SOUTH BEND — “A lot of people recognize we have a problem but feel powerless,” entomologist Doug Tallamy said sympathetically to 300 or so people, knowing that it’s easy to feel a sense of “doom” over the country’s massive loss of natural habitat.
So, the popular author said Sunday, shrink the problem. Make it something you can handle. Start with your yard. But not the whole thing. Replace one small patch of grass with native plants while you get rid of invasive species. And add to it every now and then.
He’s turned this idea into a national movement, Homegrown National Park, with a website where people can register whatever small native habitats they’ve grown — ultimately, he hopes, to be the “largest national park in the country.” The University of Delaware professor has translated it into the popular books “The Nature of Oaks,” “Bringing Nature Home” and “Nature’s Best Hope.”
“There is urgency,” he said in the University of Notre Dame’s Corbett Family Hall, where his talk was sponsored by local conservation groups like the chapters of Wild Ones and the National Audubon Society. “We haven’t preserved enough nature to sustain ourselves.”
He said the U.S. already is already consumed by 410 million acres of agriculture, 135 million acres of the classic American lawn (where he pointedly said “very little can live”) and an estimated 800,000 acres of development being added each year.
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