Gardening Needs to Change

The same self interest that dominates our consumer-driven capitalist culture -- and that destroys biodiversity, ecosystem health, and planetary resiliency -- is evoked in how we garden. If we garden for ourselves, choosing only those plants whose blooms or leaves are pretty to us but not to pollinators and other wildlife, we are directly harming the planet through wasted space and denied life processes. Even if we see one bee on a hosta bloom or a bird perched in a Japanese maple, it does not mean these plants are beneficial to wildlife or the ecosystem -- the web of life is much more intricate than a momentary observation; it's so intricate we may never know, and that's ok. 

A new gardening ethic that is required does not limit your options, attack you, or condemn -- but it is easy to feel that these things are happening because the larger implications are that even our smallest actions matter in some negative ways; but such a revelation can be empowering if we embrace the challenge, and the joy, of living with nature and not against it (and learning from it). While gardens are totally artifice and may never be fully integrated into the larger / wilder world, in an age of novel ecosystems where nothing is left untouched by us, gardens become lifelines -- both for other species and ourselves, physically and emotionally. Garden with regional native plants. Celebrate your unique home. Get in balance with a life our cultural systems say are invalid, dangerous, and of another time and place when we were "lesser" as a species.