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Entomologist Doug Tallamy watched luna moths return to his Pennsylvania farm and documented over 1,380 moth species on land that was once overrun with invasives. The metamorphosis unfolded not through expensive intervention, but by pulling weeds and pressing native seeds into the ground. His insight, born from that quiet transformation, has grown into Homegrown National Park, a movement now spanning more than 187,000 acres tended by 52,000 registered participants across the country. “If 10 to 20 percent of landowners planted native plants,” he says, “this would add up to a habitat larger than 10 Yellowstones.” What Tallamy is really asking people to shed is the assumption that conservation belongs to someone else, somewhere else — that it requires credentials or wilderness or government action. His work suggests that the distance between ecological collapse and recovery may be measured not in policy cycles, but in the choices ordinary people make about what grows outside their doors.
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