Tech Quiz

• Tallamy, 2020: '"When you look out your window, nothing moves. This does not bother you because you grew up with a yard in which nothing moved; you think a yard with little to no animal life is normal – after all, animals belong in nature, and nature is someplace else. What's more, the local civic or homeowner association has passed rules suggesting that building landscapes that do not support wildlife is good land stewardship."'
• There has been a growing awareness in the west about the importance of pollinators, but surveying the landscapes of our cities and towns, it's apparent that this hasn't translated into adequate action
• We are living through the 6th mass extinction, with prominent biologists arguing that we need to conserve 50% of the Earth in connected protected areas
• Habitat fragmentation is bad, but we still tend to ignore lawns, the spaces right outside our front doors, as sites that contribute greatly to it
• Turning these aesthetically pleasing but ecologically barren wastelands into generative, connected landscapes and wildlife corridors could be key to preserving what we have left and reviving some of what we've lost
• Turfgrass has replaced diverse native plant communities with tens of millions of acres in the U.S. alone, with that acreage ballooning each year
• In many states, turfgrass takes up an area that more than doubles the area allocated to state and national parks, state forests and wildlife management areas
• On individual lots, it's common for 90% of the available landscape to be dedicated to lawn
• In the U.S., lawn irrigation consumes on average more than 8 billion gallons of water daily, which accounts for 30% of all water used during the summer in the east, and up to 60% in the west
• This is more water than is replaced by rainfall in most areas, making this entirely unsustainable
• 40% of the chemicals used in the lawn care industry in the U.S. are banned in other countries because they are carcinogens
• There are dozens of studies documenting the connection between lawn pesticides and lymphoma
• Rachel Carson's famous Silent Spring, which is credited for inspiring the western environmental movement, warned us of the pervasive impacts of these chemicals way back in 1962
• Homeowners put roughly the same amount of fertilizer on their lawns as is used in big agriculture, and 40-60% of fertilizer applied to lawns ends up in surface and groundwater, where it kills aquatic organisms and contaminates drinking water
• According to the EPA, Americans spend more than 3 billion collective hours per year maintaining their lawns and feeding the massive and mega-profitable lawn economy, pulverizing habitat and toxifying our surroundings
• Lawn People


  People who dutifully push heavy gas guzzling mowers in the hot sun and spray carcinogens all over where their kids play
• Lawns


  • Originated in the 1500s in Europe as aesthetic, managed gardens, distinct from commonly-managed land which tended to consist of meadows for livestock grazing or forests for foraging
  • Grew in popularity among British aristocracy throughout the enclosure of the commons, where peasants were forcefully kicked off of their lands during the transition from feudalism to capitalism
  • Tied to the colonization of Turtle Island, with wealthy North American settlers using it to claim land and flaunt wealth
  • Vast areas of forest and native grasslands were razed for settler monocultural agriculture and gardens
  • The turf grass they brought over is actually highly invasive and has little in common with native perennial grasses
• Well-kept lawns


  • Flaunted wealth, as the owner was so wealthy that they could waste vast acreage on frivolous turf rather than use it to grow crops to sustain themselves and their family
  • Also boasted wealth and whiteness because slave labour and/or large amounts of sheep were required to keep the lawn trimmed before the widespread use of the lawn mower
• Lawns


  • Remain a symbol of class status
  • Developed in lock-step with the growth of the middle-classes and the subsequent global expansion of consumer capitalism
  • Became tied with property values for the urban middle class who wanted to escape what they viewed as polluted cities and have less diverse neighbourhoods
  • As the vast and coercive lawn care economy reached an increasing number of homeowners through commercials and advertisements, the lawn soon came to embody a moral character
• "Good" lawns contain dense, soft grasses with no weeds, maintain a rich and vibrant colour, and are neat and consistent - grass should be manicured and homogenous. These characteristics are associated with wealth, education and implicit moral worth; good neighbours have good lawns
• Domestic lawns are very public private spaces, and conformity of this relationship is the norm
• There are countless stories of people being harassed by their neighbours for "lowering the neighbourhood's property values" should they attempt to create generative native gardens
• In one noteworthy case in Ohio, a woman's neighbours trespassed on her property to mow her front and back lawn and pull up the saplings there after she attempted to restore the forest in her backyard. Her BACK yard, people. They also took her to civil court for lowering property values, and demanded the court enforce the 6-inch maximum lawn height mandated by municipal law
• An increasing number of homeowners are carpeting their yards with artificial turf, as plastic grass is what they need to purchase to signal their responsibility to their neighbours
• Lobby groups backed by the lawn-care and chemical industries have formed to counter the claims of antichemical groups mounting campaigns for pesticide restrictions or regulation
• Habitat fragmentation


  • Makes large species' populations smaller and isolated from one another, making them more vulnerable to local extinction
  • Species with large ranges will disappear from small fragmented patches of habitat immediately and others often eventually disappear as their population sizes are no longer large enough to weather environmental or population fluctuations
  • Migrating species, like the monarch, need access to generative landscapes over vast distances
• The steady reduction in the native plants that monarchs depend on for survival – milkweeds, asters, and goldenrods – have reduced their numbers by 96% since the 1970s
• Given that the majority of land in the lower 48 states and along the border of Canada and the U.S. is privately owned, and dominated by turfgrass, we're facing an uphill battle to recultivate native plant communities and regenerate
• Migrating species, like the monarch


  • Need access to generative landscapes over vast distances
  • The steady reduction in the native plants they depend on for survival – milkweeds, asters, and goldenrods – have reduced their numbers by 96% since the 1970s
  • The overwintering population in 2013 was estimated at just 3.6% of the population in 1976
• The majority of land in the lower 48 states and along the border of Canada and the U.S. is privately owned, and dominated by turfgrass
• It'll depend on the good graces of private property owners to change their ways. More likely, it will depend on our ability to organize to change things
• Plants


  • Allow animals to ingest the energy shining down on us from the sun
  • They store this energy through photosynthesis in simple sugars and carbohydrates, and this serves as the basis for every terrestrial and most aquatic food webs on Earth
• Animals


  Can access this energy only if they can eat plants or eat something that can eat plants
• Insects


  • Are the best at transferring energy from plants to other animals
  • Most insects are very picky eaters
  • 90% of insect herbivores are restricted to eating one or just a few plant lineages that they co-evolved with over eons
• Plant defenses


  Plants defend themselves against predators by making gross-tasting chemicals, including cyanide and tannins, and storing them in tissues like leaves
• Insect specialists


  Have adapted to circumvent plant defenses, but otherwise can't subsist on other plants in the ecosystem
• Caterpillars


  • Are some of the most important insect herbivores, not only because many become pollinators, but because they are the most vital food source for birds
• A 2018 study comparing ecosystem sites with mostly native plants versus introduced and invasive plants found that the sites dominated by nonnative plants contained 68 fewer caterpillar species, 91 percent fewer caterpillars, and 96 percent less caterpillar biomass
• Caterpillars are the mainstay of most bird diets in North America and are vital to their reproduction
• A typical nestling eats a full meal 30-40 times per day. Field researchers have counted several species bringing food to the nest over 800 times per day for days in a row. Sapsuckers feed their nestlings 4,260 times, downy woodpeckers 4,095 times, and hairy woodpeckers 2,325 times. Over the course of their 16-day nesting period, one pair of chickadee parents delivered 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars!