 everyone. How's that sound? Not very good. Okay, tech people. I'll just keep talking and hopefully the tech people will fix it. Can you hear me? No. Thank you to North Branch Nature Center for partnering with us and hosting us for that event. It's like a smile fest. There are kids from age two to adults to 80 something and everybody was enjoying themselves. It was so fun to explore nature together with the expertise of the scientists and naturalists and educators from both DCE and North Branch Nature Center. So we thank you all for being there. We'd like to thank the people, the organizations and agencies that sponsored this event. The Nature Conservancy, Hunger Mountain Co-op, Northeast Wilderness Trust, Vermont Natural Resources Council, New Nürburgr Outdoors, the Washington Electric Co-op, and Vermont Alliance for Haber. Let's see. I need to remind you all that there is a happy hour following this back at North Branch Nature Center. We hope that you'll all come back from 5.45 to 7 o'clock. There will be drinks and snacks and Doug will be there. You'll have a chance to chat with him. So we hope you all join us for a lovely evening there. And then the last thing is to welcome Doug Colony. We are so privileged to have him here. DCE's newest biologist, Desiree Nurango, studied with him for her PhD, I believe. And so maybe we had an inside angle, but one of the things I learned from Doug last night is that he gets four requests for programs per day. So we are so lucky and grateful to have you here, Doug. Can you really hear me? I want to talk to you about what my idea of Nature's Best Hope is. And I'll give you a spoiler. You are Nature's Best Hope. And we kind of saw that today. Nature's Best Hope was, of course, he's a very famous professor at Harvard, extremely long career, at least 60 years. He started disciplines. He didn't just excel in them. He started them. And one thing that was consistent throughout his very long career was his love of biodiversity, his love of life on planet Earth. And he wanted to save it. Not just because he loved it, but because he knew it was essential to our own survival. And in 2016 he wrote this book, which is for sale out there in the table. Half Earth, Our Planet's Fight for Life. And he had one simple message. If we're going to save life anywhere on planet Earth, we have to save nature. We have to save functioning ecosystems on at least half of the planet. Otherwise it's going to disappear everywhere, and that includes humans. So it's an important message. And he spent most of the book talking about the science that supported that very bold statement. And then he ended the book. He didn't spend a lot of time telling us how we were going to save nature on half of planet Earth. Not a conservation biologist. That's a great idea. We'll just put half the Earth aside and all the things that are struggling will be in there. Okay. Half of planet Earth is in half of terrestrial Earth. This is some form of agriculture. And we've got eight billion people in the other half, along with all of our roadways and airports in detritus. And we don't have a third half to put aside for nature. So how can we realize EO's wonderful dream? I think we can. And that's basically what this talk is about. But in order to do that, we need a new approach to conservation. Before we talk about that though, let's talk about what happened on the East Coast in 2019, I think it was. It was a big oak mast. Members of the Red Oak Group got together and decided to make their acorns at the same time. And that's what it looked like in a lot of places. Well, I'm easily entertained. So I just took one of those acorns and I stared at it. And I was rewarded because an insect started to chew its way out of the acorn. First it chewed a little hole for its head. Then it forced its head through there. Then it forced its entire body through there. It was a tight squeeze. And when it plops down, that's a dangerous sign for that insect larva because it's good to eat. A lot of things are after it. So it gets a safety by wiggling and squirming beneath the soil surface. It takes about 30 seconds. And once it's underground, it stretches in all directions and forms a chamber. Then within that chamber converts itself to a pupa. And it surprisingly stays in the underground chamber as a pupa for two years. After two years comes out as an acorn weevil. That's what an acorn weevil looks like. A lot of people think weevils have big noses because it looks like they do. But that's actually an extension of the head capsule. And the mouth parts are way down here at the end of that extension. They take those mouth parts, chew a hole into the center of the acorn, and turn around and lay an egg in that hole. And that's how the larvae gets into the acorn. Why do they spend two years underground? Why don't they come out the next year the way most insects would? Well, it takes red oak acorns 18 months to complete their development. So if they came out the next year, there wouldn't be enough acorns for them. Of course, after they leave the acorn, that leaves a hole. Kind of like a true vacuum. And you know that nature abhors a vacuum. And in this case, she's filled it with three species of temnothorax ants. Tiny little ants where the entire colony lives in the hole made by acorn weevils after they've left the acorn. And if scouts find a new hole in a new acorn, they get all excited because their old acorn is falling apart. So they tell everybody, it's time to move. Move the colony. They grab the larvae. They grab the eggs. They move the entire colony into the new acorn. That takes about 30 minutes. Then they post a guard there and make sure nobody else comes in. And that's where they'll live for the next two years until that acorn falls apart. What's my point with that little story? That's just one of literally millions of very specialized interactions largely between animals and plants that comprise the bulk of nature. This is another one, the relationship between jays and acorns. Jays and oaks. Jays are the primary disperser of oak acorns. They will take an acorn and they'll fly up to a mile, although I read just the other day, a mile and a half, a long way. They fly a long way from the oak. They tap the acorn beneath the soil surface. And the object is they're going to go back in the wintertime and have something to eat. But for every four acorns they bury, they only remember where one is. So for every four acorns they bury, they've actually planted three oak trees. Specialized relationship between piliated woodpeckers and carpenter ants. That's what they rear their young on, carpenter ants. So you won't have piliated woodpeckers unless you have a lot of carpenter ants. And you won't have a lot of carpenter ants unless you have the big trees that make those carpenter ants. You won't have this bee and Durana facelia unless you have that plant, facelia. That's the only pollen that that bee can rear its young on. And it turns out that pollen specialization is very common in our native bees. We have about 4,000 species of native bees and over a third of them can only reproduce in the pollen of particular plants. You won't have Baltimore checker spots unless you have white turtle head. I could talk all night, all week, all year about nature specialized relationships. The point I want to make this evening though is that these relationships, nature itself, is on the ropes. It's on the ropes because we didn't take Teddy Roosevelt's advice. Way back in 1908, Teddy heard that the state of Arizona was going to mine the Grand Canyon. So he went to the canyon. He stood on the edge, looked out over its splendor, and he said, leave it as it is. And with those five words, he started the process of creating the Grand Canyon National Park. But we didn't leave most of the country as it was. There's only about 5% of the lower 48 states. It's anything close to its original pristine ecological condition. And those are typically mountain tops. And that's because we have logged the country repeatedly. We have tilled it. We have drained it. We have grazed it. We've got 770 million acres of range land. That's four and a half times the size of Texas dedicated to cattle. And of course, we've paved it or otherwise developed it. We have straightened our rivers and dammed them. You could spell that any way you want. We polluted our skies and changed our climate for centuries to come. We've drained our aquifers. We've introduced more than 3,300 species of plants from other continents, many of which are running them up in our natural areas. And in short, we've carved up those natural areas into tiny remnants of their former selves. And each one of those remnants is too small and too isolated to sustain the amount of nature that we humans need. It is nature that keeps us alive on this planet. So you might wonder why we've done this. I wonder why we've done this, and I don't know. But I suspect we thought that our nest, planet Earth, was so large we could fowl it forever and there wouldn't be any consequences. But of course we were wrong about that and that's why we're seeing some pretty scary