It’s about as beautiful a fall day in Portland as you can get. I’d love to be hiking, bird watching, or sowing seeds for future plants, but it won’t be long before the book will be released. What on earth inspired me to write a book? Limelight? Prestige? Rolls of royalties? Ha! 
What motivated me was the earth, or more precisely, my love of it. Edward O. Wilson, the eminent evolutionary biologist and the authority on ants (and my hero), coined the term “biophilia” for our innate affinity for the rest of living organisms. Besides having a bad case of it, I am unabashedly horrified at the extent to which the natural world has been plowed under by our unrelenting reorganization of nature to suit our tastes.
Urban/suburban sprawl, invasive plants, toxins, climate change, and Big Ag (by far the biggest waste of land is the 41 percent of the lower 48 states given to livestock ranchers) all contribute to our precarious environmental condition. Many remnant natural areas are isolated, degraded ecosystem fragments that struggle to support continually decreasing levels of biodiversity. We are the only species that has such an uncanny knack for completely destroying habitat that is essential for other species to live—we take and take, without giving back. But we humanimals are a flexible lot, compared to most species known as specialists that live in narrow habitat
s and often have precise dietary needs. When environmental conditions change, generalists like us are usually able to adapt (at least so far), but specialists often become victims who silently go extinct: They can’t simply move on, quickly change their diet, or “reinvent” themselves.
Humans have the ability to conserve, restore, and give back to the earth some of what we’ve taken. I’m heartened by some thrilling restoration and preservation work going on that interlocks and connects broken landscapes—unbroken corridors are essential for wildlife caught in our anthropocentric time.
Aptly named, regional conservation partnerships — coalitions of small land trusts and the like — work to preserve and protect mosaics of public as well as private land (by buying up parcels or securing easements, basically paying landowners to protect the present and future) and connecting them by wild corridors. The Wildlands Network is one such organization that is working on four “wildways” in North America; the Pacific Wildway is closest to home, running from Alaska to Baja.
It is these gigantic projects that make the biggest splash ecologically. But small, conventionally landscaped areas are often stagnant ecosystems that add to our overall environmental debt. So my mission is to make it easier for people in the Pacific Northwest to turn their traditional yards into spaces that benefit dwindling biodiversity, to help people garden with nature in mind. Many books tell us why we need to move away from “typical” landscapes that are dominated by nonnative ornamental plants and lawn composed of exotic grasses—both of which offer few ecological benefits. But few tell how to do it, and in our region (from southern B.C. to southern Oregon, west of the Cascades).
Ecologically functional gardening is some of the best conservation work you can do. Supporting environmental groups and campaigns is wonderful, but with this you know exactly where your money goes. You can do a little or a lot. And with some patience and a bit of honest labor, the benefits will gradually be observable right outside your window. I invite you to join me on the front line (or in your back yard or side yard, or even parking strip!) to help sustain native fauna and flora, the backbone of ecosystems.
Great post.