Spirit in Action

Doing the Work of Noah: Growing the Ark

Tom Small found a way to take on species extinction on the local level, and he tells about it in his book, Using Native Plants to Restore Community (In Southwest Michigan and Beyond). By converting his grass-lawn into native flora, creating habitat for native fauna, Tom found a way to make a difference, locally.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 09 Aug 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Sometimes as we think about dealing with the big problems, like nuclear war, climate change, or poverty, we get obsessed with only these immense undertakings. Things that, even if they can be effective, can take multiple generations in order to see progress. And that can drain way the joy out of each person. Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of that kind of sustained effort, but I think we also need hands-on efforts. Things that take place where our eyes can see the change and get positive feedback. And I think that's the kind of work that today's spirit and action guest, Tom Small, has done on his plot of land in Kalamazoo, Michigan. One way of dealing with the threat and reality of species extinction is to provide habitat that is a haven for local species. In the mid-1990s, Tom and his now deceased wife, Nancy Cutbirth Small, set about to convert their half-acre of grass lawn into a native refuge. And they wrote about their motivations and experience in using native plants to restore community in Southwest Michigan and beyond, showing us a vibrant, life-giving, hands-on way that each of us can use to do something in favor of survival of the Earth. Tom Small joins us today before an audience here at the Friends General Conference National Summer Gathering. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today for spirit in action. Thank you, Mark. Glad to be here. How's your week going here at the campus of Western Carolina University here in North Carolina? It's been fine so far. We've had a good workshop with Quaker Earthcare Witness on the full spectrum of sustainability. So what are you talking about fully and who's leading it? Roy Taylor, the clerk of the Quaker Earthcare Witness Steering Committee is our leader. And altogether there are seven of us from Quaker Earthcare Witness who are participants in the workshop. Today I talked about the transition movement in Kalamazoo. Tomorrow I talk about soil. I'd love to hear a little bit about the transition community because we've got one here, and no claire, that our Quaker meeting was starting up. And we heard a couple years ago, Steve Chase and Rua Swinterfeld, "Oh, well, spoke about their interview I did with them about transition." It was so popular, as a matter of fact, it was not only broadcast on our show, and then on what's called Sprouts, which is nationwide for Pacifica radio, and then a show called EcoShock, they took a portion of it and broadcast it because it explained the transition movement so well. What's happening for you in Kalamazoo? We're really just getting underway. We started about a year ago. I visited Tautnes, the international headquarters of the transition movement in Devon, three years ago, and it took a couple of years to digest that and get us started. And right now we're focusing on three or four areas of transition to a more resilient community. And one of them is community itself, so we're working mainly with neighborhood associations, establishing kind of public spaces for neighborhoods, public spaces for production of food, food forests, for not just people, but also for the rest of the creatures as well. Working with the Nature Center, working with the wild ones, native plants, natural landscapers, working with the Kalamazoo Climate Change Coalition and its working groups. We've set up working groups on community, on waste, on food and food systems, on health and well-being. That's about where we are now. We're just getting established and going, beginning to focus on particular kinds of communication and community. One of the things I love about transition is it's fun. It's enjoyable, it's energizing. So much activism work can be daunting and can be discouraging because you have to win other people over. Already what you did with your yard and converting it to native plants, that's something you can control, you can have your hands right on it, and you can see the fruits right in front of your face. You don't have to convince one other person to vote the way you want to. Well, that's entirely true. We took a long time to persuade the city to vote the way we wanted them to and to make us legal. That involved going up from the city's environmental concerns committee through the planning commission, through the city commission and the mayor's office, and finally rewriting the city's weed ordinance, which was part of the nuisance ordinance, lumping, you know, growing weeds in your yard together with spitting on the sidewalk or peeping through people's windows. Those were all classified as nuisances. So we had to rewrite the nuisance ordinance, really, to make us positive rather than something negative. Then the city decided, well, we've got to control this, it's liable to get out of hand, so we'll write a little handbook to tell people how to do it. Well, it was awful. So we tried to gently persuade them to write it differently and