results like the insect apocalypses here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth talking about global insect decline? Followed by this, when North America has lost 3 billion breeding birds in the last 50 years. A third of our North American bird population already gone. Not a prediction. They're already gone. This is a prediction. The U.N. says, we're going to likely lose a million species to extinction in the next 20 years. And they said it two years ago. So now it's the next 18 years. It makes a nice headline, but it's not an option, folks. These are the species that keep us alive on this planet. We have to make sure that does not happen. So I could go on talking about the pox that we humans have delivered upon the environment, less upon all of our houses, but that's not what this talk is about. This talks about a cure for that pox. It's a cure that'll take small efforts from lots of people, people like you and me. But those efforts have delivered enormous physical, psychological, and environmental benefits to everybody. Let's return briefly to this headline, the insect apocalypse is here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? Back to E.L. Wilson. He told us what it would mean if Earth lost its insects. And he did it way back in 1987 with this paper, The Little Things that Run the World. And I still remember sitting in my office opening up Conservation Biology and reading that paper for the first time. And again, his message was very clear. Life as we know it depends on insects. What's surprising is I was an entomologist and that was news to me. And it was news to all the entomologists. We weren't thinking about that. Why does he say that? Well, if our insects disappeared, most of our flowering plants would disappear. And if they disappeared, it would so drastically change energy flow through our terrestrial ecosystems that the food webs that support the animals. The amphibians, the reptiles, the birds, and the mammals. Those food webs would collapse and all those animals would disappear. The biosphere, the living portion of the Earth would rot because we would have lost insect decomposers that rapidly turn over nutrients. And all we would have is bacteria and fungi. And of course humans wouldn't survive any of those drastic changes. There is some good news, and that is that none of that has to happen. We can save our birds, we can save our insects, we can save nature itself, but we're going to have to change the way we landscape in order to do it. Why do I say that? Remember, humans are products of nature. We are totally dependent on the life support that ecosystems provide. We call them ecosystem services. Here are just a few things that plants do that we depend on every day, like produce oxygen, pretty important, clean our water, slow its journey to the sea where it becomes too salty to use. Carbon capture enormously important today. Carbon, plants are capturing the carbon out of carbon dioxide, pulling it out of the atmosphere, out of harm's way, building their tissues out of it, but even they're at least equally important, pumping the extra carbon that they make into the soil through their root systems in a very complex way. But our soils are brown or black because of the carbon that plant roots have deposited there over the eons. And once it's in the soil, it's extremely stable. It can stay there for thousands of years. Plants are building topsoil, holding it in place, they're preventing floods, they're dampening severe weather, they're converting sunlight into food. If we lose our plants, we're going to have to eat sunlight, and that will be a real IT challenge. What are animals doing for plants? They're providing pest control services. They're pollinating nearly 90% of our plants. They're dispersing plant seeds. So designing landscapes like that that destroy the production of ecosystem services is just not a good idea. Never was a good idea, but today it's a terrible idea because of those 8 billion people that we have on the planet demanding more and more ecosystem services every day. And by the way, I don't usually talk about this, nice folks. Every time we add a person to the planet, we have fewer ecosystem services to provide for them. So that's not a relationship that's going to last too much longer. And we do have parks, we do have preserves. They're doing the best they can. But we're also in the sixth grade extinction event that the planet has ever experienced. Which means it's not good enough. The solution is to start practicing conservation outside of parks and preserves on landscapes just like that. There have been visionaries through the ages who have recognized we humans needed to work on our relationship with planet Earth. And Aldo Leopold was one of the most eloquent he wrote extensively in the first half of the 1900s. One of the things he said is the oldest task in human history is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it. There have been indigenous groups been able to do that for long periods. But our huge western societies and our huge Asian societies are terrible at doing that. So we have to take more from the Earth than it has to offer. Completely wrecking it. Going to another place doing the same thing. Not sustainable behavior. But Aldo Leopold had a lot of faith in him. He believed we were capable of developing what he called a land ethic. He knew we had to use the land. We had to farm and lumber and graze and mine and do all of those things. But he believed we could learn to do them gently enough that we did not destroy local ecosystems. That's what he called the land ethic and he wrote about it in the San County Almanac his most famous book. What he did not write about was developing a land ethic where we actually lived. And I'm not sure why that was but I suspect the notion that humans and nature cannot live together. We cannot coexist in the same place at the same time. That notion was so deeply embedded in the culture of Aldo Leopold's day and unfortunately it remains in our culture that he may not have recognized it as an option. What I want to argue tonight though is that not only is living with nature an option it's now the only viable option that's left to us. In the past of course conservationists worked pretty much exclusively where there weren't a lot of people. We now need to turn that on its head and practice conservation where there are a lot of people because that's pretty much everywhere. And that means we've got to find ways for nature to thrive in human dominated landscapes. Not hang on by a thread but thrive. Where should we start? Let's start with private property. Most of the land is privately owned. 78% of the entire country is privately owned. 85.6% of the US east of the Mississippi is privately owned. If we don't practice conservation on private property we're going to fail. And remember we can't afford to fail. Now when I use the word conservation I'm not using it really the way I mean. That's been our model of the last century is to find pristine areas that are not destroyed and conserve them. We keep doing that. But there's fewer and fewer of those areas all the time. And I know when I come to Vermont that's a harder sell because you've got a lot of nice areas up here. Come down to my neck in other words it's an easy, easy sell. We've got to go beyond conservation. We have to start restoring all those places we've messed up. And before you tell me you're never going to put it back together again exactly the way it was. I know that. But we can reunite enough of the specialized interactions that comprise functional ecosystems so that we have ecosystem function again even if it's not exactly what was on a particular place sometime in the past. But in order to do that we've got to start with the building blocks. Not all species contribute to ecosystem function equally. So we have to start with the most important groups and there's two groups that we can't do without. One is the flowering plants and of course the pollinators that allow those plants to reproduce. They are capturing energy from the sun and through photosynthesis turning it into food. That energy is then stored in the carbon bonds of simple sugars and carbohydrates and that's the food that supports just about all the animals on the planet. So now we have the food that plants make locked up mostly in their leaves. Well if you don't pass that on to animals you don't have any animals and if you don't have any animals you don't have functioning ecosystems. And it turns out that most vertebrates don't eat plants directly. Most vertebrates eat something else that ate plants in vertebrates typically insects and not just any insect. Caterpillars turn out to be enormously important. They are transferring more energy from plants to other animals than any other type of plant eater. So if we design landscapes that don't have a lot of caterpillars on them you have a failed food web and eventually a failed ecosystem. I'm going to use Carolina chickadee as an example. That is the chickadee that is at my feeder during the wintertime. You've got the black cat chickadee. Chickadee is all over the country practically the same birds doing the same thing. We've got our feeders eating seeds and we tend to think that's all they need. But you know even in the wintertime only 50% of a chickadee's diet is seeds. The other 50% is insects and spiders and when it comes time to reproduce their babies can't eat seeds at all. So they switch entirely to invertebrates and if they're in a healthy environment they will rear their young on as many caterpillars as possible. And they are not exceptions. 