S6. E12: Edwina Von Gal: For the Birds
“…Two Thirds for the Birds. So what does that mean? That means that going forward, don't look back, don't feel bad about what you've done today… Just for two out of every three plants that you buy for your property going forward, if they are native, you can be sure that you are actually making a measurable substantive difference. You are helping the Earth."
- Edwina Von Gal
A nest/tree house on Edwina’s property
Edwina Von Gal is a landscape designer and an indomitable steward of the planet.
She spent her career designing landscapes for the rich and famous and collaborating with architects and artists like Maya Lin, Richard Serra, and Frank Gehry.
A little over a decade ago, Edwina had an epiphany about the chemicals that we are pouring into our lawns, landscapes, and backyards. She decided right then that it would become her life’s mission to change the way that we treat our land and founded the Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit that promotes toxin-free lawns and landscapes.
A few years ago she expanded the mission. We are losing our birds at an alarming rate. Since the seventies, the United States has lost a third of our bird population. So, to combat the great bird decline, Edwina started Two-Thirds for the Birds - a campaign to bring our birds back. And the way to do that is to dedicate two-thirds of all plantings to native plants and to commit to going toxin-free.
This conversation took place at Edwina’s spectacular home that sits on stilts atop a salt marsh. It was a gift to speak with Edwina about her mission, to learn about the history of chemicals and what we’ve done to our land, and to hear her remarkable stories, all while being surrounded by many, many birds.
Learn More About Two Thirds for the Birds
Learn More About Perfect Earth Project
Watch Edwina’s TEDx Talk
Transcript:
Edwina: [00:00:15] I thought ok, two thirds for the birds. So what does that mean? That means going forward, don't look back. Don't feel bad about what you've done today. That's what it is. Just for two out of every three plants that you buy for your property, going forward. If they are native, you can be sure that you are actually making a measurable, substantive difference. You are helping the Earth.
Elizabeth: [00:00:46] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. For the month of May, June and July, Species Unite is celebrating plant based eating with vegan nights. All that really means, as we would love for you to cook dinner for your friends or your family or your neighbor and make it vegan. On our website, we have downloadable ghost packs with recipes, tips, information to make your vegan night all the more fun and better. So go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and download a host pack and you'll be entered to win one of six, two hundred and seventy five dollar vegan gift baskets that are filled with all sorts of incredible plant based products. This conversation is with Edwina Von Gal, Edwina is a landscape designer. She spent her career designing landscapes for the rich and famous and collaborating with architects and artists like Myelin Annabel Salvador, Richard Serra and Frank Gehry. Halfway through her career, she had an epiphany. Why are we putting all of these toxins into our lawns, our landscapes, our backyards? What is that doing to us, to our families, to our pets and to the planet? So she founded The Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit that promotes toxin free lawns and landscapes. Then a few years ago, she expanded her mission. She started a program called Two Thirds for the Birds because we are losing our birds at an alarming rate. Since the 70s, the United States has lost a third of our bird population. So two thirds for the birds is a campaign to bring our birds back, and the way to do that is to dedicate two thirds of all plantings to native plants. I met with Edwina at her house in Springs in the Hamptons. She lives on a salt marsh, so her house is on stilts and all around us all you could see were birds. So, Edwina, will you just talk about where we are at your home because it's absolutely spectacular?
Edwina: [00:03:21] Well, about 20 years ago, a friend of mine asked me to come look at a house that he heard was on the market and he was always looking at houses. I came along because I was perfectly happy with the house I had. I came to this place and it's a house on stilts. It was designed by Marcel Breuer and it's tiny and it's in a salt marsh looking out over an iconic harbor. There's no other houses around because even when it was built, it was actually not legal, but they goofed. I got permission and then everybody said, Oh, so what? Just leave it because it's just on these tiny little tippy toes in the marsh. So when the tide is super high and we've had a lot of rain and there's a following wind, I have about a foot or two of water under the house. I guess you can hear birds chirping, that those are the red wing blackbirds and there's an osprey nest directly in view. About 50-75 feet right off here off the deck.
Elizabeth: [00:04:38] Yes.
Edwina: [00:04:39] And so in the red wing blackbirds, they actually nest in the marsh. They're flying in and out all the time, and there's a hammock in front of me, which is a slight rise in marshy ecology, which then supports Woody. So there's a bunch of oaks there. It's just a constant, incredible changing display that requires nothing of me. So I came here and the house had been on the market for years.