it went into a file someplace. And finally somebody took over as in charge of the nuisance ordinances, pulled that out of the file and said, "Hmm, this looks kind of interesting. Why don't we just publish this?" So we wrote some more stuff and gave it to him, and he came out to our yard and took pictures, and now there's a landscaping guide on the city's website. But it takes a long time. Again, you'll get some of the history of this in the book, using native plants to restore community in Southwest Michigan and beyond. And it's by Nancy Cutberth, Small and Tom Small. Nancy left this world in 2009, so Tom is able to be with us here to carry on this work. When we finished it up, it was almost done at the time of her death. How long did it take you between, I think, 1995 when you kind of started, you got the initial impetus to do this, and when the ordinance were changed or when you got permission to go full bore? We were always going full bore, whether the ordinance was changed or not. But, yeah, we finally got the ordinance changed about 1999, I think. So it took about four years, altogether, with the process. And it was kind of an ordeal. But it was fun, too. We had some good times doing that. You mentioned that it has to be fun. You're certainly agreeing with Rob Hopkins in transition, because one of Hopkins' mantras is, if you're not having fun, you're not doing it right. Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much fun in creativity. And, of course, I think for you and Nancy, that part of the originating force behind this, I think you were birders, and somehow the connection with wild animals, I think, that's what I got from the book, that somehow knowing the animals made you want to see the animals. You were actually concerned that they'd be around. Well, I don't know that we were ever really birders. We were both plant people before we got onto native plants. And we both were trying to live more simply. And so our first thought was, well, when we come together, we were living in two separate houses, and we weren't married. When we come together in this one house, we will start growing our own vegetables and things like that. Well, it just wasn't suitable. It was too much shade. We couldn't grow vegetables. And then Nancy read a book by Sarah Stein called Noah's Garden, changing the ecology of our own backyards. And all of a sudden we had a mission, and it involved plants, and it involved creatures, and it involved restoration. Restoring the simplicity and the complexity, to some extent, within the city of the ecosystems and the native plants and the landscapes that had been there before the settlers came and decided to make it look kind of like home, or Romania, or Britain, or Southeast Asia, or whatever, and bring in all these different non-native plants and this different kind of landscaping. Again, my impression from having read the book was that Nancy was kind of leading this. She read the book first, and she passed it onto you. So she was kind of passing some of the fire onto you in some ways. Since she's left us, we can't have her here today, I would like you to channel her. And is she a leader, a fiery? I mean, you work together teaching Shakespeare and that kind of things. Is she that kind of a personality, or is she the serene pool of... I just like to know more about her. Well, we knew each other for a long time as colleagues teaching together in the English department at Western Michigan University. I guess we had known each other for 20 years before we ever got together and decided that we had some kind of mission in common and began trying to discover what that mission was. No, in some ways, yeah. Nancy was a very fiery person, but in some ways she was not. She was a very withdrawn person. She didn't like being upfront or leading. I'm the actor of that pair. I've been a professional actor all my life. I like being upfront. She didn't. Yeah, she certainly knew more about native plants than I did, or that I do now, although I think I know a fair amount. But she was always kind of quiet and behind the scenes. I think we shared the kind of leading in a double sense, the kind of quicker leading. And for quite a few years we wrote a column for befriending creation called "Leadings" that focused sometimes on native plants and plants and creatures and restoration. And some of those essays I rewrote and they're in the book. And some of them we wrote together and I rewrote those and they're in the book. So a lot of things came together. We were both leading in different ways and there were two different senses of leading operating there. I think her name appears on more of the essays in the book or more of the words in the book than yours. I mean both your names appear on some. For instance, there was the column that you wrote on sightings, I think was one of them. Was that primarily her leaders that yours or? It's hard to separate out. We wrote them together. Almost all of them. There are a few where only her name appears that were primarily written by her and edited by me. There are some where only my name appears, that it was vice versa. And some where only my name appears, which were written after she passed. Because I felt the need to complete the book in some way or another. And that essay became important as a completion of the book. And her repeated request to me in the years, the