96% of our terrestrial birds rear their young in insects and most of those insects are caterpillars. How do I know that? There's a number of lines of evidence that suggest that. But this is a citizen science project that one of my grad students did a few years ago, Ashley Kennedy. She put out a call to bird photographers around the country and said, take pictures of birds, please take pictures of birds during the breeding season when they're carrying food to the nest. Send those pictures to me, Ashley. I will identify the prey items and the beaks of the birds and reconstruct the nestling diet for as many species of birds in North America as possible. And you're looking at a summary of her data for the 20 most common bird families in North America. The green bars are the percentage of the nestling diet that was caterpillars. And in 16 out of the 20 common bird families, caterpillars dominated the diet. So again, what would happen if we designed landscapes that don't have enough caterpillars in it? A lot of our birds would not be able to successfully reproduce. So there's something special about caterpillars. What is it? There's actually several things special about caterpillars. One of them is that they're soft. Think of this guy as if he had little sausage with a very thin wrapper. The thin wrapper is exoskeleton. It's made of chitin. It's undigestible. And because they're soft, you can stuff the caterpillar down the throat of your offspring without fear of injuring him. And if you've ever watched a parent bird with their young, they're pretty rough. The beaks like a plunger. They just stuff it down there. Caterpillars are also relatively large prey items. One medium-sized caterpillar is equal to the biomass of 200 aphids. Some of our smaller birds do chase aphids around. But do you want to chase 200 aphids or get one caterpillar? They're nutritious. They're very high in fat, very high in protein. They have a low percentage of chitin of exoskeleton compared to other insects, particularly beetles. Beetles are not like little sausages. They're like little tanks. So much of a beetle is undigestible. And a lot of beetles have very sharp edges, too. And finally, it turns out that caterpillars are the best source of carotenoids during the breeding season. Now, I mentioned carotenoids, not because I love organic chemistry, but because I'm a vertebrate, and you're a vertebrate. Birds are vertebrates. And we vertebrates cannot make our own carotenoids. Only plants make carotenoids. So we have to get our carotenoids from plants. And we have to get them from plants because carotenoids are essential components of vertebrate diets. Where are the birds getting their carotenoids from during the breeding season? From what they're bringing to the nest, of course. They're usually distributed among bird prey items. These first two bars here are types of caterpillars. They have far more carotenoids than other types of bird prey. Here are the adult caterpillars. Here are the moths and butterflies themselves. They have far fewer carotenoids because they're not eating the green leaves. That's where the carotenoids are, in the green leaves. And here's the earthworm way down here. So the early bird gets the worm, but he doesn't get any carotenoids when he gets the worm. So that's steady, and several others are suggesting that caterpillars are not optional parts of most bird diets. So let's just say, most birds need caterpillars. The next question is, how many do they need? Is one or two enough? Or one or two a day enough? That's a good question. So let's go back to chickadees. A lot of data on carolina chickadees. How many caterpillars does it take to make a nest of carolina chickadees? One or two is not enough. One or two a day is not enough. It takes thousands, 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars, depending on the number of chicks in the nest. And that's just to get them to the point where they leave the nest, where they fledge, and after they leave the nest, the parents continue to feed them caterpillars another 21 days, but they're flying all around and nobody can count those. So you're really talking about tens of thousands of caterpillars required to make one clutch of a bird that's a third of an ounce. Four pennies worth of bird. And if you want chickadees to breed in your yard, and I would think you would because that's all we have in a lot of places, you need all those caterpillars in your yard because chickadees only fords about 50 meters and that's true for most of our birds. They're foraging very close to the nest and not flying five miles down the road to the nearest woodlot. And if we landscape in a way that does not include all of those caterpillars, all of the insects, that's called insect decline. And it's got to be linked to the bird declines that we are measuring. We went to the original dataset of Rosenberg and all the Smithsonian group that said we've lost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years and we divided the terrestrial bird species into two groups. The species that require insects, typically when they're breeding and the species that do not require insects. So things like finches, doves, crustbills, they can actually make a little milk out of seeds and they can feed their young that so they don't need insects and look, they didn't decline at all in the last 50 years. But the birds that require insects decline on average 10 million individuals per species. That doesn't prove cause and effect, but it does suggest as you take bird food away, you lose the birds. So I think we need to raise the bar about what we ask our landscapes to do. In the past we've asked them to do one thing, be pretty, we're good at that. Now we're going to ask them to do two things, be pretty and ecologically functional at the same time and that's not going to happen if we don't put the caterpillars back in those landscapes. So how do you do that? How do you add caterpillars? You add the plants that support the caterpillars. That seems pretty straightforward. There is a catch though and that is that most plants do not support a lot of caterpillars. We have to be fussy about it. We have to be fussy about which plants we're going to add to our yards and we have to be fussy about it because the caterpillars themselves are fussy about it and the monarch butterfly illustrates that perfectly. We all know that you can have all the crepe myrtle and all the burning bush and all the barberry and all of the breadford pear and all of the hostas and all of the ginkgos and all of the privet and all of the things we typically landscape with in your yard and you won't make a single monarch butterfly. The only thing that's going to make a monarch butterfly is the milkweeds. That's called host plant specialization and it turns out that most of the insects that eat plants are host plant specialists. They can only eat particular plants. Why is that? Because plants have made them specialize. Plants don't want to be eaten. They want to capture the energy from the sun and use it for their own growth and reproduction so they've loaded their leaves with nasty tasting chemicals. Secondary metabolic compounds that make those leaves either bitter or downright toxic. If you're not leaving tonight as you're going to the happy hour, eat a plant. See if you like it. You're not going to like it. It's a really effective defense. It keeps most of the insects of the world from eating most of the plants of the world which is why it's green out there in the summertime. It's not there's no insects out there that want to eat those plants. It's because most of the insects that are out there cannot eat most of the plants. They are too well protected. They inherently know they're toxic. But we do know that insects eat plants. So how do they do that? How do they get around those chemical defenses? Well, this is where the specialization comes in. 90% of the insects that eat plants can only eat the plants for which they have specialized adaptations to get around the chemical defenses. Specialized enzymes that store and excrete and detoxify those compounds. Behavioral adaptations and life history adaptations that minimize the insects' exposure to those compounds. But it takes a long period of evolutionary history interacting with the plant for all those adaptations to fall into place and once they do, the insects locked into eating that particular plant lineage. So if you take the milkweeds out of your yard and replace them with hostas the monarch's not going to start to eat your hostas. It is locked into milkweeds and it has two choices. Fly away and find