Homegrown National Park - Restoring the Land Around You With Native Plants

One of the best ways we can start to restore the health of the land and ecosystem that surround us is by planting native plants.  Native plants are crucial for local ecosystem health because they have longstanding and productive roles to play in your area’s particular web of living connections.  They feed local species of insects which in turn feed the local birds.  They feed birds and other animals directly with their nuts and berries.  They sustain local pollinators, which in turn help to support the broader reproductive health of the surrounding plants (which require pollinators to make new seeds).  Local species require less watering because they are well adapted to the local climate.  And there are countless other interactions that native species have with one another that make the local ecosystem healthy, resilient, robust, and life-generating.  It is ironic that the most beautiful garden in the world can actually be a food desert for the local ecosystem if it is planted entirely with non-native species, because the local insects and other animals simply don’t eat the leaves, nuts, or fruits they produce.  So planting at least a significant portion of your garden with native species is key.

A little while back, I had a conversation with a family friend who is a landscape architect, and his personal soap box, for a long time, has been native species.  He spoke to me about the crucial need for them to be planted and this got me to start rethinking how I managed the land I had stewardship over.  I began to imagine a movement where everyone started to treat at least a portion of their garden or yard as a local nature preserve – a place devoted to supporting and sustaining the local ecosystem. 

What if the land we have stewardship over – whether it’s a little square in front of our house next to the street, or a more substantial back yard – doesn’t exist for us to use only for our own pleasure?  What if God has given us whatever land we have as a place to tend so that it might be a productive and healthy contributor to the local ecosystem?  What if the land isn’t really ours at all, but rather God’s – and we have been entrusted with the ancient Gen 1-2 calling to tend it, protect it, and nurture it so that it can be fruitful?

Biblically, I think this is very clearly our calling – to tend to whatever plot we have and intentionally support its health and, by extension, its productive contribution to the broader health of the local ecosystem – plants, animals, air, water, and people.  And one of the best ways we can do this is by planting native species. 

There is an organization called Homegrown National Park (www.homegrownnationalpark.org) that is a wonderful resource for planting native species.  The whole concept behind the organization is that we, together, plot by plot, garden by garden, might plant more and more native species and through this build the ecological health of our neighborhoods so that our normal living spaces might become increasingly supportive of the network of local life.  The website has an interactive map where you can register your home and continue to update it with more and more native species as you plant them.  It also has numerous resources on what kinds of native species to plant and where you can buy them.

Restoring our local plots harkens back to our original calling in Genesis 1-2, as well as the great restoration inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection and envisioned in the Rev 21 Renewed Heavens and Earth.  We stand in between these two Biblical sign posts and in the midst of a global ecological crisis, with two hands, a heart, the Spirit of God, and whatever small land we have.  We can start a restoration movement here, in our own homes, gardens, and yards.

I’ve planted a bunch of native species this spring and registered on Homegrown National Park. I invite you to join me – and please let me know if you do!

RESOURCES:

Homegrown National Park: www.homegrownnationalpark.org 

Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education native plants sale: https://shop.schuylkillcenter.org/native-plants

“Regreening the Desert” Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

“Kiss the Ground” documentary – you can find it on Netflix, Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime

Tree Tenders (PHS): https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs

HP Community Garden – Contact Mike Wilcox at huntingparkgarden@gmail.com 

Regreening the Desert - The Power of Life to Come Back if We Will Let It

A few years ago, I was pointed towards a documentary following a scientist named Dr. John D. Liu as he explored the capacity of devastated ecosystems to be restored.  The documentary blew my mind – and I strongly encourage you to watch it.  You can watch it for free on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

The central story in the documentary is about the Loess Plateau in central China.  Millenia of unsustainable farming and grazing practices took a huge area that had once been utterly lush and bountiful and turned it into a desert with completely depleted soil (i.e. “desertified” it).  In the late 20th century, however, Chinese scientists and civil engineers came together and designed a new reforestation campaign in which they planted, among other things, 66 billion trees.  I was astonished to find that after only a few decades, what had been an utter wasteland had been restored to a flourishing, green place, teeming with life. 

The documentary explores several other reforestation projects in different parts of the world and through this you begin to learn how powerful and resilient life is.  In Jordan, an area that had been overgrazed for ages is fenced off and within 3 years, plants they thought had gone extinct in the 1800s start growing up out of the soil, completely on their own.  In a scientific re-foresting project run by a man named Geoff Lawton (also in Jordan), we learn more about the amazing ability of plants, strategically tended, to transform desertified spaces and even build their own water cycles.  Deserts have very little soil, and no plant cover for the soil – so all the water that falls on the ground evaporates easily, or simply runs off, leaving the soil dry. However, as small drought-resistant plants are planted and take root, they shade the dirt, protecting the water from evaporating as quickly.  Their roots secure the soil and absorb more water into the system.  As their leaves fall and die, they start to build soil around themselves.  As more ground cover builds and root systems develop, soil increases, along with a host of microorganisms.  As this happens, larger plants are able to start taking root.  With larger plants, there’s more shade and more soil, and so more water is absorbed in the system.  As more water is absorbed, it is run up through the plants and emitted from their leaves in a process called evapotranspiration – and as this happens, more moisture collects above them.  This in turn creates more clouds and ultimately rainfall.  It absolutely blew my mind that plants actually help to build their own rain fall and water cycles. 