Elizabeth: [00:05:05] Nobody wanted to live in a marsh?
Edwina: [00:05:07] Well, no, they didn't want to live in a house this small because the cost of the house for what you were getting to most people was too high. But for me, I see the value in the land and luckily I don't really need much space.
Elizabeth: [00:05:26] I mean, it's absolutely it's just like, it's stunning. It's magical. There’s birds all around. You're in the marsh. It's like the best snow globe you could possibly be in.
Edwina: [00:05:37] Oh, you're right. Yeah. It's just a never ending thing. Each day, I’ll never ever get tired of watching the different patterns that emerge. I am seeing sea level rise from a very personal perspective and the marsh is changing and that's become a really interesting component as well, because I'm working with Marsh ecologists and scientists looking at it because I'm their citizen scientist like here, I'm in it. I live in it.
Elizabeth: [00:06:13] I want to go back. You were a landscape designer for many, many years before the environment really took the forefront in your mind, right? Will you talk about that a little bit and how and when that happened before?
Edwina: [00:06:27] Before I was a landscape designer, I was a home gardener.
Elizabeth: [00:06:31] You grew up with parents that were gardeners, right?
Edwina: [00:06:34] I had a grandmother who was a Flower Show judge for the garden club of America, like a national judge. This was like a big deal in those days.
Elizabeth: [00:06:41] So gardening is in your bones.
Edwina: [00:06:42] My mom was president of the local garden club. My dad had a massive vegetable garden and I didn't appreciate at the time how formative that was and how that level of knowledge was really incredibly useful because later on, I come to find people don't even know how to plant a seed. To me, that's my language, you know, but I never expected it to be a career. In those days, it really even wasn't a career. Landscape design was not a career option. So I ended up working in land management for a real estate company and whenever there was anything to do with a garden space at any of the buildings that this company built or managed, they would just say Edwina can handle it. I started doing projects that were so out of my range, but nobody knew the difference. Nobody cared. So I was starting to design real landscapes with zero knowledge, except what I had learned as a gardener on my own. So then I took some time off and worked for a garden center and took architecture courses and all that. But I had never used chemicals on my own property because I was a hippie gardener. We didn't use chemicals. Everything was organic, but I really never asked my clients or thought about, like what was happening on the projects that I did.
Elizabeth: [00:08:12] Sure.
Edwina: [00:08:14] So I opened my own business in 1984. Little by little, it grew, so I started doing bigger and bigger projects and still, like, never really got that involved in the maintenance aspects.
Elizabeth: [00:08:23] Once you kind of watch the scene, it's done.
Edwina: [00:08:25] Yeah, yeah. It's like you get it to a point and you hand it over and never thought it didn't really think much about it. I went to Panama to do a project there and it was all about native plants because like it was a museum of biodiversity and it was about the biodiversity of Panama. So obviously growing exotic plants wasn't going to be like part of the vocabulary because it was about Panama. Panama has this incredible biodiversity. So I was traveling around the country and I got involved with native plant reforestation and started with a group of friends, a small project in a certain area that was highly deforested, which had incredible potential for reforestation. But the way that it was recommended to be done was with chemicals, and I was saying, but why? These are native plants. These are people with no resources and we're teaching them to use chemicals. Does that make sense? I realized that primarily that had to do with the fact that the people I was working with were all coming out of forestry school. It's the same thing. Agricultural ideas, commercially based, are being applied to environmental or ecological or residential. So I would just say, Well, why don't we do it without chemicals? Because what I realized was that the reason they wanted to use chemicals was to make sure that the insects did not invade the growth tips of the plants. Then I said, but that's in order to extract a wood product, correct? And we're trying to create an ecosystem, right? Those are two different goals for the ecosystem.
Elizabeth: [00:10:11] So if the insects didn't eat the plants they didn’t invade? Then the wood would grow really perfect or straight?
Edwina: [00:10:19] Yeah, It's particularly mahogany or some that there's a tip borer that sometimes invades the tip of the plant. So that just means that then the tree grows to tips at the top.
Elizabeth: [00:10:30] Which no one's taking these trees out for right. So why does it matter?
Edwina: [00:10:35] Right. So they want a single leader. They want one tall, straight leader. So sometimes these insects move in and you end up with a tree that's kind of bushy at the top and that's not good for wood.
Elizabeth: [00:10:48] So if you're chopping it down?
