What if there were a homeowners association for chipmunks, mosses, bees, and trees?

My neighbors took down 30-foot trees and planted 18-inch American flags in their place. Staggered with military precision, each one a few feet apart from the next, the polyester banners sagged in the slow July breeze. They were dwarfed by the doomed woods behind them, looking not so much like stalwart defenders of the American dream as resigned mercenaries on the front lines of a suburbia-vs.-nature battlefield.

Next to the driveway, where wildflowers used to beckon bees and birds, there is now a raised bed filled with vinca flowers. Catharanthus roseus is endangered in its homeland of Madagascar, and it might as well be a plastic plant for wildlife here, but no matter: It provides a splash of color, and you can get it on sale for $5.99 at Home Depot.

Festive flags hang from the mailbox, rotated periodically. “This is Birdland,” one flag declared in the spring, showing a cartoon image of the mascot for the Baltimore Orioles. April is the start of baseball season. It’s also the start of the season of chainsaws. Every few weeks since then, when conditions are right for people to be outside and machines to make sharp cuts, more trees—the former homes of screech owls, bluebirds, cardinals, goldfinches, tufted titmice, and chickadees—have come toppling to the ground.

A few years ago, the property was owned by a couple with different sensibilities. In their two decades caring for those two acres, they counted at least 100 bird species visiting or residing there. Filled with redbuds and sweetgums, cherries and pine trees, birdbaths and an extensive garden of wildflowers in the backyard, it really was a magical birdland. To say it’s become a no-man’s land now wouldn’t be quite accurate; it’s more like an only-man’s land.

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An owl came to my sister’s garden last month, and she happily escorted her sunbathing cats off the deck and safely inside. She knows that owls, too, need space to live, and does not begrudge them their predatory ways. Over the years her garden and the adjacent parkland have hosted everyone from Eastern phoebes to summer tanagers, turtles to foxes, bumblebees to swallowtail butterflies. Her husband is a passionate gardener, and he has converted most of his flower beds to native plants so other creatures can enjoy his passions with him.

For this, my sister and brother-in-law now stand accused. Of what, we’re not sure. Demonizing their “environmentally sensitive agenda” in rambling, vitriolic letters, a lawyer for their homeowners association attacks them for adding “plantings which grow back every year.” He uses single quotes around words and concepts he views as suspicious, describing the property as containing “a ‘garden’ without the use of pesticides in which they have maintained ‘native plants’ to provide food for birds, bees and other insects and animals.” Such a life-giving landscape, he writes, has no place in a planned community.

Though my sister’s case is especially inexplicable, its outlines are taken from an antiquated playbook. Among the supposed crimes against suburban humanity that unenlightened HOAs pursue with particular vigor are pine cones left under pine trees, seedheads left up for birds, violets running rebelliously through turfgrass. No plant is safe. At a presentation to a local arboretum in June, I was excited to convey the virtues of mosses—their role in mitigating erosion, the shelter they give to insects and amphibians, the velvety cushion they make in bird nests—only to be brought back to paved-over earth by an audience member with some disappointing news: “We’d love to have moss,” she said. “But my HOA won’t let us, and my neighbor was just cited for it.”

From the chipmunks who spread those trespassing mosses as they scurry along fallen logs to the specialist bees who rely on renegade violets to feed their young, nature has its own planned communities, complete with its own homebuilders and grocery stores and exquisite designs, many of them hundreds of thousands of years in the making. But there are no intentional developments for violets and bees, no homeowners associations to force compliance with the desires of chipmunks and mosses.

At a hearing in early September, the single complaining neighbor angrily told my sister’s HOA board that the sight of her flowers made his blood pressure rise. The HOA lawyer feigned shock when the language of his bullying letters was read back to him, denying having repeatedly accused my sister and her husband of intending to attract mosquitoes, snakes, mice, and (horror of horrors) birds—all animals who would be present in their forested neighborhood with or without a garden. Realizing he’d already lost that point, he took a different tack, pronouncing with more than a touch of sarcasm that “your quote-unquote garden is invading your yard.” He turned to the six-panel board: “Should landscaping be intended for decoration?”