milkweeds someplace else or starve to death. So it turns out that this is actually pretty easy. There's three kinds of plants out there. There's plants that actually contribute energy to local food webs. By passing on some of that energy they've harnessed from the sun. Plants that do not contribute energy to local food webs and plants that actively remove energy from local food webs. Best example of a contributor over 84% of the counties in which they occur in North America is one of the oaks. They're contributing more energy than anything else. A good example of a non-contributor would be a Ginkgo, by Loba from Asia. A nice ornamental plant turns pretty yellow in the fall but nothing eats a ginkgo. So he's not passing on any energy. And a great example of a detractor would be Calorie Pear, Bradford Pear, any of the invasive ornamentals that we have that are not passing on very much energy and they escape and push out the native plants that do pass on energy. With Calorie Pear you can drive from New York City actually now much farther south in the spring and it is white all the way down because of the plants that have escaped from our yards. So all I'm trying to say here is that plant choice matters. If we're going to rebuild those ecosystems we need to have functional food webs and you're not going to have functional food webs unless you have the plants that support those food webs. And I'm going to give you three examples of how well this works. When you do choose the right plants and I'm going to start with Steve Sinney says, it's really our house. Our house in Oxford, Pennsylvania we've got a 10 acres of a farm that was broken up in the year 2000. It was a very old farm, been farmed almost 300 years and the last thing they did to that exhausted farm was mow it for hay. And when you mow for hay in southeast Pennsylvania you're really mowing the rootstocks of all the invasive plants that have come in over the years and they call it hay because they give it to the mushroom industry and it doesn't matter what it is, they just grow mushrooms on it. So our job was to rebuild the ecosystem here so the first thing we had to do was get rid of the invasives and that's another talk but then we had to put the caterpillars back and I've never tried that before. As a matter of fact back then I didn't realize how important that was it was just fun. And the first thing I tried was to try to get the Canadian Owlet to make a living on our property. I'd never even seen a Canadian Owlet and people say, why did you choose a Canadian Owlet? Because I looked through Dave Wagner's Caterpillars of Eastern North America and I said that's a pretty one. Let's do that. That's what the adults look like just like a leaf. Well you're not going to have Canadian Owlets unless you have Metaro. That is the only plant that they can eat. Host plant specialization. We didn't have any Metaro. I'm sure there was Metaro there hundreds of years ago but the entire area was farmed to death. So I got some Metaro seeds from Fisher's Island and I planted them at home and they grew very nicely. But this was early on and I actually had very little faith the Canadian Owlets would be able to find my little patch of Metaro. Maybe they had to come from Canada, I don't know. So I didn't even go out and check it for at least two months after I planted it. Then I was walking by for another reason and I looked over and they were covered with Canadian Owlets. They had found it right away. I'm still impressed with that. So now we have a good population of Canadian Owlets and Metaro. So we've added two species to that barren landscape. So the restoration has begun. Same story with the Goldenrod Stowaway. That's actually a misnomer. A beautiful moth has nothing to do with Goldenrod. It's a specialist on this plant, Biden's Aristosa, Ditch Daisy. I did know where there was some Ditch Daisy in a power line cut about 14 miles away. So I got some seeds. I planted them at home and they grew very nicely. As a matter of fact, last summer they took over in my front yard. That's okay. Well I had to wait a year for the Goldenrod Stowaway to find my patch of Bidens, but they did. And now we've got a good population of both of those. Now we've added four species to the property. I wanted to see if I could get the Hackberry Emperor to make a living at our house. Not because it's the most beautiful butterfly in the world, but because it belongs there. It's one of the species that ought to be there. Well as its name suggests, it needs Hackberry. It needs Celtus. And we didn't have any Hackberry. So I planted a couple of Hackberry trees. I had to wait four years for the butterflies to find my Hackberry trees. So I planted a bunch of them. So now we've added six species to the property. And that's how the restoration proceeded. I did not plant Goldenrod. It came in on its own. And along with it came many of the beautiful creatures that require Goldenrod, like the brown hooded Owlet, the Arcidera Flower Moth, the Goldenrod Leaf Miner, the Distinct Sparigonothus, the Goldenrod Gull Moth. There are 110 species of moths that use Goldenrod in the mid-Atlantic states. I planted Virginia Creeper. Yes, Virginia Creeper. I hear some people don't like it. I don't know why though. It's a great native plant. It's got good fall color, good ground cover. It can climb our trees without girdling them, without pulling them down. It makes valuable berries for the birds in the fall. And by valuable, I mean they're high in fat. Our migrating birds need high fat berries. Fat has twice the energy that sugar has. And the overwintering birds need high fat berries as well. And those berries came from tiny little inconspicuous flowers. You don't even know that Virginia Creeper is in bloom until you see this big cloud of bees around it. It is a wonderful pollinator plant. Remember, when you're making a pollinator garden, you're making it for the pollinators. If it's not big and showy for you, that's okay. I planted Virginia Creeper because it's the best host plant for the large Sphinx moths that are a primary component of cardinal diets. Things like the Pandora Sphinx and its beautiful adult. It makes the Hog Sphinx, the Abbott Sphinx, all on Virginia Creeper. I want to see if I get the double tooth prominent at our house. Just because it's such a cool looking caterpillar. Looks like a stegosaurus. Even if you don't like caterpillars, you got to like that guy. What's a specialist on Elm? Particularly American Elm. Of course, we didn't have any American Elm. It was eliminated decades ago by the Dutch Elm disease. But there are two big American Elms at the University of Delaware that did not die. There's a lot of seed. So the second year after we moved in, I gathered up some seeds out of the gutters and I planted them at home. They germinate in six days and they grow very quickly. Those trees are now easily 80 feet tall. And they brought in the double tooth prominent. Another big, big success. American Elm. I wanted the evening primrose broth just because it's beautiful. I like beauty like anybody else. And believe it or not, we didn't have any evening primrose. So I planted that. The moths came. They spend the day with their head stuffed in the flowers. Sometimes it's crowded in there. But they're always very cute. And I planted a lot of oak trees. Now these are just examples of the plants that we put back on our property. But I want to focus on oaks for a while because they are such important plants. That's the Bedford Oak in Bedford, New York. Martha Stewart land. People argue about whether it's 400 years old or 500 years old. It's enormous. And I hear people say all the time I'm not going to plant an oak because I won't live long enough to enjoy it. And if you can only enjoy your oak when it's 400 years old, you're right. You won't. But if you can enjoy what your oak is delivering to your local food web, and remember that's our new goal here, you can enjoy it immediately. And I can say that with confidence because I planted most of my oaks as acorns, which means they were free. Or two foot bare root whips, which means they cost $1.50 each. At my house, like the Solitary Oak Leaf Miner, Juveniles Dusky Wing, the Yellow-Solid Moth, Suzuki's Promo Lactis, the Red Wash Caterpillar, the Yellow Vested Moth, the Orange Tufted Oneida, the Spiny Oak Caterpillar, the Two-Spotted Oak Punky, the Variable Oak Leaf Caterpillar, the Red Humped Oak Worm, the Pink Striped Oak Worm, the Hesitant Dagger Moth, the Lesser Oak Dagger Moth, the Red Line Panipoda, the Laffer and literally hundreds more species of caterpillars have come to the oaks on our property and they come right away. Popped its head above the leaves, and here's a caterpillar standing around eating the leaves of that tree. You don't have to wait decades or hundreds of years for your oaks to start to support the food. Then an oven burr is going to come and eat that caterpillar. It happens right away. That's what our yard looks like today, taken from the same place that I took down. That's actually where the Bidens took over last summer. Just to convince you, we put some plants