Edwina: [00:10:49] Yeah, right? If you're going to sell a timber product, that doesn't work. But I'm saying, wouldn't we prefer that people didn't cut them down?
Elizabeth: [00:10:57] Right, right.
Edwina: [00:10:59] Isn't that kind of our goal? How about that? So anyway, so we did that. We just started this project in Panama and it's now a fully Panamanian project, and they're growing trees that women in the countryside are growing, collecting seeds, growing trees, and selling them to the project. The project then gives them back to farmers to fence off the cattle out of parts of their land and restore their riparian zones primarily. It's working, it's small.
Elizabeth: [00:11:28] But it's a really good example on what it means to plant trees and be successful.
Edwina: [00:11:34] And it is based on a charismatic animal, the acero spider monkey, which we were the first people to collect actual DNA through the poop, collected poop had it tested and and were able for the first time to prove that the acero spider monkey is a distinct subspecies of Italy's Jeffrey I, the spider monkey. So that's our mascot and so everybody knows us as the monkey people, but we're really actually about planting habitat for monkeys. We have seen the spider monkey population, which was red listed, restored. That was not necessarily to healthy levels.
Elizabeth: [00:12:15] But it's coming back.
Edwina: [00:12:16] But it’s past the point of heading for extinction.
Elizabeth: [00:12:19] That is so cool.
Edwina: [00:12:19] So anyway, my dentist one day said to me, Oh, this is really interesting about your project in Panama, because at that point. I think we figured out we were possibly the only non-profit doing native species restoration in the whole world, who was doing it without chemicals. Well, we couldn't find anybody else. So my dentist says to me, I have a piece of land on the water and I do my own landscape because I really love it. But I don't like the fact that I'm using chemicals that I need to find information about how to do it without them. Where do I look? I said, Let me check that out, and I realized, Oh dear, I'm going to have to do this myself. This is the rest of my life and it has been. So that was like 2010 or 2011.
Elizabeth: [00:13:09] So it was kind of like, we're doing this in Panama.
Edwina: [00:13:13] Where I hardly speak the language, where I'm away from home.
Elizabeth: [00:13:23] But the dentist made it click?
Edwina: [00:13:26] Yeah, yeah it just made it click. I’d think, wait a minute. These are the plants I really know. Yeah, this is the place I really know. These are the people I really know. So this is where the rest of my life will be.
Elizabeth: [00:13:40] And has been since.
Edwina: [00:13:41] Yeah, yeah, because I made a promise to this place, I will never leave it. So I just decided, Oh, you're right, I should. I have to do this.
Elizabeth: [00:13:50] And how did you start? How did you start the shift and the change?
Edwina: [00:13:53] I hired a guy to help me. He was amazing. He actually had worked for the DSE in their pesticide control. So he knew everything about pesticides and I knew zip. So that was a really interesting learning curve for me because I knew nothing about lawns and nothing about pesticides. Those are the two biggest components of what people want to know about, from me.
Elizabeth: [00:14:19] No, right now that's your wheelhouse, right?
Edwina: [00:14:21] That's ridiculous. Yeah. But so that's where we really started out, because lawns, depending on whose research you follow, lawns use anything from two to ten times more pesticide per square foot than agriculture. So I figure every square foot residential management I can change is worth a lot.
Elizabeth: [00:14:42] Yeah, yeah. It saves a lot of other species.
Edwina: [00:14:45] Yeah, because it's saving in a way different species than changing agricultural practices is really about saving humans because we're running out of soil, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:14:56] Well, and all the stuff that is in us too far from eating all this crap.
Edwina: [00:15:00] Food is poisoned. Yeah, the whole system is messed up. But that's really all about, that's the human food relationship,
Elizabeth: [00:15:08] And you're feeding everybody else.
Edwina: [00:15:09] Wait a minute. That's what I'm doing. I'm feeding everybody else. Yeah, if I can position it that way, because at first it was just really about ‘got to get rid of the chemicals.’ And that's kind of negative and it's scary and it's hard for people to grasp because it's also somewhat removed. There's nothing visible about it.
Elizabeth: [00:15:31] Well, it's not a replacement, right? It's not, do this, instead of that, it's do nothing.
Edwina: [00:15:36] You know, the biggest first question is for me, when I suggest to people, because you said, What do you tell people? The first thing people ask me is great, what do I buy? It's fun for me, not for them, to say nothing.
Elizabeth: [00:15:48] Right?
