Easing the Biodiversity Crisis One Flowerpot at a Time

This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.

With very little time left to prevent the most hideous effects of climate change, Americans elected a president and a Congress whose policies will cost the planet four years of progress and send us backward at the same time. In this crisis, the greatest risk we face is the temptation to surrender to helplessness. For people who care about preserving life on Earth, the stakes are too high to do nothing, but it is all too easy to believe there is nothing we can do.

With any question of justice, the big picture can feel overwhelming. At those times, I have almost always found it helpful to zoom in, to focus on the same problem at a smaller, more manageable scale. I may not be able to save the zebras and the leopards, but I can help save the zebra swallowtail butterflies and the giant leopard moths. I can do that, at least in my own small yard, by nurturing the host plants they need to reproduce. Making a discernible, measurable difference to my wild neighbors is an act of resistance, too.

Plants and animals evolved together. To create a microhabitat that sustains your own wild neighbors, you’ll need to grow the endemic flowers and shrubs and trees they evolved alongside. The problem is that exotic plants are now ubiquitous in American gardens, and few of us know the difference between a native plant and one from the other side of the world. Most garden centers stock mainly the roses and lilies and pansies and chrysanthemums their customers recognize. And those plants evolved to feed some other continent’s creatures.

Two undersung nonprofits aim to change all that.

Wild Ones began in 1979 as a garden club in Milwaukee. Today it is a national conservation nonprofit with more than 125 formal chapters and “seedling” chapters that advocate gardening with native plants as a form of active conservation. One of the greatest threats to biodiversity is the loss of habitat. Preventing habitat loss on a global scale is complicated, but there is nothing complicated about converting garden space, no matter how small, into a wildlife sanctuary.

The Wild Ones website is a crash course in how to create habitat that is every bit as beautiful as any garden full of introduced plants that feed nobody. The site offers downloadable landscape designs tailored to specific growing regions, a path for your garden to earn certification as a native habitat, advice about how to climate-proof a yard, webinars about gardening as a conservation tool, and a state-by-state list of native-plant nurseries as well as local plant sales and seed exchanges, among others.