Planting Oaks

To many, Doug Tallamy needs no introduction. A renowned ecologist, his 2020 NY Times Best Seller, Nature’s Best Hope, showed homeowners how to turn their yards into conservation corridors. His latest book, The Nature of Oaks, was released in March 2021. Here he offers a message specifically written for Turf readers about why we should be planting more oaks. In case you haven’t heard: life on Earth is in trouble. Distressing statistics about declining biodiversity are being reported so fast they are running into each other. North America has lost three billion breeding birds in the last 50 years; Earth has lost 45% of its insects with continuing declines reported nearly everywhere; and the UN predicts one million species will go extinct in the next 20 years. Not only are we in the midst of the sixth great Earth extinction event, but loss of populations in species not yet extinct is rampant. We hear much about the climate crisis, and rightly so. What many fail to appreciate is that our disregard for the well-being of biodiversity is as grave a threat to humans as climate change, because it is healthy, productive ecosystems—not Best Buy or Costco—that support us, and it is biodiversity that makes ecosystems healthy and productive. To put it bluntly, we are destroying the natural world that we cannot live without. It’s not that we purposefully have nature in our sights. Rather, we have simply refused to share our spaces with the natural world. We have clung to ...