Edwina: [00:15:51] Absolutely nothing. You're going to create a closed loop on your property. If we can't close the loop on our non-agricultural lands, we can't close the loop on the Earth. It's that simple. Every single property, no matter how tiny, even a window box is a microcosm of our relationship to nature.
Elizabeth: [00:16:15] What we've done to the planet from soil on up, is massive destruction. Now it's so in us, it's not even a should I be doing this or is this OK? Those questions are, you know, very few and far between for most people and that's how they have been conditioned.
Edwina: [00:16:34] Yes, because we had villages, then we had wars that were territorial and so they caused more destruction. Then religion came in and turned people toward a different power structure. So nature was no longer a benevolent power in your life. It was something that your power was going to exceed. Their size was the ultimate example of the right of the king, and it was all based on the fact that he could control that much land where people could go outdoors safely. So like if you look at old woodcuts and things, you see people sitting in their gardens and then the surrounding woodlands are shown filled with terrifying animals with their tongues and fangs sticking out. If you had the power, the wealth and power, you would create this oast oasis of calm and safety. So that was further imprinting on nature as others. Then the current moment was really defined by the wars during which chemicals were created for warfare, but then became actually agricultural and horticultural chemicals. Ammonium nitrate used for bombs and it's also fertilizer. It's pure nitrogen fertilizer.
Elizabeth: [00:18:02] What war was this?
Edwina: [00:18:03] It was actually developed in the First World War, but it was used most extensively in the second. The first World War was when they really started using chemicals in warfare and for bomb making. It all came together at about the same time. The world was entering this new technological age. Ammonium nitrate was actually what they used, the fertilizers, was what they used for the Oklahoma bombings. It was fertilizer because that was a massive bomb.
Elizabeth: [00:18:31] Yeah.
Edwina: [00:18:32] And you can't go out and buy that much dynamite without being noticed, but you sure can go out and buy that much fertilizer.
Elizabeth: [00:18:34] So when they created these for World War one, who made the connection that said, hey, we can kill all the bugs and everything else around us with the same stuff?
Edwina: [00:18:44] Well, the fertilizers were for bombs and then also after the First World War began what they called the Green Revolution, which is a little confusing because there was in today's use of the word green, nothing green about it. It was about loading our crops with fertilizer. But what it did was it brought high yields to places that didn't have high yields before. Of course, it ruined the soil. There were a lot of other side effects, but for the first time, we started feeding the Earth's population in a way that could sustain our population growth.
Elizabeth: [00:19:39] Ok.
Edwina: [00:19:42] Then they also developed these chemicals that turned out to be great insecticides. Those really came into being in the Second World War and then went on to become famous in Vietnam as Agent Orange and stuff. Many of them remain in reduced forms as popular products for the American lawn.
Elizabeth: [0019:44] Still today?
Edwina: [00:19:45] Oh yeah. And what we're learning about them is that they are hormone disruptors and nervous system disruptors. They're very sophisticated. So after DDT got banned, they started looking for alternatives. Nobody said, Wait a minute, this chemical stuff is a bad idea. Let's look at nature based solutions. Nobody thought about it. Nobody thought that because it was all based on agriculture. So now you have all these hungry mouths to feed and you've got to keep feeding them and then you got the government subsidizing you. This is a big ball rolling and it wasn't going to go backwards. But the thing where I stand, is that all of this sophisticated chemistry that was created as farms grew bigger and bigger and more massive was then being rolled into horticulture. When I use the word horticulture, I really mean all stuff that is being created as non-product.
Elizabeth: [00:20:39] So everything that's not what we eat?
Edwina: [00:20:42] It's not extractive. So there could be forestry as well as what we're eating.
Elizabeth: [00:20:43] Ok.
Edwina: [00:20:44] But we're growing things and we're taking it away from the place where it was grown constantly. So that's an extraction.
Elizabeth: [00:20:48] Ok.
Edwina: [00:20:49] So the food cycle, the food web, that breaks the food loop. So the soil is growing plants and you're sucking it out.
Elizabeth: [00:21:06] Ok, taking it away.
Edwina: [00:20:07] Taking it away. So that you have to put something back. You have to get inputs into the ground or your soil is simply going to be sucked dry after a while. So that is the agricultural system. That system, then, because it was a well-developed, well-funded, easy to apply system, got just immediately adopted by horticulture.
Elizabeth: [00:21:36] And horticultural is everything else from people's yards to parks.