couple of years before she passed, where you must finish the book. That's the only promise I ask of you, finish the book. And in her lifetime we had thought of the finishing and publishing of the book as a very simple kind of thing with a limited audience. And I decided that her memory and what we were doing deserved better than that. So I took a couple of years to finish the book and get it illustrated by local artists and scientific illustrators. Two of whom are Quakers and the others of whom are illustrators and artists of international reputation. Well, one of the Quakers is likewise of international reputation. One of the founders of the National Society of Scientific Illustrators. So the book was a long process that began when we began trying not just to transform our own yards into native plantings, but also to begin to spread the idea and the practice of doing so. And then in 1999 we established a chapter of the National Organization Wild Ones, Kalamazoo Area Chapter. And we started doing handouts. We're both English professors after all. We don't go anywhere without handouts to give to people to take away with them the word. Here's the word. It's on paper. Sorry about that. We started assembling this kind of library or magazine of flyers and handouts and information about one thing or another. And gradually this began to come together and finally we looked at each other and he said, "Well, I guess there's a book here somewhere." So we began searching for the book that was in all that. Then we started going through the essays that we'd written for Quaker publications and the essays that we'd written for environmental publications and saying, "Well, this would fit and that won't. We can combine with that." It just kind of grew. And so the book is both practical and aimed in very practical ways at Southwest Michigan where Kalamazoo is. It's also got parts that are applicable across the country across the world. Why native? What does this mean in terms of having animals there? A specific plant might not be appropriate to Arizona, but the other principles probably apply. So could you talk very specifically about why local plants? Why can't I just plant Norway, maples, or why isn't that good in Wisconsin where I live or Michigan where you live? Well, the plants are part of ecosystem. Each plant is part of a locale, a place, and it evolved in that place with all the other creatures and all the other plants. In that place. As Charles Darwin saw very clearly, and he was one of the first really to see it, subtract one species or add one species. And the change begins to occur in larger and larger circles and it changes everything. And in the course of evolution, a plant or a creature develops a distinct eco-type. It's a little bit different in terms of its DNA, in terms of its genes. When you introduce even the same species from another region, you've introduced a different genetic type. And that may or may not have the same function in that environment, in that ecosystem. It may be different in some distinct way in such that the pollinators don't recognize it, but it doesn't function quite the same way for them. Or it may have developed defenses against predators in that other area that the insects or whatever in this area that it's been introduced into are able to cope with. A chemistry may be just enough different. So when you bring in something from Southeast Asia, you're bringing in something that the whole system is not adapted to, has not evolved with. That is chemically quite different and that may not have the same predators or the same pollinators and may therefore be an invasive species that will take over and suppress whole systems. So we hear a lot about extinction at this point and we're kind of well on our way into the sixth great mass extinction of species. But probably more important than the extinction of species is the extinction of local ecotypes, which is happening at a much greater rate than extinction of species. All those little chemical, biological, systematic differences are beginning to disappear. And therefore, the whole species is much endangered if one local ecotype of that species simply disappears, because the genetic diversity begins to diminish. And the possibilities of adaptation to change therefore diminish. And heaven knows we're deeply into change, climate change and all kinds of other changes, and we need as great diversity and as great local adaptability as we can manage. You don't get resilience without diversity, you don't get resilience without even redundancy and duplication of functions. If you don't have redundancy of functions, if one function, one species or one subspecies disappears, there's no similar function to fill that niche, that gap in the ecosystem. So diversity and redundancy are extremely important in resiliency. And one of the principles that the transition movement stresses, and one of the things that it aims for, is a resilient community. That's the subtitle of Rob Hopkins's transition companion, making a more resilient community. Well, ecologically, scientifically, resilience is in one definition simply the ability of a system to go through stress and to come back to relative stability after having gone through that stress. Scientists are beginning to say that's not really possible, things are going to be so stressed that they're not going to come back to