Plants and ideas to connect us to the land and enhance local biodiversity.
We live in a time of shifting, blurred boundaries. In one direction we see diverse healthy ecosystems, and in the other we encounter human developed agricultural and urban lands. We see thriving insect and animal populations on wild lands contrasted with industrially sterilized ground. We experience the economic drive to extract from the natural world for profit, yet we also sense that our prosperity and survival depend on the interconnected web of life that such extraction inevitably unravels.
We exist somewhere in the middle of these different landscapes and thought processes. Modern life often forces us to navigate these boundaries by choosing between one side or the other. Yet we always seem to end up in the middle, in a familiar yet amorphous terrain that defies labels like “wild” or “artificial”: the edgelands.
These environments, often termed “novel ecosystems”, have been heavily impacted by human economic activity but life persists there. Lands that have been graded, paved, built upon or logged develop their own set of relationships between numerous exotic species and remnant native plants, animals, and fungi. We often turn our backs on these spaces, considering them to be too degraded to tend, or worthy only of covering with turf grass and non-native hedges. But when we stop to notice the resurgent native species appearing and adapting, we are reminded that natural systems have a strong and inherent capacity to repair themselves. They just need our attention and our assistance.
Edgelands seeks to promote a greater sense of mutual belonging to the land upon which we live. We look to the rich cultures of indigenous peoples the world over who demonstrate such belonging and remind us that humans have been an integrated part of our ecosystems for as long as we’ve been a species. Through attentive re-engagement with the land and listening to its wisdom, we develop practices and perspectives that reinforce connections to the other living creatures with whom we share our homes. For so many people, this journey begins when they choose to put a plant in the ground for the first time and eagerly observe what follows.
Plants are the basis of life as we know it on earth today. Through the “magic” of photosynthesis they convert cosmic rays into the sugars that are the foundation of our food supply. They created our atmosphere and the climate in which we and most other animals evolved. And they evolved right alongside us, forming complex relationships with all other life forms on Earth in the process. And so we start with plants: growing, tending and planting to support greater biodiversity in the shifting, morphing environments we inhabit.
The more we plant native plants, the more we see the connections that form between those plants and other organisms. Soils and watersheds repair themselves. Insects and birds return to feed and nest. Life proliferates wherever we cultivate it, and so we begin to see how we are an integral part of the natural world. Our lives become more richly meaningful when we promote life in all its forms.
