It is wonderful to see inspired ideas catch on – especially the ones that encourage us all to take action and explain how those small actions can prove vital.

Michaela Haas interviewed Doug Tallamy, the University of Delaware entomologist who developed the idea of Homegrown National Parks. It is a nonprofit that encourages people to replace conventional lawns with native habitat and register their efforts on a nationwide biodiversity map, and it is growing.

The initiative has now grown to over 52,000 registered participants who tend to more than 187,000 acres all over the United States.

In her story for Reasons to be Cheerful, The ‘National Park’ That Stretches From Coast to Coast, Michaela tells the ‘origin story’ of the idea.

Doug and his wife Cindy bought a 300-year-old 10-acre farm in rural Pennsylvania in 2000, and it seemed very green. But it was green for the wrong reasons –  it was overrun by invasive plants with few pollinators. So he set out to change that – and it turned out to be surprisingly simple.

He weeded out invasives and put native plants back. “I think in the last 26 years we spent about $100,” he told Michaela. “Because I simply go get seeds and put them in the ground.” And that is something all of us can do, he says.

“Nearly 80 percent of land east of the Mississippi is privately owned, and 135 million acres are now in residential landscapes,” he says. “That puts the private property owner in charge of conservation. If 10 to 20 percent of landowners planted native plants, this would add up to a habitat larger than 10 Yellowstones.”

That is what led him to propose connecting the national park ‘islands’ to private lands through Homegrown National Park, as a way to help people understand that our life support rests on healthy natural systems. “They make your oxygen, they manage your watershed, they minimize extreme weather conditions, sequester carbon to help [mitigate] climate change,” he says. “They’re doing all kinds of things to keep you alive on this planet.”

Restoring native plant communities is essential to safeguarding the natural systems we all depend on: clean air and water, food production, and climate stability.

Doug’s 2020 book, “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard,” introduced the idea. Then he created the online Homegrown National Park campaign.

I wrote about this campaign in Hopebuilding in 2022. At the time, I noted that he had taught insect-related course for 41 years, authored 106 research publications, won many awards, and written four books: Bringing Nature Home, The Living Landscape, co-authored with Rick Darke, Nature’s Best Hope, a New York Times bestseller, and The Nature of Oaks. 

His latest book How Can I Help? Saving Nature with Your Yard argues that it is everyone’s responsibility to help take care of the healthy ecosystems on which we rely.

 “Everything we plant, don’t plant, or apply to our yard impacts the greater ecosystem in which our yard exists, and thus everything that depends on that ecosystem,” he says. “When you read that we’ve lost three billion breeding birds and have 22 percent fewer butterflies just since the year 2000, global insect decline, two-thirds of wildlife gone — that’s upsetting to a lot of people,” he says. “Even if they don’t know anything about biology, they don’t want to hear that everything on the planet is dying.”

Their Mosquito Bucket Challenge aims to encourage people to take action against mosquitoes in their yards without killing caterpillars, fireflies, dragonflies, pollinators, and other wildlife through fogging – spraying pesticides.

But what if you don’t have a yard? One of their blog posts has an answer – container growing.

“For me, the best part isn’t the flowers,” says science lead Krista De Cooke. “It’s the relationships. Every time I walk out the front door and see a bumblebee working a bloom, I get a little spark of joy.

“What surprised me most wasn’t that the plants survived. It was how quickly wildlife found them. Even with just a handful of containers, bees, butterflies, and other insects showed up. The first time I noticed multiple bee species visiting flowers on my front steps throughout the day, I realized these weren’t just containers anymore. They were habitat.”