back. Now I'm still putting plants back. I'm sure it's not close to the diversity that was there originally, but over the years my research has suggested that if you know the number of species of moths in your local food web you have a good index of how productive that food web is and how stable it is. So five years ago or maybe it was six now, I don't know, I started taking pictures of every species of moth I could find on property and I'm still at it, but I'm up to 1,202 species of moths making a living here because we put the plants back. Now we've got 10 acres, Pennsylvania's 2.4 million acres, so on 1,240,000th of the land mass we've got 44% of all the moths that occur in the entire state. And because so many of them are types of bird food, we have recorded 61 species of birds that have bred on our 10 acres, not flew by, but bred. Why am I telling you this? This is another headline we see all the time. The World Wildlife Fund says Earth has lost two thirds of its wildlife since 1970. It's a terrible statistic. But I'm thinking, gee, not at our house. I am convinced we have increased biodiversity by more than two thirds. It didn't take that long and it wasn't that hard. We just put the plants back. What would happen if everybody put the plants back? We really could turn a lot of these statistics around. We've got 10 acres, a lot of people have less land than that. Will it work on smaller properties, let's say in suburbia? That is a good question. So let's go to Margie and Dan Terpstra's house in Kirkwood, Missouri. They have 0.6 acres, 18 times less land than Cindy and I have. They're in the middle of a development. Everybody around them has the big lawns. When they moved into their yard, it was choked with Amur honeysuckle, bush honeysuckle. Another invasive from Asia, so they got rid of that. When it's 70 species of native plants put in a water feature, they call a bubbler and then they sat back and started to count the birds using their yard and they are up to 149 bird species including 35 warbler species. That's an incredible figure. Just to compare that to our house, we've only recorded eight warbler species at our house. So does it work on smaller properties? Absolutely. What about urban yards though? Let's go to Pam Carlson's house in Chicago and I mean in Chicago, oh here airport. She has one-tenth of an acre, three times smaller than the average lot size in North America. She's not connected to any natural area at all. It's a pretty one-tenth of an acre because she is a native plant landscaper. But it's an island. It's an isolated island in Chicago. But Pam did the same thing. She got rid of her non-native plants, planted 60 species of native plants, put in another water feature and then she sat back and counted the birds using her little-tenth of an acre. She's up to 124 bird species including a woodcock. There's Pam's woodcock. So if you haven't seen a woodcock lately, go to Pam's house in Chicago. There's four things we need to think about if we're going to succeed in a big way and we need to succeed in a big way. And one of them's got to be. We've got to reduce the area in lawn. Latest figure I saw was 44 million acres of lawn. That's an area bigger than all of New England combined acres. Okay. Why do we do that? Well, it's a status symbol and we need to display our Halloween decorations. But what if we cut that area in half? Let's make the math simple. We've got 40 million acres. We cut it in half. What if we took areas like this and turned them into this? I got this picture from Dan Getman. I never met Dan Getman. But he said, look, I had a big lawn. I'm putting plants back. I'm doing it. I said, so that would give us 20 million acres that we could restore right where we live. We can create a new national park that I'm calling Homegrown National Park and it'll be big. It'll be bigger than the Adirondacks, plus Yellowstone, plus Yosemite, plus Grand Tetons, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands National Park, Olympic National Park, Sequoia National Park, plus the Grand Canyon, plus Denali, which is huge, plus the Great Smoky Mountain. So Edilpolis Park is still less than 20 million acres. So Homegrown National Park is the biggest park in the country. What do you get when you put a park at home? What do you get when you put some part of nature right where you live? You get the opportunity to interact with that part of nature. At your own time, at your own pace, all you have to do is go outside, or maybe even just look at your window. You can do that avoiding crowds. You know, if you go to a real national park, 375 million people did that last year, so I know what you're really going to interact with. It's free. There's no admission fee. It's never closed no matter what pandemic comes down the pike. You can avoid travel hassles, which to me is important. You get to experience the natural world alone. Alone is the key here. There's no way you can develop that unique relationship with the natural world if it's mediated by somebody else. And this is particularly important for our poor kids who are suffering from nature deficit disorder, according to Richard Louvre. That's why today was so valuable for so many kids. You know, we're trying. We get 30 kids. We put them on a bus with a teacher, and they drive for an hour, and they go to a natural area and they walk around for an hour, and the teacher tells them not to touch anything. And they get back in the bus and they go home, and that's their experience with the natural world, which I'm sure is better than nothing. But it's really been an experience of 30 other kids and a teacher telling them not to touch anything. If they have some part of nature where they live, they can go out and get to know it, become friends with it, fall in love with it. Alone. No parental supervision. They will come home again. When we hover over our kids, we are sending a subliminal message that this is dangerous stuff. And you're not capable of dealing with it yourself. We're sending that to the future stewards of the planet. We're doing the best we can to scare them about the nature that they've got to take care of it. If they're going to be afraid of the natural world, if they don't love stewarding the natural world, if they don't know how to steward the natural, they're going to be lousy stewards. And we can't afford any more lousy stewardship. And maybe they will learn how to hunt lizards, which I'm learning from my own granddaughter, Zoe, who lives in Hawaii on a very modest patch of nature. She's got a piece of grass and a hedge, but there are no lizards there. And when she learned that, she sent me this picture to describe how you hunt lizards. Zoe is a very serious girl, by the way. This is serious stuff, no smiling. You get on the ground and you cover yourself with leaves and sticks so that the lizards can't see you coming. Then you crawl very slowly towards the lizards. You can wear your best dress, that's okay. But you catch a lizard, you put it in an aquarium and learn how to take care of the lizard. You fall in love with that part of nature. I don't think Zoe's going to be crawling on the ground on her best dress catching lizards the rest of her life. I don't think. She sent me this picture not too long ago, so who knows. But I guarantee she's going to remember catching lizards the rest of her life in Hawaii. And she's going to be a good steward of the planet because of that experience. If you want to join Homegrown National Park, it's real. It exists. A small non-profit. You can do it. Go to HomegrownNationalPark.org and get yourself on the map. It is free, so we're not pulling membership away from any other existing conservation organization. The idea is to get the message that everybody, everybody, not just tree huggers are critical components of the future of conservation. We want that message to go viral. What you do is you register where your property is and the amount of area on your property you're being a good steward of. Maybe you really are going to reduce the area of lawn. Maybe you're going to plan an oak tree. Maybe you're going to put an aster in a flowerpot. Whatever you do. Counts. You put that area there, then your little area of the county will light up. And we want, you can see other people in your county who have joined Homegrown National Park. There's actually competition among states who can get the most members. But again, we want that message to go viral. We want the whole country to light up. What are we asking? We're asking people to reduce the area of lawn. I mean, that's, lawn is not giving us any of the things we need ecologically. And we want to replace that lawn with the important native plants that are contributing. We want to remove any invasive plants that are on our properties. Remember, if 85% of the property is privately owned and everybody got rid of their invasive plants off their own property, we'd be 85% done. Just worry about your property. That's all. That's all. Most people do have invasive plants on their property and they don't even know it. If you're protecting any natural area, you certainly want to