what they were. What is necessary is the kind of resilience where you go through the bottleneck, you go through the squeeze, you go through the stress, or what more and more philosophers and scientists are calling the long emergency of all kinds of convergent crises. You go through that and you come out with maybe a simplified, but a still viable, still coherent, still integral community that works. It'll still work, it hasn't just fallen apart and fragmented. So that's what we kind of work for, that's what we kind of work for with ecosystems, with plant communities, with communities of creatures, pollinators. We know it's not going to be quite the same, that things aren't going to be what they used to be. As Bill McKibbon says, we're already living on pretty much a different planet, so let's spell it differently or call it something a little bit different, because it's not the same one that we've been assuming that we have. So diversity is extremely important, so you try to maintain as much of it as you can, and you try to restore as much as you can of what is losing or being lost from the system. And that's what we do with wild ones, and that's what we do with transition on a small scale locally. I think we should get concrete about some of the monocultures and how that's affecting the world. I think that at one point you mentioned, maybe, I've seen it elsewhere, I'm sure, that Americans eat a variety of about 20 different plants, whereas two centuries ago, the normal intake would have included, you know, people would be eating dandelion greens, and they would be eating choke cherries or whatever, they'd be eating a wide variety of plants much wider than what we have. And certainly we can think back in history of the Irish potato famine, plant all your plants there, put all of your marbles in one bucket, and when something comes along, that's when you don't have resilience. Could you comment a little bit more about the historical or the transitional thing? What's happened? Have we really gone that far that we're no longer likely to be resilient? One of my favorite books about extinction is Terry Glavin's The Sixth Extinction, and I like it because it doesn't just deal with the creatures out there and the plants out there, the so-called natural world. He deals with cultures that are going extinct. He deals with the languages that are going extinct. We lose a language from the earth but every two months. And we are losing the diversity of our crop species, and he deals with that also. You know, how many species of beets are there really? I don't remember the figure, but it's dozens, dozens of species of beets, hundreds of species of apples. That's reduced in the supermarket to a few cultivars and hybrids that are specifically designed to be transportable and have a fair sort of shelf life and to look good and shiny and be kind of crisp when you bite into them, even if they've been sitting there for a long time. And we're just reducing that diversity of the foods that we eat, crops that we raise, and one of the favorite places that we've visited just in the past year is the Seed Saver's Exchange in Decora, Iowa, which is devoted to finding and preserving and disseminating those vanishing and lost species of our crops. And they also deal with some native species because they're in the midst of what was tallgrass prairie. So they also raise on their land and preserve seed from a few of the tallgrass prairie species, and those are included in the exchange in their kind of basket of what they try to propagate. It's a wonderful kind of enterprise, and it's absolutely necessary because the way we market and the way we produce in the kind of system that we're caught up in of industrial agriculture is just homogenizing the world supply of genetic diversity on which ultimately we're going to depend if we're going to make it. Yeah, I'm always amazed when they find out some plant that's in the Amazon, or maybe it's in the neighborhood of Kalamazoo, but there's very few of them left and they find out this has the magical properties to deal with cancer, diabetes, or who knows what. The entire genetic code that's out there contains such reams and reams of valuable information that we're losing. Yeah, these plants have been inventing chemical systems of defense and sustenance, food, and attractiveness, but they're just amazing, and yet we're not preserving that wonderment. And it's worth being preserved just for its own sake, quite aside from the fact that it might at some point be useful to us. I'd mention that we're doing this in course of this week of what's called Friends General Conference Gathering, a nationwide, Quaker Gathering, about 1500 people here on the campus of Western Carolina University in Cooloween, North Carolina. And at this gathering tomorrow night, there's going to be a presenter, Dr. Lowdog, started out as an herbalist, and so she knows how to use a number of these herbs, some of which probably wouldn't be here if our policies continued. We didn't have people restoring community through native plants like you did, Tom, with your wife, Nancy, and you're still doing. I want to remind our listeners that you are tuned in to Northern Spirit Radio's program, Spirit in Action, and we're on the web at northernspiritradio.org, where we have more than 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. We've covered all kinds of topics of peace and social justice, environmentalism, many other ways that we can care for and heal the world. 