by Leonard Green
Looking out the window while preparing breakfast, these days, I’m likely to see ruby throated hummingbirds visiting our deeply scarlet bee balm, blue vervain, and white spired Culver’s root. In spring, migrating hummingbirds arrived just about the time the bell shaped red and yellow columbine flowers opened.
Pictured Above: Detail from Albrecht Dürer’s “The Great Piece of Turf.”
The synchronized flowering and arrival are not coincidental. Columbine has grown in our region for millennia. It and our only native hummingbird have woven themselves into the rhythms of shared habitat, shared environment, a shared natural economy: what we call an ecosystem.
A Fabric of Stitched Connections
Every morning I look out the kitchen window, eager to witness these rites of place and time. When will the bees come, the swallowtails and monarchs, the admirals and painted ladies? Each is stitched into a fabric of connections, dependent upon familiar flora for food and reproduction. If we are to have butterflies, we need larval caterpillars, most of which require specialized host plants to complete their lifecycles. Mostly, these hosts are native plants that our regional birds, butterflies, and bees have evolved with over great periods of time.
These connections and interdependencies show up throughout living ecosystems. Nothing is isolated. Biological soil communities, for example, are the foundations of terrestrial food chains. They also sequester massive quantities of carbon, build soil aggregates, filter our water, and limit stormwater runoff. These same soil communities have evolved complex relationships with regionally native plants, for the most part engaging in mutually dependent resource trading systems.
About 90 percent of terrestrial plants depend upon underground fungal relationships. It is a system so large that its microscopic networks, stretched end to end, would reach 730 million times the distance from Earth to the sun. And, like most of Earth’s ecosystems, the soil biome is under deep threat from pesticides, fungicides, habitat degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.
While my slow-cooked oats sit on the stove, I walk into the yard, looking and searching. I never know what will be new. We have been “rewilding” our small lot for over a decade now, letting nature take back what we can give. No more pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, or synthetic fertilizers. We plant things that have evolved in the region.
The Fire Next Time
Last week I was reluctant to go outside. Earth is burning. Some days you can smell it. The sky is full of orange warning.
The National Academy of Sciences recently released a paper adding even more evidence to the connections between climate change and catastrophic fires, floods, heat domes, and droughts. We are the problem. It’s simple physics; the more carbon we pump out of the earth into the atmosphere, the hotter our planet becomes. To confront this, we must see ourselves as part of the picture, part of the problem and solution.
The Big Picture
In the spring of 1503, Albrecht Dürer painted “The Great Piece of Turf.” It’s a small painting that looks closely at a piece of grassy turf. Botanists have named all the very common, very ordinary European species depicted. I often think of this painting when I walk our yard in spring, searching for what rises and returns from winter’s burial.
The painting is small but also monumental. Dürer gives grasses and wildflowers the same attention that other painters might have given a mythological or historic subject. The painting is about looking and seeing, looking closely and discovering a world overlooked.
This spring, when I found teaberry (Gaultheria procumbens) emerging from leaf litter in our yard, it was a moment of joy. If it survives, it will flower midsummer, its small white florescence becoming a single, bright red berry by autumn. Unplanted, it has volunteered in our woodland, a sign of a recovering soil system. Like other members of the heath family, it depends upon Ericoid fungi, which in turn depend upon leaf litter and carbon rich acidic soil.
What Recovery Looks Like
If we are to heal the ailing planet, I think we will have to change the way we see things. Nature is not a commodity. It is where we live. What happens when we stop managing nature with resource intensive fertilizers and biocides? What does recovery look like? And what do we see when we look at “overly managed” properties?
When everything is designed to be an unchanging image, mowed and pruned to perfection, do we see anything more than cultural markers signifying property value?
Dürer gave a simple patch of European turf his focused attention, transforming it into something rich and beautiful, something fully seen, looked at and redeemed by attention. It would be good for us all if we reimagined our landscaping ideals and began to actually look closely at what happens when Earth begins to heal. It may be the first step in our own recovery.
Leonard Green grew up on Long Island, spending his summers in the African-American summer community of Azurest, Sag Harbor. He now lives in East Hampton, is a founding member of the environmental action group ChangeHampton and a board member of ReWild LI. | www.changehampton.org
Climate Local Now is a partnership between the East End Beacon and two leaders of a grass-roots group inspired by the science of Project Drawdown to advance local climate solutions.