“Landscaping is supposed to be intended for decoration,” the board president parroted.

“Especially the front yard,” another board member chimed in, while a third nodded his head vigorously. The remaining members sat still, perhaps not agreeing, perhaps not understanding the question—but complicit in their silence, signaling tacit approval of a decades-old, industrial-scale suburban war on nature.

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Hawaiians have a saying, Limua ka moku, or The land is moss-covered. Its deeper meaning, according to one Hawaiian dictionary, refers to a tranquil place, since moss grows where humans don’t. Or, as another notes: “There is peace in the land, and no wars to disturb it.”

On islands with a long history of foreign invasion, where the number of introduced species dwarfs those native to the region, moss still thrives in forgotten places: oceanside boulders too steep to climb, strip mall walls too lowly to attract notice. It grows in the increasingly narrow spaces between golf courses and resorts, on rocks and hard places where volcanic terrain appears to be the only barrier left to development.

“Makahū’ena Estates,” a sign read behind us as my husband and I walked the cliffs of Poipu in July. “Prime Oceanfront Subdivision … 10 Lots Ranging in Size from 1.001 – 1.535 Acres.” Beyond the path, facing the ocean, were acres of newly laid sod being watered in by a series of sprinklers. If it weren’t so heartbreaking, the sight of this anemic human attempt to control nature would have been comical, as the backdrop of giant waves crashed against ancient boulders to remind us of our own impermanence.

Ahead on the path, a smaller sign alerted us to the presence of some of the few wild residents who’d been spared by the construction project, if only because they hang out in cliff pockets that developers haven’t yet figured out how to exploit: “Wedge-tailed Shearwater (Ua’u kani) Nesting Area. Nocturnal (active at night). Please help protect Kauai’s seabirds!” It was in these spaces where we also found mosses, clinging for dear life on rocks littered with plastic bottle caps and cigarette butts—a microcosm of the differences between people and these ancient plants that Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses:

The patterns of reciprocity by which mosses bind together a forest community offer us a vision of what could be. They take only the little that they need and give back in abundance. Their presence supports the life of rivers and clouds, trees, birds, algae, and salamanders, while ours puts them at risk. Human-designed systems are a far cry from this ongoing creation of ecosystem health, taking without giving back. Clear-cuts may meet the short-term desires of one species, but at the sacrifice of equally legitimate needs of mosses and murrelets, salmon and spruce. I hold tight to the vision that someday soon we will find the courage of self-restraint, the humility to live like mosses. On that day, when we rise to give thanks to the forest, we may hear the echo in return, the forest giving thanks to the people.

Back home in Maryland, a rainy season has encouraged mosses to weave themselves into new spots, their ethereal shades of green softening the hard edges of my garden, growing on bricks and around pavers, in stumps and over molehills left to their own devices. I encourage moss under trees and hope the Japanese stiltgrass and European ground ivy and feral turfgrasses of unknown origin won’t find it, but they always do, inserting themselves into the patches as if they owned the place.

Sometimes I’ve thought myself lucky to at least live in a community where there are few rules, or where, as another neighbor recently reminded me while he raked up grass clippings on his closely snipped lawn directly across the street from my riotous garden, “It’s a good thing we don’t have an HOA.” I can do what I want, for the most part. I can grow milkweed by the roadside for monarchs, add decaying stumps along my driveway for woodpeckers, leave tree snags for the beetles and birds and butterflies and raccoons.

What I can’t do, though, is prevent the couple in the cul-de-sac from hounding county officials to demand the butchering of street trees that brush the roof of their oversized RV. I can’t stop the man at the other end of the road from shooting foxes. And I can’t prohibit my new neighbors from turning their once wooded lot into a Stumptown.

