The Natural Patriot

What a week it’s been. Martin Luther King Day followed immediately by the swearing in of a pathbreaking President of the United States. I would like to write at length about the tide of hope that President Obama’s measured words, and deliberative actions leading up to and following the inauguration, have set in motion.  But for now, I will only pass on this clever and aesthetically pleasing graphical analysis of his inauguration speech, based on this cool software and taken from here. Basically, it simply goes through a text and plots each word therein (excluding “the”, “and”, and the like, evidently) with its size proportional to the number of times it appears in the text. Essentially like the tag clouds you see associated with blogs or Technorati, etc.  So here, my fellow Americans, is the analysis of President Obama’s inauguration speech:

In comparison, here is the analysis of President Bush’s second inaugural speech in January 2005:

The inaugural speeches of Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln can be found here. I will leave it to the pundits (for now at last) to make the detailed comparisons. Naturally, I was intrigued by the idea of trying this out myself. So just for grins, I cranked the Natural Patriot’s first post through the grinder and here is what it produced:

Not terribly surprising given that the first post was essentially a definition. And here is the analysis of my own reflection on the upcoming Obama inauguration:

Lots of opportunities for fun and mischief here . . .

The creeping dominance of suburbia by non-native ornamental plants is depleting the abundance and diversity of native animals too—but landscaping with native plants can help reverse the trend.  Yes, we can! (OK, I am still in the grips of Obamaphoria)

Non-native plants now dominate the base of the food web in human-inhabited landscapes (which is to say, most landscapes) of North America and many other regions, largely unnoticed as we go about our daily business.  Sure, that Wisteria looks nice.  But does it taste nice–that is, to the creatures that have to make a living on it?  How has this creeping transformation of outdoor space affected the rest of the ecosystem?

I have written before on the interesting work by ecologist Doug Tallamy of the University of Delaware on this topic.  Now a new paper in the journal Conservation Biology has tested his thesis that introducing non-native plants breaks the evolved links in the food chain that support wildlife, and contribute to, well, making our spring (and summer) silent. The authors of the new paper selected six pairs of sites in suburban Pennsylvania, matched by size and approximate plant cover, in each of which one member of the pair was landscaped entirely with native plants and the other with the typical mix of Eurasian grasses, Asian shrubs and native canopy trees.  Total plant cover and diversity were similar between treatments.

The results were dramatic.  The properties landscaped with native plants supported 4 times the caterpillar biomass, 3 times the caterpillar species richness, significantly higher bird abundance and diversity, and 8-fold higher abundance of bird species of “regional conservation concern”, that is, declining or endangered in the local region.  In other words, even on the small scale of most yards or medium to large house lots, providing the right kinds of plants can make a major difference in spport of wildlife and biodiversity.  In fact, the benefits of native vegetation are probably even more pronounced than their results suggest because the authors attempted to choose sites in their study with similar levels of plant diversity, so the non-native sites were more diverse than most suburban yards.

What’s behind these results?  The likely mechanism is that the host specificity (i.e., picky eating habits) of many insects prevents them from thriving on non-native plants–many of which have become popular in the nursery trade precisely because insects don’t like them– and since most birds feed their young on insects, this broken link cascades up the food chain to reduce bird abundance and diversity as well.  The latter point was also supported by the finding that insect-eating birds declined even more than birds with other diets in plots with non-native plants.

Given the unabated breakneck growth of the human population and associated built environment, a critical key to conserving a significant remnant of earth’s biodiversity would seem to lie in actively engineering the human-dominated environment to make it hospitable to other organisms. This paper offers hope that fostering native vegetation can significantly further that goal.  That’s what I’m talking about. More details on the home project as the weather warms up and I can venture outside again . . .

[Source: Karin T. Burghardt, Douglas W. Tallamy, and W. Gregory Shriver. 2009. Impact of Native Plants on Bird and Butterfly Biodiversity in Suburban Landscapes. Conservation Biology 23:219-224.]

It’s as predictable as the seasons — every year, when I hear the excerpts from Martin Luther King’s historic speech on the radio at this time of year, it brings tears to my eyes.  I just watched the speech on CNN again and this year was no exception.

But today the words come across in a whole new light.  It still seems, indeed, like a dream that a mere 46 years after Dr. King’s sublime speech (a period of time that seems shorter and shorter as I get older), the hugely diverse, cantankerous, politically divided, myopic, maddening, yet inspiring population of this country have come together to elect an African-American President of the United States.  A mere four decades after black people in this country could be routinely denied entrance to a hotel or restaurant or even a bathroom with no explanation and noone much noticing, a black man is moving into the Oval Office of the White House. And freedom is, at last, ringing from every hill and mole-hill in Mississippi.

Even these months after the election, it seems surreal — a dream — that this could happen.  It seemed inconceivable even 3 or 4 years ago that this could happen at this stage in history.  Yet here we are.

Martin Luther King’s dream, a dream that he gave his life for, brought this country through a dangerous and tumultuous period in our history, with remarkably little bloodshed. It made possible, in no small part, what we will witness at the historic inauguration tomorrow, a mere four decades later.  Much has been said about this literally world-changing event, and there is undoubtedly much more to be said.

But it occurs to me that there is a larger lesson here for Natural Patriotism. It is about, if I might blatantly steal the phrase, “the audacity of hope”. Four decades ago it seemed impossible that black children could one day hold hands with white children in America, much less grow up to be President.  It has come to pass. We faced the seemingly impossible challenge of getting past the bitter, divisive history of four centuries of slavery and brutality to forge a nation of unity from diversity.  Though we have a way to go, it has come to pass. The American way of life was built, in significant part, on exploitation of African-American people.  Yet we are leaving that behind. The American people rose to the challenge.

Now we face the seemingly impossible challenge of another fundamental transformation. The American way of life (and increasingly that of most other countries in the world) is similarly built on exploitation of Nature. This, similarly, is a situation that the nation cannot ultimately survive. It seems, similarly, impossible to move beyond. But perhaps the most important lesson of the momentous transition we are now witnessing is this: Yes, we can.

We can reach the mountain.  We will not all make it, and the going will be difficult, but we can get there.  We can find a way to live happily on this earth, the only home we will ever have, into the distant future.  We can move beyond an economy based on fossil fuel and extravagant consumption and extravagant waste.  We can move beyond the ignorance and hostility to an idea whose time has come. Yes, we can.

As in 1963, we know where we have to go, and we even know how to get there.  The challenge is locking arms together and making the long difficult trek. We have the ideas, we have the know-how, and we are at long last beginning to see the political will.

Even a few years ago, it seemed impossible that we could face the realities that oil is running out, that burning it is cooking our planet, and that our ravenous appetites are literally suicidal.  But we are beginning, after a long darkness, to see light on the horizon.  And I feel that I can allow myself to believe that we will make it.  I have a dream.