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Again, we're with Tom Small today. The book is Using Native Plants to Restore Community in Southwest Michigan and beyond. Again, the lessons in the book are applicable around the world. There's a number of the species, which will be specific to your area in Michigan, Tom. I was wondering if you could talk -- there's a whole number of topics that -- how you get to the point where you converted your grass lawn into native plants, and I want to hear some more about that. First of all, though, there's these invasive species. When we hear the word "invasive," we think, "nasty." It's like terrorists, right? It's the terrorist of the plant kingdom. Any particular terrorist invasive species that you hate? I don't know that I hate any of them, no. There are colleagues of mine who say, "Well, there really isn't such a thing as an invasive species." There is an opportunistic species that finds an opportunity. It finds a niche that is just fine for it because it has no competitors. It does not have the same competitors, the same predators that it had in its native place that keep it in control. Garlic mustard is a case in point. If you go to England, you find it growing in the English garden, you find it growing in the English countryside. It is not an invasive species at all. In our part of the world, I don't know about yours, in our part of the world, it becomes an invasive species in our forests and our forest edges, and it just takes over. And not only crowds out all the native woodland, delicate, fragile, ephemeral species, it poisons the ground for a lot of them. It is allelopathic. Its defense against other plants is, well, most sunflowers are allelopathic also in that way. They put something into the ground that tends to eliminate competition. Not only is garlic mustard crowding out fragile species, it is also poisoning the ground for tree seedlings that are also a little bit fragile. So the forest is not able to renew itself. And yeah, that's a really kind of bad speech. I don't know that I hate it, but we do our best and try to keep it from doing what it does so beautifully and so thoroughly. And it is an opportunist. And in its native place, it finds its niche, it finds and makes its place. Here it tries to take over more place, more space, more system than it would in its native space. One of the passages that I ran into a long way, you talk about doing the transformation from one form of flora, to getting rid of some of those invasive non-native species. Such as turf grass. Such as turf grass, yes. One of the ones that you mentioned, you said don't pull it out, don't get rid of it, is the poison ivy, at least at one stage. Could you remind me why that is that I should not hate poison ivy and destroy it on site? It's not invasive. It's not an invasive species. It's not an alien species. It's native to southwest Michigan. I think it's native to much of the United States. And it's one of the 10 most effective foods for birds. If you have a place where it really is bothersome, is a nuisance, or somebody who's particularly susceptible to it, or you have children that are going to run into it, yeah, you should probably make a point of taking it out of there. But if you have it in a place where it's not likely to do much harm, by all means, leave it. It's in its place, and its place is important in the system. That brings me to one of the ideas that occurred to me as I was reading, using native plants to restore community. We talked about the transition movement before, and certainly Rob Hopkins was involved in permaculture. You just talked about having poison ivy there, because it's part of the plants and insects eat. I mean, it's useful to them. We don't tend to eat poison ivy. Although we do eat nettles, which some people consider a problem, right? Yes. So is there some kind of attention between planting local plants to nurture animals and the food, the plants that we put there, because we want to eat them, because the large majority of plants that we get from the store are not native to whatever area we live in. A lot of them come from South America and from Europe and Africa, everywhere else. So is there some tension between permaculture and native plants, which is really restoring this larger sense of community with all of the other creatures of the earth? I occasionally get uneasy with plant lists in handbooks for permaculture, because they do include some species that I would regard as invasive or opportunistic. And rather a problem if they escape from cultivation in your garden or on your farm. So yeah, there is some tension, perhaps. But that's how Rob Hopkins got started. That's where he comes from, that permaculture background, that sense of a kind of total culture. And that's where one of my favorite essayists and thinkers, one of our favorite, my wife and I, Ruth, one of our favorite thinkers, Wendell Berry. That's where he comes from, and his essays are often have a subtitle, culture and agriculture. The two really have to go kind of hand in hand. You have to have a broad cultural sense of the agriculture that you're engaged in. It has to be consistent with the natural system that it is a part of and that it exists within. And