Edwina: [00:21:40] Yeah, it's ornamental, recreational. Basically, ornamental and recreational. So it's your backyard. It's all your county's own land. It's roadsides. It's a lot of land of which 40 million acres is now lawn, which is America's largest irrigated crop.
Elizabeth: [00:22:04] So did it happen right around the same time, like, ‘hey, this is working, we're killing everything, we can kill all your bugs, too.’
Edwina: [00:22:09] Yeah, so that happened after the Second World War. So just think about it. So atrazine and 240, the two main herbicides that came out of the Second World War were used to kill the enemy crops because they would spray over the land so that they couldn't feed their troops, right? In Vietnam, it was used to clear the jungle.
Elizabeth: [00:22:30] You would think maybe we shouldn't put it in our backyard?
Edwina: [00:22:33] Yeah, but so then they brought them home and said, and just by this really interesting coincidence, there was the GI Bill, which brought us the birth of the American suburb because people left the cities to work. They left their farms because suddenly they had a chance at a different kind of life and farming was tough. So more and more people abandoned their farms, but they also abandoned that in any inner-city life for a suburban life. Suddenly it's a whole new landscape for them. Suddenly, the suburban model was that you had a front yard and a street that was all laid out perfectly on an urban plan. But in the countryside, you just gobble up a field, plop this down and everything looks like barracks because Levittown was really based on a military model because everybody's coming back from the war. They're totally stressed out. They didn't know about PTSD then.
Elizabeth: [00:23:37] Right
Edwina: [00:23:38] What else could it have been? So what makes you comfortable but the entity that saved the world, the military, right?
Elizabeth: [00:23:44] Right.
Edwina: [00:23:48] So every lawn had to look like a military haircut and every home looked like a barracks.
Elizabeth: [00:23:54] This is kind of how the suburbs were developed.
Edwina: [00:23:57] Yeah. That started in Levittown. Right here on Long Island. And funny thing, the same town was where Scott Seed Company was. So Scott Seed Company developed these seed and lawn products. These war surplus chemicals were really cheap.
Elizabeth: [00:24:21] Ok
Edwina: [00:24:22] They were surplus. They just bought them up so you could dump them. Then the idea was that the front yard of your home should look like everybody else's front yard. So they decided in a way to vilify dandelions because dandelions are really easy to see. Like way down the street, your neighbor has dandelions. That's, you know, socially unacceptable. That was just like, you can't have that. So this was what people did with their free time, creating a war with dandelions.
Elizabeth: [00:24:50] This is insane that something as cute and little as a dandelion, by destroying it, has caused so much mass destruction.
Edwina: [00:24:56] Exactly because dandelions actually are not native. But like many other plants that came and have been here for so long, they've actually adapted very well and they actually provide some good ecosystem services. They poke calcium down into the soil. They're a great pioneer species. So they started using the broadleaf killers to kill the dandelions, but Scott Seed always included Clover in their seed mixes prior to this time, because Clover has a really great symbiotic relationship with grass that makes a healthier lawn. In addition, it's a legume, so it's nitrogen fixing, so it provides nitrogen to the lawn. But so now they're putting the broadleaf killer on to get rid of dandelions.
Elizabeth: [00:25:45] And everybody's putting this in their yard.
Edwina: [00:25:47] Yeah, yeah. Well, that's like the thing to keep up with your neighbor. It was so easy. You just buy this bag of stuff and you put it on your lawn. But unfortunately, the broadleaf killer kills clover as well as dandelions. So Scotts thought, Oh dear, but wait a minute. This is actually an opportunity because without the clover, we can sell more nitrogen fertilizer. So they then mounted campaigns to make Clover bad and so now people hate Clover, and they hate dandelions. From a marketing perspective, I find that really interesting because they're both very charming flowers.
Elizabeth: [00:26:33] Yeah.
Edwina: [00:26:34] And so what better way to still have an attractive package? So you're pointing your death ray at something, but still, you can put it on the cover of your package and your package looks nice.
Elizabeth: [00:26:44] That's so true. So true. Wow.
Edwina: [00:26:49] Yeah, these plants play an important role. All things do. Like, should we kill every mosquito on Earth?
Elizabeth: [00:27:00] No.
Edwina: [00:27:03] Yeah, it would take a big chunk out of the food chain. So what I'm looking at now is. Landscapes play a role that we have effectively scrubbed out of them, but they are the food for all other life because our agricultural systems do not provide food for anyone but humans. That's what they're designed to do to feed us, and we don't want to share any of it because that reduces the profitability of farming. So you have the food for humans. And then what about the food for everything else? So all the animals in the world that need plants and that we have either removed from their habitat or sprayed so that we kill them when they land on them or when they try to access them because we don't want them to eat our plants in our yards. But our yards are their last refuge.
