What’s behind the idea

Along with describing the personal benefits of creating HNP, Tallamy shares two basic statistics. First, lawns in the United States occupy about twenty million acres. Second, twenty million acres is bigger than the combined areas of the Everglades, Galveston, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. Says Tallamy, “If we restore the ecosystem and function of these twenty million acres, we can create this country’s largest park system.”

It’s not just that this would be a really cool idea. There’s a need to steer us toward a new approach to conversation. Tallamy says that “Conservation that is confined to parks will not preserve species in the long run, because these areas are too small and too separated from one another.” He points to the huge ecological value of the land between these isolated habitat fragments. “Restoring habitat where we live . . . will go a long way toward building biological corridors that connect preserved habitat fragments with one another.”