Nature Everywhere

We seem to assume that land conservation ought to be mostly the job of government because, the assumption goes, only government has the funding and logistical power to support conservation on a large scale.

But, as conservation writers are increasingly pointing out, even an entity as large as government will never be capable of conserving enough environmentally significant lands to counteract the mass extinction of species and degradation of ecosystems caused by human activity.  Why not?  Because there just aren’t enough public spaces on that scale to do the job by themselves.

So landowners ought to think about how they can complement larger-scale public conservation by smaller-scale private conservation, on their own property.

A movement to support conservation of this kind is already underway.  It has several approaches.  The nature everywhere approach recommends taking overlooked areas of settled landscapes, from parking strips to abandoned agricultural spaces, and rewilding them.  The homegrown national park approach recommends re-nativizing residential properties, turning them into pollinator-friendly, wildlife-supportive mini-ecosystems.  The idea behind both approaches is that, if enough small-property owners participate in this movement, the total area thereby conserved might one day rival that of large-scale preserves, or at least add significantly to the overall amount of conserved land.

This movement might help you feel good about conservation work around your place.  Small-scale conservation can sometimes feel a bit . . . small.  It can all get a little lonely.  Feeling part of a larger enterprise might help curb the downsides of smallness.

A more important benefit of this movement:  It reminds us of the value of wildness right where we live.  Preferring our wildness “out there” in set-aside lands and at what feels to some like a safe distance, can prevent regular, casual encounters with that wildness.  Making some wildness at home guarantees encounters that spark joy and, in the process, lessen some people’s (especially children’s) fear of nature, a growing phenomenon known as biophobia.

Granted, your property doesn’t contain anything as spectacular as a mountain range or wild desert river, so you may feel that the little national park you’ve created on it is a bit underwhelming.  As cultural historians point out, we Americans have been conditioned to want our wildness grand and picturesque.

But maybe this cultural conditioning is working against us, lazying our powers of observation and our curiosity.  Is a mountain storm really more dramatic than what’s going on in the leaf litter of your re-nativized backyard?  Or is the difference between the two a matter of scale, the storm’s size grabbing our attention because it’s easy to see and feel?  Do we always need big effects just to jolt us into apprehension, and appreciation?

Would our curiosity be strengthened (always a good thing) if we encountered out our familiar back door the true strangeness, relative to human life, of plants’ and animals’ ways of being?