Since people are reading this, let me rant a bit:
One of the things you can do, as an individual, to help your local environment, is grow flowers. Even if you live in an apartment, just a flower pot on a windowsill helps - even tiny urban gardens have an outside impact on pollinators.
If you have a yard, you can replace invasive grasses with native species and nectar-rich flowers. Don’t use herbicides or pesticides. Leave leaf litter alone over the winter to provide habitat for insects. Set aside a section to “go wild”. Just like with flower pots, leaving even a small section of lawn without chemicals and frequent mowing can have an outsized impact on pollinators and native insects.
Lawns and gardens are a space where individual effort and individual care for the environment really does matter. You might not be able to reverse climate change, but you can make a migratory monarch butterfly’s day just a little better.
And tell people! Tell people how you are gardening and how you’re managing your lawn, and why. Because the most important thing you can do for the climate is talk about it.
i leased a house and let the backyard grow wild outside of a small barbecue area, maybe 20x20 ft, because it was huge and I wanted to create it safe space for all the critters.
without a single exception, every single neighbor or person who saw it (we had a gate leading into the backyard) asked about it, and when I told them that honey bees visited everyday and we had fireflies at night threw me an expression like I had just explained to them that it was a great place for people to take a shit in public.
There are dozens of us. Dozens! I don’t know whe the fascination for perfectly level lawns, pruned daily by automatic lawnmowers.
i dream of lichen, clover and brush
That makes me think of how people react to Clarisse from Fahrenheit 451. Clarisse’s interest in nature instead of mundane entertainment causes people around her (except the protagonist) to become uncomfortable, and she is forced to go to a therapist because she deviates from the norm.
wow, talk about a book I’d love to read again, good connection with Clarisse.