“They are making it their own,” the mother of the wife told me when I ventured over to introduce myself as she walked their dog around the front yard. She’d been staying there while waiting out a devastating storm blowing past her South Carolina home, the kind that’s increasingly common in the age of climate change. She seemed kind as she looked around the newly barren yard and smiled. She was also proud of her kids’ efforts, equating putting down roots with uprooting all the trees.

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Another fabric banner now decorates that nearly treeless front property, waving from the mailbox. “Land of the Free,” it declares above a picture of the stars and stripes—a kind of flag within a flag, its colors already fading in the sunlight bearing down where once there was filtered shade.

During the nearly 20 years since we moved here, other human neighbors have come and gone, sometimes multiple times from the same house, in a frenzy of arrivals and departures, packing and unpacking, mowing and chopping down and mulching and replanting with miscanthus, barberry, burning bush, nandina and other mass-produced plants known to harm wildlife habitat. As people transplant themselves from community to community, living like the generalist species they are—building and eating and driving and taking resources wherever and however they want to—they forget about the animals who can’t do that, the turtles with the two-acre ranges and the bees with the highly specialized diets and the hummingbirds who’ve been stopping here in the same patches for generations. In our attempts to sell to the highest bidder, we ignore the many wild residents of our communities who can’t bid at all.

In the “Land of the Free,” even the most basic freedoms—including the freedom from being sprayed, mowed down, yanked out, trapped, and shot—are denied these creatures. As Benjamin Vogt points out in his book A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future:

We live in a world of perfectly spaced plants that mimic headstones aligned in exact intervals. Wood mulch is more important to us than flowers. We clean up our gardens like they are living rooms after the children have gone to bed. We mow the world back on roadsides, hellstrips, business frontages, vacant lots, and parklands, beating any sense of wonder, awe, or love into submission. We’ve even set up laws that mandate this sort of forced submission upon nature to the point that any deviation from this norm is believed to be highly seditious, unpatriotic, undemocratic, and worth getting reported by a neighbor.

Equating homeownership with patriotism and lawns with manly duty helped the earliest developers of mass planned communities keep their “citizenry” in line. William Levitt, the builder of the famous cookie-cutter Levittowns, issued fines to home buyers who failed to mow their lawns every week, declaring that “no man who owns a house and lot can be a Communist, he has too much to do.” But his targets included more than Communists and “weeds”; anyone who wasn’t white was explicitly barred from buying a home. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, around the time my parents moved into their Levitt-built house in Bowie, Maryland, that the company pledged to end its practice of racial discrimination.

Levitt’s story has long fascinated me, as it apparently has long fascinated the man we are resigned to call our president. Of course, Donald Trump and I have entirely different reasons for our interest. He featured Levitt in his book “How to Get Rich” and in his infamous Boy Scout speech, lauding the developer as a “master” whose late-life failures conveyed important career lessons. I highlight Levitt here as a leader in the 20^th century’s downhill slide into highly eroded, degraded, contaminated soils across tens of millions of acres of residential property now devoid of the creatures who once made their lives there—a mistreatment of land and living beings that cannot be separated from the way humans often mistreat each other.

When Vogt was saddled this summer with a municipal weed ordinance citation in Nebraska, he successfully fought back by taking inspectors through his prairie garden and naming the plants, one by one, as he explained their broader place in the natural world. To know something is to love it, or, at the very least, to understand it a little more. “If ignorance and racism are erased when we travel and experience other peoples and cultures,” Vogt recently wrote, “what happens to speciesism and mass extinction when we learn the language and lives of birds, bees, wasps, spiders, beetles, and moths?”

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Hanau ka po ia honu kua nanaka: “From the darkness of time,” goes a Hawaiian creation story, “came the sea turtle with its plated back.”