continue to do that. There are real ecological products associated with Homegrown National Park, a significant increase in biodiversity and just go back to the figures at our property. It really does work. Measurable reduction in invasive species. A significant drawdown of atmospheric CO2. When you turn lawn into a planting like this, or any kind of planting, you are sequestering more carbon than that lawn did. And we're going to start to transform areas outside of parks and preserves into viable habitat. Any bit of conservation we do outside of a park helps conservation inside of the park. There are real sociological products too. National awareness, not just what the problem is, but what the solutions are. We are trying to change the culture. We want people to recognize that nature is not optional. It's not there just for our entertainment. It's essential. And because everybody needs it, everybody owns responsibility to sustaining it. We want to convert hope into action. Hope is good, but action is better. And again, we want to merge all of the existing national conservation efforts. Audubon and National Wildlife Federation, Wild One Sierra Club, all the land conservancies. We want to merge them into one visual on the map so we can see how well we're doing in terms of conservation on private property. There's the 30-30 initiative. People say it's Biden's 30-30 and it's really the U.N.'s. He's just saying, yeah, we're going to try to do it too. That means saving 30% of the U.S. by 2030. There is no way we're going to do that if we don't record conservation on private property. So we're going to shrink the lawn. We're going to join Homegrown National Park. The plants that we're going to put in the area that was once lawn. I'm going to argue that some of them have to be what I'm calling keystone plants. Remember what a keystone is, it's the stone in the middle of the Roman arch. If you take it out of the arch, the arch falls down. Well, if you take keystone plants out of your local food web, the food web collapses because they are making most of the food. So think of the, well, 14% of our native plants are making 90% of the caterpillar food that drives food webs. So think of the keystone plants in the ecological house that you're building as the 2x4 that are holding up that house. They're the support. You can't build a house out of wallpaper, and that's what we've been trying to do for the last 100 years. What is the best keystone plant? Again, in most areas of the country, it's one of our oaks. We've got 91 species of oaks, folks. We don't have to plant English oak or Chinese oak. We don't have to. So native oaks in the mid-Atlantic states, they support 557 species of caterpillars, over 950 species nationwide. And that figure is about to go up by over 300. If I can get Dave Wagner to actually publish something. And there's no other plant genus that comes close to that. So how do you find out what the best plants are? Where you leave, you go to native plant finder, put in your zip code, and the ranked list of the most important woody plants and herbaceous plants in your county will pop up. These are just that's what a lot of the list looks like. And they're much bigger than that, but I ran out of room. So we're going to shrink the lawn. We're going to use keystone plants and invite a lot of insects to our yard. And then we're going to kill them with our security light. Which, of course, is not the goal. There's a lot of research that is suggesting that lights are one of the causes of insect decline. And these are all the ways that lights kill insects. Particularly those moths that are making the caterpillars that run our food webs. So it seems like bad news, but I see it as good news. Because we've got to stop insect declines. Now stop it. We've got to reverse it. We've already lost more than 45% of the insects on the planet. We've got to turn that around. And if we can do that by flicking a switch, we're getting off easy. A lot of switches to flick, but there's a lot of us to do that. Think about, gee, I can't turn the light off over my barn or over my garage or over my front porch because the bad man won't come. Or I put a motion sensor on it. So it only turns on when the bad man does come. And the first thing you'll notice is the bad man does not come very often. And if you don't want to do that even easier, take the white bulb out of your security light and put in a yellow bulb, yellow incantation, yellow LED, yellow wavelengths are far less attractive to nocturnal insects than our white or blue wavelengths. If we switched out our white bulbs for yellow bulbs overnight, we could save millions of insects. And if we used LEDs, we could save millions of dollars, too. So we're going to shrink the lawn. We're going to use keystone plants. We're going to modify our lights. Then we're going to invite one of the mosquito foggers to come kill all of our insects. Booming business around the country. It is a booming business. And they say it's okay because what they're fogging is a natural product. And it is a natural product. It's pyrethrides. That's the compound that chrysanthemums have come up with to kill insects. It's industrial strength pyrethrides, but it is a natural product. But you know what, cyanide is a natural product. Ricin is a natural product. Nicotine is a natural product. A lot of things that nature makes that are not very nice. So I don't like that argument. They also say it only kills mosquitoes. Not even close to true. It kills all the insects. All the pollen. All the insects it comes in contact with, it kills the monarchs. There was a big monarch mortality event in a mosquito fogging a couple years ago. This is one that happened on the eastern shore. When you see this, you get it. The guy who comes down the street and fogs when you didn't ask for it has consequences. The interesting thing is it does not control mosquitoes. You're doing this for nothing. You don't control mosquitoes in the adult stage. You have to kill 90% of them to get good control. These guys kill between 10 and 50%. So it's not even close to working. If you really want to control mosquitoes, let's try something that's benign for everything else except mosquitoes. How about biological control with mosquito dunks? Get a bucket, fill it full of water, put it in a handful of straw or hay, put it out in the sun so it can build up populations of diatoms and algae. And that is what mosquito larvae eat is diatoms and algae. So that becomes an irresistible brew to the ovipositing the females that want to lay their eggs in your yard. They will preferentially lay their eggs in your bucket. Then you go to the hardware store and you get a sheet of mosquito dunks. $12. You put a mosquito dunk in there. That's bacillus thuringiensis, which is a natural bacterium that only kills aquatic diptera. And the only aquatic dipterin in your bucket is a mosquito larva. If a dragonfly gets in there, won't hurt it a bit. Won't hurt it. You might put a coarse screen over it so your local chipmunk doesn't commit suicide. But it's effective. It's cheap. It's targeted. And if everybody did it, it really would help. But you know if you just want to use your yard, maybe on a Saturday night, you don't want to kill anything. Get a fan and plug it in. It creates a directed breeze and the mosquitoes don't fly into it. That works too. The fourth thing we need to do is to landscape in a way that allows those really important caterpillars to complete their development. What do I mean by that? This is just an example, but I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where oaks support 511 species of caterpillars. A few of them, like the polyphemus moth, complete their development on the tree. The caterpillar eats the leaves, then it spins a cocoon and hangs from one of the branches, then it emerges as an adult, and then it does it all over again. Everything happens on the tree. Most of the species don't. 94% of them, when they finish growing as caterpillars, they drop from the tree and they wiggle their way beneath the soil surface and pupate underground, or they spin a cocoon and the leaf litter that's under the tree and that's the problem. There is no leaf litter under the tree. We don't tolerate it. It's messy. And we mow and compact the soil under our tree, so it's rock hard. Very difficult for those caterpillars to get underground, which means even if we're using the right plants, actually particularly if we're using the right plants, we're creating ecological traps. We are calling them in so that the females will lay their eggs and the caterpillars grow and they drop down and die. And I am convinced this is another major cause of insect declines around the country and of course the cement landscape isn't the answer either. I'm not saying get rid of the trees out of the cities. I'm saying get rid of the cement out of the cities and then maybe it'll work. This is what most people do. You have a tree in a yard. I've got a new grad student this semester who is actually starting to measure how well caterpillars do in a situation like this. But I guarantee they're going to do