I think Doug Tallamy has the right message for us, and I need to write again about his idea of the Homegrown National Park. First of all, its pretty good marketing, because it catches your attention and is easy to remember. The only thing I slightly quibble with is the use of the word "Homegrown" because I think to many that has the connotation of growing vegetables. But what Tallamy is advocating is not a Victory Garden - although it would be a victory for the climate if it were to be adopted widely across the US.

From the Homegrown National Park website

Chances are, you have never thought of your garden - - indeed, of all of the space on your property - - as a wildlife preserve that represents the last opportunity we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common throughout the U.S. But that is exactly the role that built landscapes are now playing and will play even more in the near future. If this is news to you, it’s not your fault. We were taught from childhood that plants are decorations and our landscapes are for beauty; they are an outlet for expressing our artistic talents and an oasis for having fun and relaxing in. And, whether we like it or not, the way we landscape our properties is taken by our neighbors as a statement of our wealth, our social status, and our willingness to follow cultural norms.

This is idea #1: even though our landscapes are there for beauty, expressing our artistic talents and an oasis for fun and relaxation, they need to be more than that at this point in hiustory. Your landscape has to play a more important role than just being a statement of wealth or social status.

But no one has taught us that we have forced the plants and animals that evolved in North America (our nation’s biodiversity) to depend more and more on human-dominated landscapes for their continued existence. We have always thought that biodiversity was happy somewhere “out there, in nature,” in our local woodlot or perhaps our state and national parks. We have heard little about the rate at which species are disappearing from our neighborhoods, towns, counties, and states. Even worse, we have never been taught how vital biodiversity is for our own well-being.

This is idea #2: Biodiversity is critically important. Learn what it means!

The population of the U.S., now over 330 million people, has more than doubled since most of us were kids, and it continues to grow by 4,800 people each day. All of those additional souls, together with cheap gas, our love affair with the car, and our quest to own ever larger homes, have fueled unprecedented development that continues to sprawl over 2 million additional acres per year (the size of Yellowstone National Park). ... We have connected all of our developments with 4 million miles of roads, and their combined paved surface is nearly five times the size of New Jersey. Somewhere along the way we decided to convert most of our living and working spaces into huge expanses of lawn. So far, we have planted over 62,500 square miles -some 40 million acres - in lawn. Each weekend we mow an area the size of New England to within one inch and then congratulate ourselves on a job well done. And it’s not as though those little woodlots and “open spaces” we have not paved or manicured are pristine. Nearly all are second-growth forests that have been overtaken by invasive Asian plants like autumn olive, multiflora rose, Oriental bittersweet, porcelainberry, buckthorn, privet, and bush honeysuckle.

This is Idea #3: Re-think the lawn.

... We have turned 54% of the lower 48 states into a matrix of cities, suburbs, roads, airports, power and pipelines, shopping centers, golf courses, infrastructure, and isolated habitat fragments, with 41% more of the U.S. into various forms of agriculture. That’s right: we humans have taken 95% of the natural world and made it unnatural. But does this matter? Are there consequences to using almost all of our land to meet human needs without considering the needs of other species? Absolutely, both for biodiversity and for us. Our fellow creatures need food and shelter to survive and reproduce, and we need robust populations of our fellow creatures because they are what run the ecosystems on which we all depend.

Why We Need Biodiversity

... Biodiversity losses are a clear sign that our own life-support systems are failing. The ecosystems that determine the earth’s ability to support us are run by the plants and animals around us. It is plants that generate oxygen and clean water, that create topsoil out of rock, and that buffer extreme weather events like droughts and floods. It is insect decomposers that drive the nutrient cycles on earth, allowing each new generation of plants and animals to exist. It is pollinators that are essential to the continued existence of 80 % of all plants and 90% of all flowering plants, and it is birds and mammals that disperse the seeds of those plants and provide them with pest control services.

This is Idea #4: Ecosystems fail without enough biodiversity.

Here is the solution proposed by Tallamy - this is Nature's Best Hope. Move your landscape toward four ecological functions:

• support a diverse and complex food web

• manage local watersheds

• move carbon from the atmosphere to the soil

• provide food and housing for as many species of native bees as possible.

Lawn does none of these things well, so reducing the area we have in turf grass is a logical first step. But plants vary a great deal in how well they achieve ecological goals, so we must choose very carefully the plants we use to replace lawn.