The green sea turtle is a global animal, swimming the waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. But in Hawaii, the turtles have a special name—honu—and they are genetically distinct from all others. Surviving since the age of the dinosaurs, these gentle giants loom large in stories and legends, alternately serving as friends and protectors, good luck symbols and messengers, foundations of islands, living canoes, and ambassadors of the sea who connected people with their lands.

But there was a time when those stories were increasingly difficult to tell. In 1896, three years after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the last Hawaiian queen, a new law prohibited the use of the Hawaiian language in schools. When the people of Hawaii could no longer learn and teach in their own words, their language faced eventual extinction. And so, too, did the beloved honu. Having lived alongside Hawaiians for centuries, they were now subject to severe overharvesting.

Over the past three decades, though, Hawaiian green sea turtle nesting rates have increased by more than 50 percent, and the origins of that comeback may go beyond their placement on the endangered species list in 1978. Something else happened that year that likely also helped turn the tide, as Debra Utacia Krol points out in an article in The Revelator: The state finally recognized Hawaiian as an official language.

But for every such success story, many more languages and species fall by the wayside, often in tandem. Those losses are inextricably linked, according to Terra Lingua, a British-Columbia-based organization that coined the concept of “biocultural diversity”:

People who lose their linguistic and cultural identity lose an essential element in a social process that commonly teaches understanding of and respect for nature. The consequences are profound for both the well-being of people and the health of the natural environment. Forcing cultural and linguistic conversion on indigenous peoples and local communities not only violates human rights; it also undermines the goals of nature conservation.

“Monocultures of the mind” have the same end result as monocultures in nature: they make our planet more fragile and vulnerable to both natural disasters and human-made crises. But the dominant ideology today ignores this reality, and seeks easy-to-control uniformity instead of organic unity in diversity.

It’s no surprise that some of the most profound losses have been in the Americas, wiping out the songs, stories, and wisdom of a thousand years. In the wake of this systematic erasure of knowledge and land ethics, gathered over countless generations through careful observation and hard-won experience, what will replace it? Are we permanently doomed to a society where our only common vision is based on empty “Land of the Free” and “Make America Great Again” platitudes? To a world where, instead of admiring the growing population of green sea turtles from a safe distance and understanding that they have a culture all their own, tourists ignore Hawaiian pleas for a little respect and crowd around the turtles on beaches for the sake of reductive selfies?

I long to share a more meaningful and nuanced language with my neighbors, to have a word for the way an Eastern box turtle blinks his ancient eyes from under a mayapple leaf, or a phrase for the peacefulness a doe embodies when curled up in the purpletop grass for a respite, or a seasonal description for the autumn breeze that picks up the fading scent of summer from the last phlox flower and mingles it with goldenrod and aster and fallen leaves on its way to your nose. I want to help my neighbors hear what birds hear, see what squirrels see, and feel what trees feel when their community is being cut down, limb by limb, and hauled off to be made into wood chips.

But my neighbors and I have no shared history, and likely few cultural stories in common. Their Birdland of stadiums and parking lots is not mine, just as my Birdland of trees and Carolina wrens is not theirs. Though I dislike what they are doing to the land, I do not dislike them. But I struggle with the question of how to bridge these gaps. Where can we find common ground long enough to agree that we need to nurture common ground for all the species within our sphere, not just our own?

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The animals who visit our habitat can’t read our many welcome signs, though they often perch and preen on them. Once I watched a monarch butterfly land on the Monarch Waystation sign, still wet and wrinkly and drying off his wings for his first real flight. My language is not his, but I can learn to interpret his needs. I can nurture the milkweed he eats as a caterpillar in the summer and the nectar-producing flowers he relies on during his long migration in the fall. I can step mindfully through the land, taking as much care as possible not to mow him down at the larval stage or knock off his chrysalis.