Elizabeth: [00:27:58] So therefore people don't really have any insects, caterpillars, bugs in their yards anymore.
Edwina: [00:28:08] Correct.
Elizabeth: [00:28:09] Or very few, and they don't stick around very long.
Edwina: [00:28:07] That's for a couple of reasons. One is because the current fashion in horticulture, well, it's been this way for a long, long time. It's like planting the things that aren't of the place. So you move into a place and you move there because you think it looks really nice. The first thing you do is replace all the plants with foreigners, so they haven't evolved there. So they, it's really interesting. Something like 90 percent of the insects in an area are specific to the native plants, and they really cannot live their life in a landscape with exotic plants. So people are going to the nurseries and thinking, Well, maybe I don't have to spray so much if I buy something that's sold as nothing will eat it. But then you have to think about that. Ok, here's a plant that nothing will eat. That's like dead. Like, as far as your ecosystem is concerned, it might as well not exist.
Elizabeth: [00:29:08] May as well be plastic.
Edwina: [00:29:09] Exactly. Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:29:10] I just think the more we connect because we've just been so conditioned not to connect anymore, what happens when there aren't any caterpillars or there aren't any, certain kinds of bugs or insects in the yard and what happens to everybody else?
Edwina: [00:29:24] I am now working on this thing that I'm calling two thirds for the birds because people do respond very emotionally to birds. In North America, since the nineteen seventies, we've lost about a third of our bird population, which counts in at about three billion birds. The primary reasons are loss of habitat and use of pesticides. Habitat is food, shelter and water. So food and shelter is basically native plants because native plants have the insects on them. So those caterpillars and all the little bugs that birds eat need those plants. Plus those plants provide fruit and seeds. According to Doug Ptolemy, a chickadee needs six to nine thousand caterpillars to raise one nest of young. For a chickadee population to remain stable and to go back to its original numbers, a chickadee needs to raise two or three nests of young every year in the season. They can't travel that far to find all those caterpillars because that would be just too much time and work. So you figure maybe a quarter of a mile max that means like your house and a small circle around it. Are you providing in one season at the minimum, eighteen thousand caterpillars, because if you have a chickadee, nest and your neighbors have a chickadee, nest and their neighbors like that means each of you really has to have that many caterpillars in your property.
Elizabeth: [00:31:05] And nobody has any caterpillars anymore, right? I mean, very few people.
Edwina: [00:31:08] Not if you spray. And if you call someone because you see caterpillars on your tree or you see a little munching and, well, they're in the business, the pay is in the spray, so they're going to recommend spraying, you can count on that. Trees can pretty much easily give up 10 to 20 percent of their leaf surface every year. They are the salad bar.
Elizabeth: [00:31:35] I love thinking of trees as a salad bar.
Edwina: [00:31:36] All your plants are, because native plants, if you think about it, like what else is feeding everything on Earth? Other than humans? What else? It all starts with the food. So like every single wildlife you see out there needs a plant at some point in its lifecycle. Or depends on something that eats plants. So it moves up the food chain if you're spraying. So even if they're not directly impacted by the fact that the caterpillars are gone, they might be eating fruit that's contaminated with an insecticide that is systemic like the neonicotinoids because people put poisons in the soil it goes into the system of the plant, that's why it's called a systemic, so it permeates the entire plant like 100 percent. That means the pollen, the nectar, the leaves, the flowers, that's the one that's been causing decimating the bee population. Yeah and the crazy thing is, of course, that plants now being sold as pollinator plants are often grown with neonics. So, basically you're putting out a poison feast.
Elizabeth: [00:32:55] Oh my gosh.
Edwina: [00:32:55] But so some of the big box stores are really starting to address that due to people who have made this ridiculousness clear to them and they are starting. But it's very, very hard to know when you go to buy plants, whether they've been treated with neonics. So I would strongly recommend if you're buying plants for a pollinator garden that if you can't ascertain the entire lifecycle of that plant, its origins from the very beginning. Shop somewhere else, shop local, shop from someone who's growing. There are lots of wonderful places now that are popping up in neighborhoods that are growing their own native plants or you could join a garden club. A lot of people are propagating their own and sharing them. It's a nice way to support your native Audubon or other garden club activities.