better in a situation like this where you have a layered landscape. Maybe a dog would hear, native azalea, ferns, ground cover, leaf litter hiding in there. Heather Holm and Desiree call this soft landing. It is a soft landing. The ground is not compacted. I'm sure that's one of the major features there. So they can easily get underground. Nobody's going to mow them. Nobody's going to step on them. Much higher survivorship. This is where you can do your fancy spring ephemeral gardening. We're not talking about less gardening here. We're talking about more gardening. Put a bed around every single tree. The bigger the better. That is how you shrink your lawn. First put the tree in your yard and then put a bed around it. Liberally use your native ground covers. Things like wild ginger and native pack of Sandra. This is the Virginia Creeper is a good ground cover. You can see the ground. You don't have enough plants. Green mulch is the way to go. Not bark you buy from someplace else. The trees will love it and it's great for the caterpillars. Let's talk about Desiree Narango. She's sitting in the back row. There's a former student. She got her PhD with this little guy, the Carolina Chickadee in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and she had one simple question that actually suggests there's room for compromise. Her result suggests there's room for compromise in our plant choice. She wanted to know how well chickadee populations would do over time in landscapes that are dominated by native plants versus landscapes dominated by non-native plants. And what she found when they're dominated by non-native plants they reduce caterpillar abundance by 75%. So right away you've reduced the amount of bird food by 75%. They were 60% less likely to have breeding chickadees at all. Every landscape has a nest box up in them. But the chickadees would come and look around. They told me this. They would look around and say, there's not enough food there. We're not even going to try to breed. If they did try, they laid 1.5 fewer eggs. Those clutches were 29% less likely to survive. If they did survive, they produced 1.2 fewer fledglings and it took them 1.5 days longer to do that. And if you put all that into a population growth model as a function of the percentage of non-native woody plants in your landscape from none to 100%. And we looked at woody plants because that's where chickadees forage on woody plants. This is what you get. The dotted line is replacement rate. That's the rate at which the population has to make babies to replace the adults that die every year. If you reproduce at this rate you have a sustainable population. It's not growing, but it's not shrinking either. If you make more babies than adults die you've got a growing population. But if you make fewer babies, as you do when there's a whole lot of non-native plants in your yard, then you have an unsustainable shrinking population. Now right here, very liberally speaking, is where those lines intersect. Which suggests you can have up to 30% of the woody plant biomass in your yard non-native without collapsing your food web. You can't tolerate any invasive plants. Invasive plants are ecological tumors. Somebody sent me an email and said, but can't you tolerate just a few? Well, how many tumors do you want to tolerate in your body? They grow. And they escape your yard and ecologically castrate the local ecosystem. But there are a lot of natives, or non-natives that are not invasive. Remember Dan Getman? That's a ginkgo tree. Did you pick that up the first time? Why does Dan have a ginkgo in his native planting? Because Dan's wife likes ginkgos and asked him to put one in. So he did. Is it going to escape and mess up the local wood lot? No, it's just there. So I like to think of plants that are just there like this, as if they're statues. So there's Dan's ginkgo. If everything was a statue, it wouldn't work. So it's not the presence of non-native plants that destroys food webs. It's the absence of the native plants, particularly those high contributors that destroys them. To increase the percentage of those, we can tolerate a lot of these. Can we use native plants in formal designs? Of course we can. This is a Linn-Oshonisi design. You don't get more formal than that. It's taken by a drone 400 feet up. Every plant in that landscape is a native plant. Formality is a function of the design. It's not a function of the plants in the design. Our native plants are used in formal designs in Europe every day, and they love them over there. I guess it's okay because they're not there, but we can do the same thing here. Can we get a pollinator garden into a typical suburban yard like this without offending anybody? Sure. Just put a little fence around it. It formalizes it. It tells your neighbor it's not just a bunch of weeds you forgot to mow. It's pretty when it's in bloom. It's not very big. It could be bigger. But if everybody did it, it would help. Help what? Help our pollinators. Why do we need to help our pollinators? The reason we're here from the media is because they pollinate a third of our crops. It's a very anthropocentric view of pollination. It's also not true. They pollinate about a 12th of our crops. I hear people say, I don't live next to a farm so I don't need any pollinators. Forget the crop argument. We all need pollinators because they pollinate 80% of all plants and 90% of all flowering plants. If we lost our pollinators, we'd lose 80 to 90% of the plants on the planet. We'd lose our pollinators, which is everywhere. How about this? A droolatum design, much bigger. Imagine the amount of life here versus the amount of life here. Seems like a no-brainer. Can municipalities help us live with nature? Yes, they can. More and more of them are doing it all the time. Minnesota is one of the first to kick it off years ago with a cost-sharing program the state pays homeowners to reduce or eliminate their lawn and replace it with appropriate Minnesota prairie plants. Pennsylvania has a similar program now, long-waiting list. They don't have the money to support it. There's an island off of Florida that is paying residents to allow burrowing owls, listed species, to burrow in the front yard. This is the way the Endangered Species Act should have been written with carrots rather than sticks. If you have an endangered species on your property, we're going to pay you so that you take care of it. Everybody would want an endangered species. Put a bounty on these invasive ornamentals like calorie-pair. That's what St. Louis, Missouri did, Fayetteville, Arkansas, South Carolina has banned them all together. North Carolina has a bounty on them. If you take out a calorie-pair, you get a free tree replacement. Utility, public utilities, not just in the dry southwest, but in a lot of places giving people $100 coupons to plant water-efficient native plants rather than the thirsty non-natives. And, of course, the big lawn reduction programs in the Far West, particularly California. This is going up. You get $3 per square foot rebate for every square foot of lawn you take out and replace with a xeric planting. And if you want more information on all of that, memorize that. I think we've made three missteps in the early years of conservation, and the first one is really important. We're starting to think of nature as if it's optional. We like nature. We like to ride our bikes and undergo bird-watching. We like to stare at it, but it's not essential. And if it's not essential when push comes to shove, when resources are in short supply, nature takes a backseat. And that's, of course, always. Resources are always in short supply. I went to the Cincinnati Zoo before the virus broke out, and there's this wall-size poster there, which to me epitomizes our society's view of conservation. We want to save wildlife. We want to save nature so that future generations can enjoy it. That was Teddy Roosevelt's argument in the National Park System. Gorgeous places want to save them so that future generations can enjoy and appreciate that. And I get that because nature is enormously entertaining, but it is much more than that. We want to save nature so that we have future generations. A little bit more urgent. We've also assumed that humans in nature cannot coexist. Now, we talked about that, but if we restrict conservation just to the places where there's not a lot of humans, we're going to fail because those places are too small, too few, and too isolated. David Quaman has an excellent analogy between a Persian rug and an ecosystem. That's a functional Persian rug. That is not 71 Persian rugs. That's 71 rug fragments, none of which are acting like a Persian rug, and that is what we have done to our ecosystems. The UN does its best biosphere reserves as places of ecological significance. I don't like that language because it suggests there's places on planet Earth with no ecological significance. Not so. Every square inch of the planet has ecological significance, including our yards, including our corporate landscapes, including our road size, even including much of our agriculture. So