Motivation for Planting Natives

By the time you’re reading this, the Land Trust’s Tree Sale ordering has wrapped up, and folks will be looking forward to picking up their native-plant orders on February 3rd.

So now comes the planting of those natives—or maybe not.  It can be hard to get stems in the ground during February, with its cold temps and steady rain.  Such an irony.  Some of the best conditions for planting bare-root natives happen when our winter lethargy is peaking.

Where to find the motivation to plant?  Maybe going deep might help.  Warning:  philosophy-talk ahead!

Here goes.  Assume that people operate from a worldview, a set of axioms (unquestioned principles) about how the world “is” and how it works.

Now let’s examine two axioms in the general American worldview—specifically, the two pertaining to physical land.

The first axiom holds that land is naturally amenable to private-property ownership and rights, and that the best way to conserve the value of that land is through private ownership.  To feel how deep this axiom lies in the American value-set, consider the popular symbol of frontier-folk claiming a homestead and, through hard work, “proving up” their land’s value—and, in the process, ennobling themselves and the nation.

A second, and quite different, land-related axiom in the American worldview holds that the land should be considered as a whole and valued as everybody’s common inheritance.  In this view, the land is a sacred birthright:  a beautiful, varied, but continuous landscape, celebrated in popular song as stretching bountifully between shining seas and made for you and me, together.

Some things trouble these two axioms. For example, you may feel private property is an artificial, not a “natural” construct and that a land’s “value” can be computed along many, and not just monetary, lines.  You may also feel that some private-ownership patterns don’t map well onto ecosystems, potentially compromising environmental and human health.

But then there’s also the tragedy of the commons—the oft-cited idea that lands owned by the public, such as grazing allotments or recreation areas, are often degraded precisely because they aren’t privately held. In this view, no one in particular suffers loss from the degradation, so few care when it happens.  The “sacred birthright” of land belonging to all Americans can easily devolve into orphan spaces that nobody stewards.

So we might say Americans’ most cherished beliefs about land are complicated at their very core.  The complexity can cause real problems personally, culturally, and environmentally.

You can straighten out some of the complexity by—you guessed it!—planting natives.  By restoring native plants to your property, you’re re-connecting it to the fuller landscape of the Island, supporting that one-big-beautiful-land idea cherished in the American worldview.  But, in doing so, you also can demonstrate the virtues of private land-ownership, through caring for your property and improving its many values—the other great land axiom residing in our deepest view of the world.