one of the ways in which native plants and agriculture or cottage garden or vegetable gardening or whatever level you do it on, one of the ways in which they are synergistic is that a kind of companion planting of native plants to your food garden is very beneficial. And in perhaps two respects, your food garden may provide food for pollinators, nectar and pollen, and be blooming only at certain times. If you plant a native planting properly, it will be blooming for the entire season and have food available for all seasons. And that becomes extremely important then for the pollinators and also for the beneficial insects, which are different from the pollinators. They're the ones that come and kind of keep predators of your food crops under control, the aphids or whatever, you know, natural predator is there that's going to consume maybe a little bit more than you would like of your food crop. So if you keep those things in a kind of a balance, then you're living together with the system and you do that by that kind of companion planting, tomatoes and carrots or tomatoes, carrots and native plants that may not be recognized very broadly as food. Although there is hardly a native plant in our part of the country, and I suspect in your part as well, that was not used in some way by the Native Americans and probably also by the early settlers who learned from the Native Americans how to use those plants as food or as medicine or as part of making shelter, making structures, all kinds of uses for those native plants. And that's one of the fascinations for me of learning about native communities of plants and creatures that they're part of the human culture as well as being part of agriculture and part of native ecosystems. You mentioned this early in the book, you have an essay or two where you mention about insects as favorable. I'm afraid that most of us ignore this whole connection in the food chain, which is insects. When we think of insects, we think of either, well, because I'm far enough north, it's either deer flies or black flies and mosquitoes. And the proper thing to do with those is to slap money or risk and say go to God. That's my personal practice, I'm sorry to say. But the question I have is, are insects really important? And are they actually suffering? Are they in danger of extinction? By all means. Ruth and I, when we travel by car, any distance, we often remark to each other how few insects are splatted on our wind shields. As opposed to the hordes of insects that we used to go through in our youth, you'd have to stop and wash off the windshield in order to be able to see. And they would clog the radiator grill and your car would overheat. There were just masses of these insects. And yeah, yeah, there's some crop loss to insects. But you know what? With all of our insecticides, with all of our herbicides, with all of our pesticides, the crop loss to insects is still really about the same as it ever was. It's not changed all that much. One of the glories of the native plantings in our yard is you go out sometimes and there's a hole in a leaf or a leaf that's chewed or even a stem or even a whole plant that's been predated. And you think that's part of the function. That's how it works. Gregory Bateson says that most of the problems of the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way people think. And if we could attune ourselves and our thinking and our feeling as well, not just our thinking, and our acting as a result, more and more to the way nature works in its evolution and its communities and its interactions and its symbiosis, we would probably, as a species, be much more resilient. I'm not a complete neophyte in terms of this transition. I happen to be, let's say, disposed against lawn grass. So when I moved into the house, which my wife had already been occupying for 17 years, when I moved into that house, I didn't want to mow the lawn. I'm not a very good prototypical man in our culture because I don't. It's not that I really object the exercise or anything, but I objected to mowing the lawn. So we started some transition. Part of our transition was to enlarge our garden. Part of it was to wood chip in the area under our clothesline because we were walking over there and we didn't want high plants there. And we planted some fruit trees, the very sorts. And there's a whole section of our backyard that got converted to native prairie. So we did that transition. One of our sons happened to be working at prairie restoration. He could provide some plants and we got some local seed as well. Anyway, so we did some of this. So I got to see some of that succession of the wildflowers. You know, when sometimes it's yellow and sometimes it's white and sometimes it's the purple lavender and just watching that richness. So I had some experience with that. You mentioned this in the book as well, that even in a small plot, you talk about, I think, a half acre plot that you live on, that there's different ecosystems. You can have your wetlands and you can have your shaded and you can have your full light and all of that. How much do I have to learn before I can start doing what you did with your yard? Well, I think most of what we learned, no, not a lot of what we learned. We learned by error, by mistake, by trial and error. Yeah, we just kind of started out. And yeah, we had a local grower who