You know, this is compromise, and that's great. But we can't compromise when it comes to invasive plants. So plants like Callery Pear, for example, Bradford Pear. It's a pretty plant when it blooms in the spring, but it's an invasive species, meaning it moves out of our gardens, and its seeds spread throughout natural areas. And it displaces the native plants that support the food web and replaces them with a plant that does not support the food web.

And that's true for Burning Bush and Barberry and Privet and Miscanthus and Porcelainberry. There's all kinds of ornamental plants that are highly invasive. And we want to make sure we don't have them in our yards because they're, I call them ecological tumors. They just keep expanding. And you know what a tumor does to our body. It's not good. We don't want tumors in our ecosystems either.

You know, I want to dig down a little bit on the notion of native species because a couple of years ago I participated in a program that was put on by, I'm not sure it was Cornell Cooperative Extension or one of the other local offices of one of these national programs. [Editor’s note: It was the Peconic Estuary Program.] And they gave up to a $500 rebate to homeowners to plant native species.

But I quickly found that just going online and finding something that, you know, they give a couple of useful websites: You go on, you put in your zip code and it will tell you what native species there are.

A lot of those native species are native to the eastern United States. But this program would not support them because they weren't the particular cultivar. What they were really talking about was native cultivars.

So I had to be very careful to get the right kind of, let's say, goldenrod or to get the right species of a particular plant.

And right now because I've read your book, I'm thinking, well, I should plant more things. And I'm looking at perennial sunflowers. But I don't know if what I find online is actually proper for this particular area.

Is it really that detailed, that important, or can you plant something that basically grows in the eastern United States?

Well, that's a difficult question. It depends on from which perspective you're looking at it. If you're planting something that's going to be useful to local wildlife, it's not as specific as that makes it seem.

But you do need to plant a plant that is adapted to your region. So even if something can eat it that lives there, if the plant can't survive there, it's not going to do you any good. That's called the plant's provenance.

So there are genotypes of any species that are adapted to a particular area. Let's use American beech, for example. It grows from Canada all the way down to Florida.

But if I get American beech seeds from Florida and plant them in my yard in Pennsylvania, they'll germinate and they'll put out leaves and then I'll have a late frost and it'll kill them because they're not adapted to where I live.

An insect that eats beeches doesn't care where it's from as long as it's a beech, but the plant does care where it's from. And that's where provenance becomes important.

It's really a great idea to plant plants from your local area. And that is a challenge because people selling plants often sell them, you know, who knows where the genotype came from.

We're getting better at doing that, but that has been a challenge. A lot of the very big nurseries, I mean, there are big nurseries in Oregon that will sell eastern plants. I have no idea where they got the seed for those plants. And that does become important.

So what we're trying to do is encourage more local production of these plants, get more nurseries to produce local genotypes so that you don't have to worry about it.If you go to a nursery and you buy a goldenrod, it's from your area and then all will be well.

Douglas Tallamy, you also talk about carrying capacity in Nature's Best Hope. First of all, explain what carrying capacity is. And something that I really learned by reading this is that it's not fixed. We can increase it.

We can increase it and we can decrease it. Okay, carrying capacity is the ability of a place to support the animals in that place or the plants in that place, the living things in that place.

Now the way I talk about carrying capacity is a little bit different from formal ecological definitions. Usually they're talking about a single species. So how many deer can a particular place support? That means, before they start to degrade the local ecosystem. That means they would have exceeded the carrying capacity. That area can no longer support more deer and they've exceeded it. The environment will deteriorate and the number of deer will be reduced. They'll starve to death, they'll get diseases, whatever.

The problem is when deer exceed their carrying capacity, they destroy the carrying capacity for a lot of other things at the same time. So I like to look at carrying capacity in terms of the entire community that's in that place, not just one species.

And that's the problem with humans. You look at our human population, we've got 8 billion people on the planet now, but we only have 8 billion people on the planet because we've taken resources from everything else. So that's why we've got this extinction crisis.

That's why we're in the sixth great extinction that the planet has ever experienced because we're absorbing all the nutrients we need to support our huge populations and taking them away from everything else.

So most, you know, wildlife, we've lost two thirds of the wildlife on the planet, 3 billion birds fewer now than 50 years ago, and the UN says we're going to lose a million species.

This is all because we're taking all those resources for ourselves, meaning we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth to be able to support us and everything else at the same time.

You don't want it to be a trade off. You want everything to be there at the same time. And that's why my view of carrying capacity is a little stricter than other people.

Stricter and yet you also say that it is more flexible. And I think that's what you're talking about in this book. On the one hand you do talk about the need for people to restrict the number of children that they have, which is a controversial concept in environmental circles, I know, because some people say that it's racist to say that we need to control our population. But you know, the notion of simple replacement is probably not out of line. But also there are things that we can do to increase the carrying capacity, which is I think what this book is really directed to.

Do you want to comment briefly on that whole controversy over population growth and control?

You know, the notion that it's racist is ridiculous. All races need to control their growth. The planet is finite. It is not growing. The idea that humans can grow forever is ridiculous. Of course we can't.

You know, we've got finite resources. There's no population that has ever grown forever. What happens is it grows to the point where it uses up everything it needs and then it collapses. That's going to happen to us too, unless we control our population numbers. So we can control that in a nice way, or we can wait till we die from diseases or war or famine or all the nasty things that would control our population.

In terms of increasing carrying capacity, we've decreased the carrying capacity of the planet by taking away the plants. That 44 million acres of lawn that we have, that has reduced the carrying capacity on 44 million acres to just about zero.

If you put the plants back, and if you start with those keystone plants, things like oak trees and cherry trees and willow trees, then you've increased the carrying capacity of those areas. So we can increase the ability of local areas to support us and everything else by proper plant choice.

