SARAH F. JAYNE
NATURE'S ACTION GUIDE
How to Support Biodiversity and Your Local Ecosystem
FOREWORD BY DOUGLAS W. TALLAMY
NATURE'S ACTION GUIDE
Foreword by Douglas W. Tallamy
Every once in a while, a book comes along that meets an important need most people don’t know they have. Sarah Jayne’s Nature’s Action Guide is such a book. Sarah could have called her book Conservation for Dummies, not that she wrote it for true dummies, but because she has identified a subject everyone needs to know but almost no one was ever taught: how to share our spaces with the natural world. I will use my own experience with conservation as an example.
When my wife Cindy and I bought a 10 acre section of a defunct farm in Oxford, Pennsylvania, our plan was to restore the eastern deciduous forest that had thrived there some 300 years earlier. We were excited about this plan for several reasons, but one was the size of the property: this was 10 times more land than we had owned before and a real chance to provide a home for many of the Piedmont plants and animals that we love. It was a good idea, but we had never restored land before and we knew little about how to proceed. We did know that nature was on the ropes in many places, but we didn’t fully understand the depth of the earth’s biodiversity crisis. We didn’t know, for example, that 45% of the earth’s insects were already gone, that North America had lost 3 billion breeding birds in recent decades—1/3 of its total bird population—or that the planet had entered the sixth great extinction event in its history. We might have despaired had we known that the UN would soon predict that 1 million species—that’s one million kinds of our fellow earthlings—would be forced to extinction in the next 20 years. We didn’t know that light pollution was one of the major causes of insect decline, and we didn’t know the extent to which neonicotinoid insecticides and mosquito fogging were impacting non-target species. Even though I was an entomologist by profession and had worked as one at the University of Delaware for 20 years, I did not fully appreciate the extent to which insects were essential components of terrestrial ecosystems or that moths and their caterpillars were the bread and butter of local food webs. We did not know that to reach a viable relationship with the natural world that supported us, our property would have to sustain a complex food web and a diverse community of native pollinators. It also would need to manage the watershed in which it lay and to remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as possible. We didn’t know how extensive invasive plants and overabundant white-tailed deer were, or how those two problems intersected synergistically to degrade habitats across the country. We knew that native plants supported essential insect populations better than non-natives, but we didn’t know how much better, or how extensively non-natives were used in residential landscapes. We also didn’t know that just 14 percent of North American native plant species supported the food web orders of magnitude better than the rest of the native species and so were must-use choices for our restoration. There was so much we didn’t know, but most of all we didn’t know how to address these issues on land that had recently been mowed for hay.
As Donald Rumsfeld once said, these were unknown unknowns. Our ignorance protected us from being discouraged, so we proceeded happily, learning by trial and error, with a heavy emphasis on error. We eventually did learn how to control invasive plants, how to minimize damage from hungry deer, and how to use security lights without killing nocturnal insects. We discovered that oak trees supported more caterpillars and thus more bird food than any other plants in our ecosystem. We learned that every state had a native plant society that could help us find sources of natives, and we met talented landscape designers who could deploy native plants without running afoul of local landscaping ordinances. We have now been working on our home restoration for 23 years, and, despite our initial ignorance and missteps, we have witnessed extraordinary success. Fortunately, nature is inherently resilient, much more so than we ever thought it would be, and our early optimism has been rewarded many times over.
But how much more success could we have enjoyed, and how much easier and faster could we have reached our goals, if we had had Sarah’s ‘how to‘ book to guide us.
Once Cindy and I learned that nature could be restored successfully on private property, I was eager to spread this message to other people. Surely once they understood the problems, there would be many people who would be eager to create landscapes that enable rather than destroy the life around them. And so I shared my research and the successes we have experienced on our property in Bringing Nature Home, The Nature of Oaks, and especially in Nature’s Best Hope. In these books I explain why we have to transition from an adversarial relationship with nature to a collaborative one, and what each of us can do to make this transition. I spent little time, however, explaining exactly how to do the things I recommended. How do you reduce the area occupied by your lawn; how do you plant a tree; how can you replace your outdoor lights with insect-friendly bulbs; how can you control mosquitoes with benign biological control rather than destructive adult fogging; how do you fight invasive plants and deer overabundance; how do you plant for specialist bees and create beds beneath your trees that will enable caterpillars to complete their development? How, how, how! What was needed was a book specifically designed to guide homeowners toward meeting all of the ecological goals I have outlined over the years. Thanks to Sarah Jayne, you are holding such a book in your hands.
Sarah wrote Nature’s Action Guide as a companion to my book Nature’s Best Hope. My last chapter suggested 10 things homeowners could/should do to help share their property with nature. After reading my book, Sarah set about trying to enact each of these suggestions in her own yard but quickly realized that, even as an experienced gardener, she didn’t know enough to be successful. And if she didn’t know enough, many other budding conservationists were likely to struggle as well. Sarah’s solution was to write Nature’s Action Guide, a step by step, easy to use manual that explains how each of us, regardless of our background or gardening experience, can accomplish all of the goals I propose in Nature’s Best Hope, as well as several I only hinted at!
Restoration biology is a relatively young scientific discipline a few decades old. Practicing restoration in human-dominated landscapes, in comparison, is in its infancy and we are still learning what works and what doesn’t work. One of its many distinguishing features is that Nature’s Action Guide is current, explaining state-of-the-art conservation in suburbia with the most up-to-date best-practices available. Even a half-hearted attempt to follow Sarah’s action items is guaranteed to improve the biodiversity potential of your landscape and thus the productivity of your local ecosystem. For this, we all owe Sarah Jayne our heartfelt thanks and gratitude - because, whether we appreciate it or not, we all depend on those same ecosystems.
~ Douglas W. Tallamy