gave us some information and we started reading and we read Sarah Stein's Noah's garden and liked what we saw there. So, native plants, we just started planting things in the area where we thought they would do okay. And it's worked to some extent, but there are certainly things that we would have done differently had we known what we know now. So, one thing that a student from the university and I are working on this summer and another student and I worked on all last summer was replanting, taking out what has become more kind of monoculture or just a few species and getting some diversity back. And also opening out our yard, opening it out more as a public space, not as private property, so that people feel free to wander in there to look at our signage to kind of explore, not just the front yard, but the backyard all around the property are half acre. And sit down on log stumps or benches or whatever we have available and contemplate or read, we have books out there in a kind of a little free library, take a book, leave a book. We have seed and plant exchanges a couple of times a year where people can just come in, bring plants, take away plants, no money changes, hands. It's a process of trying to deprivatize and to give back some of the commons that we've been privatizing and closing for a number of centuries now. And the first place to do it is with our own property, so Ruth and I spend a fair amount of time thinking about that, working towards that kind of thing. And now we're trying to broaden that to more and more of the community, working with a local church to take their four and a half acres of underused lawn turfgrass, begin to change that into native plantings, food forests, playgrounds, neighborhood gathering places. So that we are a gathered community and maybe some of the same sense as a meeting can become a gathered meeting or is a gathered meeting on those wonderful occasions when everything kind of seems to come together and come from the spirit of community. That's an important part for us of the transition movement, to get to that kind of vision, that kind of actuality of the restoration of community and the restoration of public space and the restoration of sharing with the whole community, not just the community of the poor, but that's important, not just with the community of all the human beings, although that's important, but with the community of all the creatures, not just those that are visible, but those that are also invisible down on the soil because that's where 80% of the earth's biomass and life is underneath our feet. And that's what I'll be talking about tomorrow morning at the QEW workshop. And hence the title of the book using native plants to restore community, very large sense, multiple layers of sense of community. Does transferring your lawn grass into native plants, does this require more or less work and expense than just mowing your lawn? What's your sense? Well, we were very naive when we started with, "Oh boy, you know, we're going to save all this labor. We're not going to have to mow. We're not going to have to get rid of the dandelions and all that kind of stuff." And yeah, that worked. What patches of lawn we have left are what the New York Times used to call a freedom lawn. Anything that wants to grow there is free to do so. And some of what remains is grass, turf grass. But elsewhere, we really are engaged in a different kind of work or a different kind of enterprise, I guess. I wouldn't say that it's less labor. It's a different kind of labor. You're naive if you think that you can just plant these native plants in a city or an urban area or a suburban area or even a rural area and that they're going to take care of themselves and you can walk away from it. Even the new weed ordinance, nuisance ordinance in the city says that the key to making it legal is if you maintain it, you can't just walk away from it. It has to be visibly maintained, some kind of plan that you have and that you maintain and follow through with that plan. And so, yeah, there's work involved, but we're hoping that for on behalf of Rob Hopkins, that is fun as well as being work and that you learn a lot from it. You get back in touch with the land in a real sense and you get back in touch with culture and you get back in touch in a way with the indigenous peoples and the indigenous cultures that knew these plants and these creatures and lived with them as part of that system. You know, one of the things, Tom, that you mentioned in the book, I was really happy to see this because I realized that I hadn't thought about it at all. The concept of having a lawn is not five centuries old. I mean, I suppose in the same way that we think of traditional marriage. Well, yeah, maybe that was the past hundred years or something. That was what traditional marriage was, but 200 years ago, well, you know, you still saw them for a cow and three sheep or whatever, things have evolved. And 200 years ago, I think that lawns were not a thing. No, well, it all happened with the invention of the lawnmower in 1830, but up until then, the idea of a private lawn was not part of the culture. Well, there were lawns on aristocratic estates and they were maintained usually by sheep. A very different thing than what we normally think of as lawns. I do wonder about something. I've traveled a fair amount with a Quaker