What would the world look like if HOAs and municipalities gave a vote to him and all his fellow nonhuman residents, from the butterflies and grasshoppers to the toads and salamanders to the rabbits, opossums, foxes, and deer? What if my sister’s antagonistic neighbor—who has cut down his trees, planted environmentally harmful bushes, and even killed a snake (an illegal act in Maryland) in front of neighborhood children—could be cited for his crimes against nature? What if instead of going after people who welcome plants and animals, homeowners associations and code enforcement departments issued fines to residents who do them harm? What if we looked to the mosses of the forests and the cacti of the deserts and the grasses of the marshlands to learn what they have to teach us?

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Some communities actively encourage landscaping that nurtures both animals and people. A shining example is Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Illinois, where residents live alongside wildlife among restored wetlands, prairies, and hedgerow habitat. In Denver, Colorado, one concerned resident persuaded neighbors to replace all 250 water-guzzling lava rock gardens of their HOA with native landscaping. My mother- and father-in-law’s community in Scottsdale, Arizona, cherishes the saguaro cactus and prickly pears and other native plants in public spaces while prohibiting environmentally harmful plants in the small private gardens that surround each home. Texas, California, and Florida have all enacted laws that restrict HOAs’ abilities to prohibit environmentally friendly gardens.

Even in less regulated communities, positive change can be contagious. Sometimes my friendlier neighbors walk by and ask me about my milkweed. One even wanted to know if she could take some seeds. Another is converting much of her expansive front lawn to gardens this fall, inspired by a goldfinch who feasted on her echinacea seedheads in August. A third down the street has spent decades filling his five acres and is now adding as many natives as he can, updating friends almost daily with reports about which wildflowers are in bloom, what butterflies have visited, and the ever-growing list of new plants he still wants to add for his wild visitors.

As some people continue to cut down, others build up. It is their stories I have usually told in my writing and advocacy work, celebrating those who’ve heard the call of the chickadee and the buzz of the bumblebee and felt an urgent need to act. But I know there are many who have still not heard, or perhaps not taken the time to listen. I understand they may be busy, or tired, or overwhelmed—but it’s precisely our disconnection from nature that exacerbates our isolation. “If we choose the path of destruction, the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves,” writes E.O. Wilson in his book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. “I prefer to call this option by another name, the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.”

Recently for my 48^th birthday, I had a lovely lunch with my family at an Italian restaurant on a manmade lake in the densely developed town center of Columbia, Maryland. My husband and I walked around the lake afterwards, and my heart sank as I realized the traffic from the adjacent road had become much louder. The felling of trees throughout my county not only takes away physical habitat; it removes the sound buffers that provide at least a modicum of protection from noise pollution for the sensitive ears of local wildlife.

But as we kept walking and seeing new plantings of winterberries, dogwoods, Indian grasses, bluestems, sycamores, and Joe Pyes mixing with wild goldenrods, frost asters, and bonesets, I rejoiced in these reminders of how many people are still listening. They are listening and watching and feeling the wingbeats of the sulphur butterflies dashing through the meadow fragments and the heartbeats of the herons and egrets owning the sky above the lake. They are marveling at the life sustained by the fallen persimmon fruit, where  common buckeye and Eastern comma butterflies stop for a snack, joining the many bees and flies and wasps in a frenzied communal feast.

Across the lake are hotels and restaurants, a grocery store and a housing development, a music hall and high-rise office buildings. Paths loop joggers and dog walkers to the far end where painted turtles watch from the water, the adults basking on upturned logs while babies swim among the gathering algae. By the dozens, their heads pop up and back down, as they keep a tentative grasp on their home and wait to see if it’s OK to stay.

Will the humans notice the turtles long enough to appreciate them but not so long that they start to disturb them? Will passersby come too close to the water’s edge for comfort, with their cameras and their loud voices or, worse, their backhoes and their chainsaws? Or will they keep moving along the path, living a little more like mosses by taking only what they need and giving back in abundance, or at least with enough reciprocity so the turtles and butterflies and herons can be free to live their lives too?

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Photos by Nancy Lawson/Humane Gardener