we need to glue our rug back together again, folks. We've got to put the plants back. Not just to make biological carters that allow plants and animals to move between viable habitats, but to recreate viable habitats in all those places where we've destroyed them. This is starting to happen. It really is starting to happen, and when it does, it'll be the first time in modern history that we humans have coexisted with the natural world. Our third misstep was to leave Earth stewardship to just a few specialists, a few conservation biologists, a few ecologists. For some reason, we did not see it as an inherent responsibility for every single person on the planet. But I don't know why, since every single person on the planet depends entirely on the quality of their local ecosystems. So why wouldn't everybody share the responsibility of taking care of those ecosystems? Stan Resworth, a Cherokee elder once said, the Western settler mindset was, I have rights. The mindset of indigenous people is, I have obligations. You're not born with those mindsets, you're taught them. We're very good at teaching this one. We have been terribly teaching our kids and our peers that we all have obligations to good Earth stewardship. That does not mean you have to save biodiversity for a living, but you can. You really must save it where you live. And if you do, it empowers you. You know, more and more people recognize every day that the Earth has some serious issues, but they all say, what can one person do? Well, one person can shrink the lawn. One person can modify their lights. One person can fire mosquito Joe. One person can use keystone plants. One person can put in a pollinator garden. One person can totally revitalize the ecosystem on their property and then enhance their local ecosystem instead of continuing to degrade it. And it shrinks the problem down to something that's manageable for each one of us. Don't worry about the entire planet's problems. Just worry about the piece of the planet that you can influence. If you own property, it's obvious. That's where you start. If you don't own property, help somebody who does. Help a land conservancy. Help a park or preserve. They're all underfunded. They're all understaffed. They will love you as a volunteer. So as a property owner or a volunteer, each one of us has the responsibility and we certainly have the opportunity to change dead landscapes like this. Whether or not we decide to do so to determine nature's fate and then ultimately our own. I think I've convinced my grandchildren that you are nature's best hope. I hope I've convinced you as well. Thanks very much. Well, thank you. I think that's the loudest clapping I've ever had. I answer questions. I mean, how much time do we have? Forever. Alright. I will sign that, but I'm going to answer questions first. Yes. Talk about ticks. Ticks. Okay, ticks. When I grew up, you're talking about deer ticks, you're talking about Lyme disease and when I grew up, there wasn't Lyme disease and there were no deer ticks. Of course, there were, but they were so few in number that we didn't know what they were. Nobody ever got a tick bite and there was no Lyme disease in human populations. Well, now we have it. Why? Because we've got overabundance of deer. We've got overabundance of deer from coast to coast. And estimates vary, but the deer populations are over the carrying capacity anywhere from three to ten times. Ten times more deer than the area you can support. There's a lot of reasons to control our deer. Wrecking the understory is one of them. You know, ground nesting birds. There's no recruitment into our forest, but they also support huge populations of deer ticks. They're one of the links. So some people say we've got to kill all the ticks, we've got to kill all the white-footed mice. What we really have to do is reduce the number of deer. So, you know, I understand I'm not minimizing the problem. I've had Lyme disease five times, so I do get it. But putting a band-aid on the wrong end of the problem is not going to solve it. If we don't reduce the deer populations, which we have to do for other reasons, we're going to actually control the ticks. What do you do in the meantime? Notice I say reduce the lawn. I don't say get rid of it. Lawn can be a cue for care. So the lawn you keep is going to be mowed, it's going to be manicured, and it shows your neighbors and your Civic Association, your HOA, that you know what the rules are and you're playing, you just have more plants in your yard. So you're going to have less lawn that is lining your flower beds, lining your driveway and your sidewalk. And that is where you walk, particularly in May and June when the ticks that you get have a much higher percentage or chance of being actually infected. You can get a tick bite any day of the year, but infectivity is highest right now. And by the way, I'm not telling you this, but if you get a bite by a deer tick, you pull it off and put Neosporin on the bite. A doctor at Penn University of Pennsylvania working on Lyme disease told me that a long time ago and it works. I have not gotten Lyme disease since then. We get ticks all the time. I had one two days ago. Pull it off, little Neosporin on that because it takes hours for the Borrelia to transfer from the tick into your capillary system and the Neosporin apparently kills the Borrelia. I've heard people poo-poo that but there's no cost to it. It's easy and I think it works. But you stick, you know, if you go out and lay down in the woods if you expose yourself to the ticks you probably will get ticks on you then you have to be really vigilant. I said, what spouses are for? They check you. I don't know. I don't have this solution to that but that's the best thing. Yes. Oh boy. Glyphosate. That's a book. Yes. I do have a lot to say about that. The biggest row that glyphosate, it's not glyphosate. It is round up ready corn and soybeans that allows the growers to spray glyphosate over their crops and then they get spray happy and they spray right up to the road. So wherever we have corn and soybeans now and wheat in some places, all the weeds on the side of the agriculture are dead and they replace it with lawn which they have to mow. So that is what has called the decline of monarchs. The biggest monarch population ever recorded was 1976. Well after we had agriculture in the Midwest, they were coexisting very nicely but we got rid of all the milkweeds and esters and golden rice on the side of the road which is what produces those large monarch populations and replaced it with lawn. So that's the biggest indirect impact of glyphosate. If you wanted to control your invasive plants and then replace them with natives, it's not hurting insects, it's helping them. But I don't like to spray glyphosate because you always hit non-targets. I'd rather cut and paint stumps which use this very little product. You know, herbicides are an effective tool in our conservation toolbox if we use them correctly. Just like chemotherapy is. You need something nasty to kill those tumors in your body and if you don't you have issues. Is chemotherapy toxic? Yes, it is, but you've got to use it correctly. Okay, yes. Okay, you're talking about cultivars? You're creating a cultivar out of natives. Well cultivar is just a genetic variant of a particular plant species, whether it's native or not. And it enhances a particular trait. You know, plant breeders for the most part are breeding for aesthetics. They want to make the flower larger. They want to take a green leaf and make it purple or red. Sometimes they want to take a tall plant, make it short. There's a lot of reasons that cultivars are created. Many cultivars, which are actually called variants I believe or varieties, are natural genotypes that are found in nature. They just bring them in and they put a name on them. There's no reason to suspect that they are supporting fewer insects. But we did a study looking at six cultivar traits in woody plants in a common garden experiment to see what happens when you compare it with the straight species. And the only trait that actually reduced insect use was taking a green leaf and making it red or purple. Because that loads the leaf with anthocyanins, which are feeding deterrents. Now we didn't look at flowers in herbaceous plants. And if you look at plants or shape or color or UV spectrum or pollen or nectar nutrition it's bound to affect specialist bees more often than not. So Annie White at the University of Vermont has done studies on that. You can get her to talk to you. She looks strictly at flowers and that's what she found. More often than not it messes up the relationship between specialist bees and the plants. But there is a genotype, a cultivar of Phlox paniculata they call it Jenna. They were found in nature in Georgia. It has twice the flowers that the straight species has. And guess what? It supports twice the number of pollinators. So it's not a sure thing. And my answer to your question always is, it depends on what the genetic variant is. What was actually changed to create the cultivar? Thank you very much. Thank you.