Folk Dance group called the Friendly Folk Dancers and been to New Zealand. I've also been to Australia and I see one person in the room who was part of that tour. Janine was part of that. And so in those places, they're heavily populated with the flora of other places. New Zealand is particularly distinctive because its native flora was all some kind of variety of ferns. So you see fern trees and that kind of thing in the places where they still have their native flora. I suspect that there is no way for New Zealand to go back to what was native. Except for the bat, they did not have any native mammals on those two islands that are New Zealand. Have we gone too far in the USA to go native? Is this a fool's errand hopeless? Is it doesn't make any sense at this point? Is that a possibility? I'm definitely not trying to rain on your parade. I'm asking a question that if we're down to 1% of the land maybe has native species on it. Yeah, that's a difficult question and the answer is not a simple answer. There are times when I wonder about a particular kind of restoration project. Is the amount of energy being expended really worth that process that is being restored? And will that process really survive as a process without continual struggle to maintain the integrity of it from the surrounding alien species or systems that are always encroaching upon it? On the other hand, whatever we can do at whatever scale, a very small scale to sustain, maintain, restore something of the complexity, something of the diversity of species, something of the wonder of those species, something of the beauty of those species and the way they work together. It's worth it and we can do it. It may not be easy and it's a kind of continual process that we're involved with. And maybe there are times when you have to walk away from it and say, we have to divert our energies elsewhere. We can't maintain that. Things have changed in too many different ways for us to sustain the purity of what was there. We can't do it. And I think that's on the whole case. We can never restore what was there. Not only are things not what they used to be, in a very real sense, they never were what they used to be. They were always changing. You can take a date. You can say, okay, we're going to restore this place to what it was in 1835 or in 1750. And you can probably figure out something approximating what it was at that period. The information is out there in one form or another, but you have to kind of take a sense. You have to gather in a sense of the context, of the place, of what has changed since then and what you're actually able to do and to more or less sustain. And whether you have the ability and the personnel or even the funding to sustain it over some particular period of time. So there are permaculturists who say, well, restoration isn't possible, so we're going to do something else. But there are restorations who say, well, but we've got to do what we can. And I sympathize with both arguments. But to me, the argument that Terry Glavin advances at the end of his book on the sixth extinction is the argument that I try to follow. He says, I'm looking for the particular quotation in our book, he says, well, what do we do? You do what you can. That's all anybody can ask of you. And then there's one more sentence. You do everything you can. There are certain things you can't do, but you do everything that you can do because the forces of destruction are on the move. And the forces, the energies of restoration and the energies of life and the energies of diversity and the energies of creativity and the energies of procreation. And that whole cycle of the dance, of the dance of Shiva, of creation, preservation and destruction is us and we're part of it. And we have to be part of the whole of the dance, not just the destructive part. There's so much there for digestion. And folks, I want to remind you, you can find it in the book, Using Native Plants to Restore Community in Southwest Michigan and Beyond by Nancy Cuppert-Small and Tom Small. Tom Small has been with us here today. For spirit and action, you can also look up your local chapter of Wild Ones. They'll be very helpful in making progress in this. And if you want to contact Tom through me, I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to you. He's got a valuable amount of history with the process and obviously a joy in it. That's one of the things I want to mention, Tom, that comes through the book so clearly. The absolute delight in the different plants and animals, the insects, every layer of it and the process that you went through. It feels to me like your family grew a hundredfold by what you did to your lawn grass, making it to Native Prairie. It's a joy to watch it in the book, and it's joy to have you here today for spirit and action. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. And once again, I invoke Rob Hopkins' mantra. If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right. And this was fun. Thank you. Thank you again, Tom. And thanks to all you listeners for joining us today for spirit and action. Remember to come to the Nordenspiritradio.org website to find a link to Tom Small's book using Native Plants to Restore Community. Thanks again to Andrew Janssen for Production Assistant with today's program. And we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You