So what does this have to do with our lives here in Philadelphia?  We live in a city, and in cities we don’t tend to deal much with excessive grazing or poor agricultural practices.  But we do deal with a lot of concrete, tree removal, huge parking lots, damaged and vacant lots, and development that has been done without any consideration for the local ecosystem.  As a result, creation is groaning here in Philadelphia – it has been hurt, damaged, and even somewhat desertified in certain areas.

But the life God has created in this world is powerful and resilient.  And so if we can be intentional and consistent about planting new plants in our yards and on our streets and in our parks; and if we can protect our parks, and clean up our vacant lots, and mitigate our toxic brown fields, and plant community gardens … we can help Philadelphia grow into a robust, healthy, and restored ecosystem.  God’s living system around us has this capability – we just need to give it room to breathe.

Now there are a LOT of practicalities to this, but that’s not the purpose of this post (there will be many other posts where we’ll focus on that).  The purpose of this post is simply to share a story about just how powerful and capable of resilience life is – and to show that if we can protect it, give it room to breathe, and help it strategically to regain its foothold, it can return to us in ways we never thought possible.

RESOURCES:

“Regreening the Desert” Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

“Kiss the Ground” documentary – you can find it on Netflix, Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime

Homegrown National Park: www.homegrownnationalpark.org 

Tree Tenders (PHS): https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs

HP Community Garden – Contact Mike Wilcox at huntingparkgarden@gmail.com 

Called to Dance With Creation

Genesis 1:28 reads, “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”  This is a beautiful and powerful calling for humanity – yet it is also one of the most misused verses in the Bible.  Understood in its context, Gen 1:28 is a calling for human beings to rule over creation with the love, care, and justice of the Creator whose image they were placed on earth to represent.  We are here to express God’s heart towards His Creation.  Yet too often this verse is used by Christians to say that God has given humanity permission to use Creation however we see fit in order to advance our own cause.     

But the reality is that Genesis 1:28 is not an invitation to use Creation like a slave – rather, it’s an invitation to dance with Creation in a way that makes her grow and flourish.  Even more than this, the calling is to marry human life, culture, and creativity with her in such a way that she becomes even more beautiful.  We can see this in the trajectory of the Biblical story as a whole.  In Genesis 2, human beings are set in a Garden to care for it.  After the whole story of the Bible – the fall, the saga of Israel, the arrival of Christ, and the age of the Church – we arrive at Revelation 21-22, when the New Heavens and New Earth have been established, God and human beings are living together again, and all is made right.  What do we see here?  God’s story for humanity does not end in a return to the Garden of Eden – rather, it culminates in a garden CITY.  The New Jerusalem is a place where the artistry of human beings (the city) has merged with the creative beauty of God (the river, trees, leaves, and fruits that run through the city) in a new way that has made everything even more beautiful than it was in the beginning. 

This, then, is the Gen 1:28 calling for humanity.  It’s to steadily, and with great service and care, marry human creativity with God’s creativity into a new tapestry where both are honored and both flourish even more together than they would apart.  A healthy human society that is pursuing this calling will weave throughout itself traditions that honor, integrate, showcase, and protect Creation.  As it develops technology, laws, health systems, and art, it will do so in a way that elevates the beauty and health of the natural world – and through this the two will flourish together.

So the question is: how well are we living out this vocation?  The deforested and concrete jungles of our cities, the trash strewn about our blocks, our polluted waterways, our poisoned air, the great Pacific garbage patch, and the ever deepening climate crisis (to name a few things) all speak to the perversion and dysfunction of our way of life.  Rather than dancing with God’s Creation, we have oppressed her and harvested her like a slave, abusing her, extracting from her, depleting her, poisoning her, and in many ways deconstructing her.  We have been a profound and highly effective agent of death in God’s beautiful world – and that death is beginning to spread back over us.  Because of what we have done to her, we now need to restore her to health before we can even consider dancing with her.  This, then is the urgent calling of our time.  Wherever we are and in whatever way we can, we need to orient ourselves towards healing and restoring the living system around us.  We need to plant new plants in our neighborhoods, clean poisoned lots, protect our waterways from pollution, slow and stop all the trash we’re throwing into her, and stop pouring fossil fuel emissions into her atmosphere.   In many cases, we need to just try to leave more and more of her alone so she can start to heal herself. 

We’ll engage the practicalities of this calling in later posts this month.  But for now, consider the Garden of Eden of Gen 1 and the Garden City of Revelation 21.  Our calling has always been to dance God’s creation from Gen 1 to Rev 21 but instead we have enslaved her, used her for our own purposes, and ultimately left her bleeding on the side of the road, just like the robbers in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Yet despite the fact that we are the robbers, through the grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit we have been invited to change direction and participate in the work of the Good Samaritan.  We’ve been given an opportunity to join God in healing the damage we’ve caused.  This path is set before us – and it is urgent, because the Creation is bleeding heavily from the wounds we have inflicted.  But there is a real path of new life, if we are willing to take it. 

RESOURCES:

“Regreening the Desert” Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI

“Kiss the Ground” documentary – you can find it on Netflix, Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime

Homegrown National Park: www.homegrownnationalpark.org 

Tree Tenders (PHS): https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs

HP Community Garden – Contact Mike Wilcox at huntingparkgarden@gmail.com