Elizabeth: [00:33:43] I would think that after this year of COVID, where so many people slowed down and started paying more attention to begin with, that was like a good opener for a lot of people to do the right thing and people had time to learn more. For Two Thirds for the Birds, it's two thirds of whatever's on your land should be native, is that kind of right?
Edwina: [00:34:06] Ideally that's what I do. That's the ultimate goal. The way the two thirds came about is also, Doug, tell me who's really done. He's kind of the god of backyard habitat, but he doesn't call it backyard anymore because it's your whole property. Why not the front yard too. He's an entomologist, and so he, as a scientist, has carefully done the research, and he and his grad students determined that a bird should have about 70 percent native plants in its native range and its home range in order to maintain a stable population. And one of the big things about the bird dying off, which is interesting and heartbreaking as well, is that the biggest losses in the bird species are our common grassland birds, not not the exotic endangered ones that live in some forest or wetland because those places are protected, right? So their habitat is not being destroyed and they are not being sprayed. But we tend to inhabit grasslands. That's the perfect place for people to live. It's flat. It's easy to take over. So we are replacing bird habitat with our landscapes, but we are not sharing very well. So we are not providing what the birds needed and were actually removing what the birds needed in order to thrive there.
Edwina: [00:35:39] So when I heard about the bird loss and then when I read Doug Ptolemy's research, I realized, well, loss of habitat, use of pesticides. That's my wheelhouse. It's a long uphill battle getting people to feel emotionally concerned about the loss of plants. So what if I just made it about the loss of birds?
Elizabeth: [00:36:09] Yeah.
Edwina: [00:36:10] Since 70 percent is around two thirds, if we need 70 percent native plants and it rhymes with birds, I thought, OK, two thirds to the birds. So what does that mean? That means going forward, don't look back. Don't feel bad about what you've done today. That's what it is. Just for two out of every three plants that you buy for your property, going forward, if they are native, you can be sure that you are actually making a measurable, substantive difference. You are helping the Earth. But along with that, you cannot spray. We are actually asking people, if you insist that you must spray for whatever reason, please do not plant pollinators, because think about it, you're attracting pollinators and then you're spraying them.
Elizabeth: [00:] No one is connecting this, right? Like, that's crazy. That's literally like, you're trapping them too. It's like, I can't.
Edwina: [00:37:03] I try not to say it in a vicious way, like too harsh.
Elizabeth: [00:37:06] People don't connect.
Edwina: [00:37:11] It’s like, you're building a death trap.
Elizabeth: [00:37:12] You're literally like bringing them in so you can annihilate them.
Edwina: [00:37:20] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:37:23] So when people hear you say stop all pesticides, stop everything in your yard. What's a lot of the reaction to that and what happens when they do stop?
Edwina: [00:37:27] Well, if they ask their landscape guy, yeah, the most likely response they will get is that, well, it costs more and it doesn't work.
Elizabeth: [00:37:36] To not spray it costs more?
Edwina: [00:37:39] It costs more.
Elizabeth: [00:37:40] What costs more, though?
Edwina: [00:37:42] That's a really good question. I mean, it depends on what they're spraying for. So they say, OK, we stop using these chemicals and they're building fear and people are afraid of that, I don't really know. Suddenly it's going to be messy. I think messy is the really operative word these days. People don't want to be messy.
Elizabeth: [00:38:05] OK?
Edwina: [00:38:07] Because messy implies a certain loss of control, and everybody's really anxious. Anxiety requires you to be standing there, looking out the window and if there's one tiny patch of brown in your lawn or a leaf out of place or a line that's not straight, you're on it. Or you can say this is my opportunity to look at this party that's happening out here and get to know who's at the party.
Elizabeth: [00:38:37] That's the disconnect right.
Edwina: [00:38:39] Their lives are in your hands, right? They are. In a way, to my mind, it's how can I actually be less responsible for their lives by putting the plants that evolved here? When I started gardening, I wanted to grow the rarest, most unusual, the thing that nobody else had, the thing that nobody else could grow. That's what gardeners traditionally did. Like, you got your chops as a gardener. If you could grow them like something that doesn't belong here, right? Because then everybody could go, Oh my gosh, you've got that. Oh, I'm so jealous. And now I just want the stuff that doesn't need me.
Elizabeth: [00:39:24] Yes.