If we think plants are just decorations, it's not going to work. Plants are decorations, but they're a lot more than that. So we have to choose the plants that are going to support particular things.

And again, the monarchs are a great example. If we don't choose milkweeds, we lose the monarch. And that's right where we are. They're red listed now, because we've replaced milkweeds all along agriculture areas with lawn.

If you drive through the Midwest now, you've got corn, soybeans, and lawn on the side of the roads, rather than corn, soybeans, and goldenrod and milkweeds and esters and all the things that used to be there.

That's so reduced the carrying capacity for monarchs. They're just about ready to disappear.

Can we increase it?

Absolutely. Put the milkweeds back and it'll work.

And of course, we haven't even mentioned pesticides.

Just this last week, New York State passed, finally, after several years of attempts, the Birds and Bees Protection Act, which was about controlling terrible pesticides called neonicotinoids that have been devastating to all insects and therefore, as you point out, birds.

But I want to ask you a couple of practical questions. For those listeners who are gardeners like myself, I find myself in a quandary. Birds depend on caterpillars. There are caterpillars that eat my plants. What do I do about that? Should I not use BT? Should I not try to drown those tomato hornworms or cabbage loopers in soapy water? What should I do?

You know, now it boils down to which caterpillars you're talking about.

The caterpillars that give us the most trouble are usually introduced caterpillars. Things like the spongy moth—used to be the gypsy moth—the winter moth, or other insects like the emerald ash borer or the hemlock woolly adelgid. These are introduced insects that have no natural enemies, so they explode and then they do hurt the plants.

So do they need to be controlled?

Yes, they do. And until we introduce natural controls, that's when you do spray BT and get your soapy water out.

Your cabbage butterfly is another introduced species. It's here from Europe. And if you want to have cabbage, you better control them because they're going to eat the whole thing.

We don't need to control our native insects, though. They're in a nice dance with the natural enemies that eat them.

Remember those birds that are eating hundreds of caterpillars every single day. I go out and I try to find caterpillars and it's hard to find them because the birds have eaten them all. I've got 61 species of birds that are breeding on our property.

That's the kind of balance that you want. You won't have to worry about defoliation of your favorite plants from native insects if you have a balanced ecosystem, if you have all of the predators and the diseases that keep those caterpillars in check. And if you make everything native, that's exactly what will happen.

So people get confused. You know, I don't want the gypsy moth to eat my oak tree. I get that. You don't. But that's not part of the natural system we're talking about.

This is the danger of moving things around the world. We don't want to bring in things from other countries because they're here without their natural controls and they cause huge problems.

And then finally, talk about some of the cleanup that people do. You say stop cleaning up your yard or at least leave some parts just for the bees. Don't weed. Again, how do you balance gardening with not weeding?

So address some of those, you know, those details because people, you know, may end up saying, well, I don't know whether I should do this or that.

Yeah, unfortunately, it does take a little bit of knowledge.

I don't say don't weed. You do want to weed out the non-native plants that you don't want. They are true weeds. They are plants out of place. They're not helping anything. So we do want to get rid of them.

But for example, if you have a meadow area, if you have a pocket prairie in your yard, these stems, so let's say it's got a lot of goldenrod. The goldenrod stems, you know, in the fall, they're nice and yellow and bloom. But then they're essentially dead and they're standing there. People want to cut them down to the ground.

Well, it's those stems in the next season, the next summer, that native bees will nest in. So if we cut them all down, we've just removed all the nesting areas for the stem nesting native bees.

So the recommendation is to cut them down, but leave like 12 inches or 15 inches and they'll sit there all winter. And then the next season, the bees will be able to use that.

But we recommend cutting them down in March because those goldenrod seed heads are filled with seeds that sparrows and other things use all winter long.

When we neaten up, we're removing the resources that the things that overwinter need.

That goes for raking leaves as well. The leaves fall down. Now, normally they would just stay there. You'd have a nice leaf litter base on your property and all the plants would grow through that.

Well, you know, leaves on lawn, it doesn't work, but remember, we're going to reduce the area of lawn. So rake the leaves off the area of lawn you're going to keep.

That's a wonderful way to create a new flower bed, by the way. Every tree should have a big flower bed under it. And you rake the leaves to that space and then plant right through it the next year. You want to have so many plants on the ground that you can't see the ground.

Green mulch is the way to go. And underneath that green mulch are those leaves that fall each year.

You want to keep the leaves around because, first of all, they're returning the nutrients to the soil that your trees used the previous year. If you rake them away every year, you're starving your trees over the decades. And eventually that does kill a tree.

There's also a ton of things that live in those leaves. They're full of the pupae and overwintering stages of the insects that drive the food web. They also form a blanket that covers the soil community that contains all of the organisms that break down those leaves. It contains the mycorrhizae that transfer energy to the roots of your trees and your plants.

And when you rake all that away, you're removing that protective cover. All those things need high humidity and high moisture levels. So there are really good ecological reasons to keep leaves on your property. And I suggest you keep them in beds. But you're going to have much bigger beds than you're used to. And that's what reduces the lawn.

I talk about reducing the lawn, not getting rid of it, because lawn is a cue for care. The lawn you keep should be mowed, it should be manicured, and then it shows your neighbors that you know what the culture is, you're fitting in, you're just having more plants on your property, and everybody will be happy.

And this book, Nature's Best Hope, is one of the best books I've read to help people do that and to get kids engaged also. I think kids have an enormous impact on their parents. And this book will really help make that culture change that we spoke about in the beginning of this conversation.

Douglas Tallamy, thank you so much for talking with us here. It's a wonderful read, and it's been a fascinating conversation.

Thanks very much. It's a great opportunity.