indigenera

Ineffectual environmental practices

    Currently, the policies and proceedings of government agencies and environmental organizations collectively have failed to situate preservation of the environment at the very center of American life.  At the local level, pieces of land, and too few of them, are set aside as reserves, but almost always with an economic benefit in view for the land’s owner–—whether that benefit is a lowered tax assessment or stumpage or a wilderness building lot carved out of the parcel, thus fragmenting the site supposedly being protected from fragmentation.  And the focus is always on individuals, not on a community.  No adequate guidance exists for crossing property boundaries and piecing together small units of land into a larger, continuous and restored landscape of fields, woods, wetlands, and streams with no economic gain being sought.  Yet it is just that—the voluntary, unselfish reconstruction of entire landscape systems—that must be done if native plants and animals are to survive for future generations.  Some additional reserves that contain "hotspots" of diverse structure and life-forms will continue to be needed, but the larger landscape, called the matrix, must be entirely returned to functioning as biodiverse habitat with its "patches" connected by wildland corridors.

Biodiversity preservation by owners of small parcels

    Despite the failure of leadership from government and most environmental organizations, landowners can act on their own to preserve local biodiversity by developing expertise in the  functioning of their land through study of wild lands in their region, by questioning what their land’s potential is, and by finding answers in experimentation that is supported by accessible scientific research.  indigenera is available to assist at every stage of this discovery process. 

The fraud of "green" America

    Loving the landscape, while it’s a start and probably necessary, is not enough.  Much that is wrongheaded or wasteful or self-serving currently passes itself off as “green” or “sustainable” or as "backyard biodiversity" conservation.  To cite just two of the popular but flawed sources that are responsible for American misunderstanding of biodiversity conservation, I consider Sara Stein’s (Noah's Garden) expensive alterations of her property (and that of her well-to-do husband’s) and also the backyard gardening of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) as distracting exercises in making people feel good while leaving unchanged their consumerism and essentially doing nothing effective over the long-term for native species across the larger landscape--the time line and the scale at which biodiversity conservation is needed.  The goal of indigenera, on the other hand,  is to guide landscape managers in ways to set lands back on  track, not to maintain land parcels as gardens needing custodial care.  Interventions must connect smaller parcels across property lines and ultimately  release these enlarged blocks, or "patches,"  of related ecological systems to their natural trajectories.  indigenera intends to help landowners anticipate the pathways that will come and not to interfere with these beyond assisting the land in attaining them. 

Reading the landscape

    Amid the complexity of reading the landscape, landowners can look at four aspects of the environment:  ecosystem, structure, succession, and disturbance.

• An ecosystem is a group of interrelated life forms; where one species is, the others are likely to be or could be.

• Structure is any set of conditions that provides habitat for particular life forms.

• Succession is the change in kinds and numbers of living things that occurs on a site over time—usually advancing the vegetation from simpler generalist forms of life to those requiring more specialized conditions.

• Disturbance is a disruption, whether caused by nature like fire or by humans like clear cutting, that brings to an end the trajectory a site is on and sets it back to an earlier or different or mixed phase of succession.

    A fifth focusing concept is scale.  Ecosystems, for example, can be at a large scale, as would be the case of a forest that extends for many acres or square miles, while nested within the forest will be numerous smaller ecosystems, such as oaks on drier elevations and hemlocks in wetter soils, or smaller still, a patch of skunk cabbage and marsh marigolds along a stream that flows through the forest. 

Looking--really looking--at nature

The challenge for most of us will be to see nature as it is rather than as how we wish it to be.  That is the problem with efforts like those of Stein and the NWF; they encourage us to indulge our human sense of beauty, symmetry, and neatness--when setting aside such anthropocentric biases is what is most needed.  The concepts of ecosystem and disturbance, for example, provide ways of looking at and understanding nature that replace the gardener's preoccupation with form, color, texture, and rarity.

Nature talk

  Speaking nature's language will allow us to understand the unique structures that nature presents.  Problems in the environment don't lend themselves to simple solutions because the reality that is out there consists of systems nested in systems and processes linked to other processes. Science, as inadequate as it sometimes is,  provides the best language we can speak with nature.