Edwina: [00:39:25] I just want to relax, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:39:26] Like, I mean, you can look at just so many things on this planet and say, like, what have we done? What have we done? It's literally any direction you look. We've done some terrible damage.
Edwina: [00:39:31] But this one is so easy. This one is just so easy because so back to what your landscape is going to tell you. So what they're going to do is take the chemical products that they're using and replace them with organic products, but they're not going to change behavior at all. So they're going to continue maintaining your lawn and landscape in a way that is based on this extractive model, where they're chopping everything and taking it to the landfill, just chopping and taking it away and chopping and taking it away. When you cut a plant, when you prune something that's a wound every time you take a plant and meatball it, that's like a thousand cuts. So that plant is in a constant state of crisis and so you can keep it alive, but you're juicing it to keep it alive. So you have drip irrigation on it and you're fertilizing it and you're spraying it. There's this old saw that's the right plant, the right place to which I paid zero attention for so much of my gardening life. You know, like that was boring, right? It seemed so confining. Now I realize how freeing it is because basically, if you get the soil right and the ecosystem right and everything right, that plant is on its own. It's like, when do you get to the point that you're an empty nester and you're happy about it because like the kids have flown, but hey, this is good. I can do stuff.
Elizabeth: [00:41:01] Well the kids have flown. But where we're sitting, there are a lot of nests.
Edwina: [00:41:10] True. Not an empty nest.
Elizabeth: [00:41:11] No, you're not an empty nester. So truly, everybody can be doing something in terms of reversing this.
Edwina: [00:41:15] Yeah, easily. Like easily. The first thing is, let go, walk out your door and think, What do I look at that I feel I've got to fix? Rethink that, is that really something that needs you to chop it, fertilize it or fuss with it? What if you went the other way? What if you pulled back and let it express itself? So there's this saying: apply the ten step program to your insect management plan, which is if you see some nibbling, if you take 10 steps back, youre not going to see it.
Elizabeth: [00:41:59] You're not going to say you're not going to see it. That's actually really good.
Edwina: [00:42:03] Yeah, let go. Just relax. Two thirds for the birds are primarily targeted. So who is my audience? You know, that's the other thing. But so is my initial audience, because I feel so personally attached to the fact that no one in my profession should ever, ever again make a landscape or design a landscape that does not meet this basic criteria for everything else on Earth. That is not human oriented. If you can't meet that, the basic two thirds. Some of them have said to me, Oh, that's a low bar, and others argue with me about why it doesn't work. Interesting. So you want to continue to be part of the problem. You're creating a space that you then know is contributing to the bird's decline. So how do I embed this into the profession of landscape design and landscape architecture? So it becomes, you wouldn't even think of not creating a place that provides habitat, food, shelter, water?
Elizabeth: [00:43:17] That's how it should evolve.
Edwina: [00:43:20] That static landscape is attractive, no.
Elizabeth: [00:43:25] Right?
Edwina: [00:43:29] No, there's nothing happening there. It's dead. Isaac Mizrahi had the best line for it. He said to me, Oh, I get it. It's like a bad facelift. It never ages, but it's trying to age and it can't. It's hard for me to look at a conventional static landscape again without thinking of him. So what's the first thing to do is to change your perception and your expectations? And yeah, let go open yourself to the unexpected, because it's a whole lot more interesting.
Elizabeth: [00:44:04] This is how it starts, right? I mean, it has to start somewhere.
Edwina: [00:44:08] This is how it starts, what's wonderful is that the moment is happening. And it's not it's not me. It's way bigger. It's happening. People are talking about pollinator pathways. Kids in school are saving bees and people want a patch of wildness on their property. Little by little, hopefully that will move on through and they'll have less and less lawn and more and more.
Elizabeth: [00:44:36] And we'll look back at this like crazy as you call the military lawns, and it'll be a really bizarre chapter, right?
Edwina: [00:44:44] Ideally, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:44:45] Yeah, I love it. Thank you, Edwina. This has been really, really cool. I mean, it's obviously like life changing for many, many species, but it's also just like, let's bring the beauty back and that's what you're doing.
Edwina: [00:44:50] Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:44:52] You’re bringing life back and the beauty back.
Edwina: [00:45:03] Yeah, I hope so.
Elizabeth: [00:45:05] You are.
Edwina: [00:45:06] Thanks.
Elizabeth: [00:45:18] To learn more about Edwina, about two thirds for the birds and about A Perfect Earth, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything, we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate, review and subscribe to Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we'd greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Cronuts, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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