In the face of climate change, these small changes can support the recovery of declining populations of birds, insects, and other pollinators.
If you were born before 1990, you probably wistfully recall mass murmurations of migratory birds in the fall (swallows and house martins in the UK, purple martins and barn swallows in the US), and drives down country backroads where your headlights would illuminate vast swarms of moths and other nocturnal insects that would end up splattered on your windshield.
Fireflies used to be so abundant that they are part of our folklore and literature, and older adults have warm memories of collecting jars of fireflies as children. The drop in numbers is so staggering, with a landmark German study recording a 75 percent decline in flying insect biomass over just 27 years, that some have dubbed it an “insect apocalypse,” and North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds, or 29 percent of its total bird population, since 1970.
The problem is that if you grew up after this, you have no memory of how abundant nature once was. This is dubbed the shifting baseline effect, where today’s reality becomes the new normal against which future generations compare. Everywhere we look, this is true. Early accounts of European immigrants to North America describe rivers teeming with fish and coastal waters so abundant that they created whole industries and communities that prospered from them. Today, this is no longer the case.
There is a sense of powerlessness in this, a feeling many ascribe to the reality of climate change as they see summer temperatures soar and wildfires become ever larger and more frequent. While there is little one person can do in the face of Big Oil and the agro-industrial complex, there are concrete, small changes you can make and see a difference relatively quickly.
Wilding, or rewilding, is one of them, and you don’t need to be a major landowner to facilitate it. You only need to look to your own backyard. Nature is incredibly resilient and will, given the chance, revert to previous equilibria. Insect generations are counted in weeks to months, and bird life in years.
A few years of swapping out invasive foreign species of plants and flowers for native ones, replacing empty lawns with wildflowers, and the insects return. A little later, birdlife returns, followed by invertebrates, then larger birds and small mammals. The extraordinary success of rewilding at Knepp, just 16 miles from Europe’s ninth busiest airport at Gatwick, and of The Biggest Little Farm (Moorpark, California) has demonstrated this dramatically. But all over the country, families planting wildflowers are seeing it for themselves.
My own front yard is one small example of that. I moved to New Jersey about four years ago and took the opportunity, on purchasing a house, to reassess the front, rear, and side yards. It’s a modest property that doesn’t sit on very much land.
Out front, there was a non-native hydrangea that had grown into a mini-tree, attracting little more than carpenter bees. There were also two pieces of green lawn, perhaps eight feet by two feet, separated by the path to the sidewalk.
Out back, the yard had been neglected and overgrown with invasive weeds, including Japanese knotweed, and a burning bush whose vines had begun climbing and strangling the maple. Sadly, although well established, the maple wasn’t native either. It was a Norway maple. The rest was completely overgrown.
The first task was to cut everything back, pull up all the weeds, and assess what I had. The answer was: very little. There was bamboo, which I had to smother. I avoided using Roundup or other pesticides to kill the invasive weeds. The Japanese knotweed was mostly at the front, on the left-hand side, a sort of side yard connecting my rear yard to the street and overlapping with a neighbor’s property. The knotweed was all coming from his even more neglected yard. I ripped it all up, then smothered the soil with thick layers of cardboard, covered with about two inches of mulch to encourage die-off.
It worked spectacularly well. Over the next couple of years, the amount of knotweed that pushed through decreased visibly and allowed me to start planting. The goal was to turn this tiny little bit of urban New Jersey into a native haven.
That meant taking down the hydrangea, which was stunning in the summer, although it required a great deal of pruning because it kept spilling over the path. My wife loved it, but it was non-native and was doing very little for native pollinators. That was probably the most difficult decision. Instead, I replaced it with a sweet bay magnolia, one of the handful of magnolia species native to New Jersey.
On the left-hand side at the front, I planted a pollinator garden with coreopsis, beardtongue foxglove, butterfly weed, wild bergamot, purple cornflowers and garden phlox. Within the first summer after planting, it was gloriously ablaze with color and now attracts a wide variety of native bees, including three species of bumblebee (common eastern, two-spotted and brown-belted) and fritillaries.
In addition, eradicating the non-native hydrangea seemed to significantly reduce the number of carpenter bees feasting on my wooden front porch, which, while disappointing for the carpenter bees, has created an opportunity for the other native bees to thrive.
After removing the knotweed, milkweed naturally emerged, which I left alone. Every subsequent summer, more milkweed has appeared. Last year, for the first time, I saw monarch butterflies, two of them, perhaps more at different points during the summer, much to my delight.
The back took much more work, particularly the burning bush, which I had to chop, pull, rip out, and dig up. Rather than wrestle with the invasive roots, I applied a spot treatment of pesticide to the freshly cut surfaces, then blocked the light with a tarp and buried everything in tons of mulch. In March, we began planting natives in that area. Already there has been an increase in bird life and insect life in the backyard as a result of the earliest plantings, which included, among other things, wild poppies, chokeberry, blueberry, sweet pepperbush, native hydrangeas, and more.
So far I am alone in the neighborhood in doing this. Another house about a ten-minute walk away has a pollinator garden. Everyone else has non-native lawns, which they have to water excessively during heat and drought, while employing small armies of landscapers to keep them tidy, and spray with pesticides. They are largely bereft of life, little more than green deserts, with even the solitary dandelion attacked with vigor rather than being allowed to be a source of nectar and sustenance.
The blaze of color at the front of my house has now become such a delight that my wife has forgiven me for removing the hydrangea she loved. The magnolia is still some way from being substantial enough to produce the blooms you would expect, but I’m looking forward to that. I also removed a Japanese barberry, another non-native species that was smothering a hydrangea at the front. This year, for the first time, that hydrangea flowered spectacularly.
It just goes to show what you can achieve, even in a small front and backyard.
I don’t think the importance of this should be underestimated. Hudson County, where I live, just nine miles from Manhattan and nine miles from Jersey City and Hoboken, is one of the most nature-deprived parts of the state, with the exception of the Meadowlands wetlands.
Nevertheless, within a twenty-mile drive of where I live, there are 57 nature reserves, varying in size from two or three acres to 40 or 60 acres. Some of these, like Tenafly Nature Center, are important because they act as islands for wildlife, enabling species to link up with larger protected areas such as the Great Swamp, the Meadowlands, and the extensive county and state parks across northern New Jersey.
These small nature reserves act as islands, and backyards can serve as important corridors for wildlife moving between places like the Meadowlands and inland habitats, especially if more people become aware of the small changes needed to make this possible, and of the joy that comes from doing it.
If you think about how much of America is somebody’s yard, it’s probably comparable in size to the entire National Park System, roughly 40 to 46 million acres of lawn against about 52 million acres of national parkland.
If managed correctly, these spaces can go a long way toward helping arrest the precipitous declines in bird life, insect life, and pollinators that we are seeing across the world.
To do so we need to break away from the idea that an aesthetically pleasing landscape is a lawn. We need to abandon the notion that we should recreate what was essentially an English country gentleman’s landscaping with perfectly manicured lawns and instead embrace the fact that nature is messy.
Removing invasive species and allowing natives to return is one of the biggest steps we can take, and it is something every individual and every family can do. When we feel powerless in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges, these small changes are something we can do, and they can have very real effects. The bees can come back, so can the birds. We just have to act.
Featured Image from the author.
Dr. Jason Abbott is a Professor of Political Science at Montclair State University, where his research focuses on comparative politics, international relations, and political economy. He has written on U.S. foreign policy, military strategy, and energy security for Fair Observer and Just Security, and publishes regular geopolitical analysis at his Substack newsletter, The Balance of Power . He previously held an endowed chair at the University of Louisville and has appeared as a political analyst on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and CNN. He installed a 12-kilowatt solar system on his former home in Louisville, Kentucky in 2021.
BECOME A PATRON
For $5/mo or $51/year, dive deeper with 50 exclusive films hand-picked to empower your activism.
Subscribe here.