I welcome human immigrants to my community, but my botanical preferences are for natives. Some people think the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Here’s where they’re wrong.
Two years ago while attending an entomology lecture, I was surprised to hear the professor describe native plant advocates as “borderline xenophobic.” The comment seemed to appear out of nowhere, a defensive-sounding remark delivered amid a heated discussion about pesticides.
Since then I’ve learned that this type of characterization is nothing new. In a 1994 New York Times essay titled “Against Nativism,” Michael Pollan called for a kind of “multihorticulturalism,” portraying native plant advocates as goofy and misguided at best and racist at worst. Sociologists, ecologists, and historians have since written extensively about the politicization of native species, echoing Pollan’s reflections on what he described as a dangerous cultural obsession with European plants in Nazi Germany.
Whether or not Hitler really had an opinion on the provenance of plants is subject to debate; at least one researcher offers compelling evidence that cynical landscape professionals jumped on a political opportunity, attempting to garner attention by cloaking their agendas in the sentiments of German superiority. Nazi authorities, he writes, appeared somewhat indifferent to the whole matter.
Whatever the case, a fear of repeating history (or even interpretations of that history) is often invoked as a way to discredit the ecological case for native plants. Especially in this age of sweeping anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by the new U.S. administration, some wildlife-friendly gardeners and horticulturists are struggling to find new ways to describe native plants in an attempt to distance themselves from the semantics of hateful ideologies.
Aside from the obvious point that our country’s agricultural and horticultural history has brutal roots in the colonization and extirpation of Indigenous people, plants, and animals, there’s a more fundamental flaw at the core of all these discussions: By projecting our own politics onto the millions of other creatures with whom we share the planet, we are comparing not just apples to oranges but one apple to all the other fruits across the globe.
Here’s what I mean: We humans are all of the same species. We are all mobile, and we can all technically survive in a variety of habitats around the planet. We are generalists on a global scale. But we are only one among nearly 1.5 million known animal species, many of whom have evolved to be specialists, surviving on or in certain flowers, leaves, rocks, and waters. These animals and countless other organisms (up to an estimated 1 trillion when accounting for microbial life) often need certain plants that in turn have evolved to grow on certain topographies, in certain climates, with certain rainfalls or dry spells or soil profiles. From bees to butterflies to birds, many creatures can live only in regions or even narrow niches in which they evolved.
We are generalists on a global scale. But we are only one among nearly 1.5 million known animal species, many of whom have evolved to be specialists, surviving only on or in certain flowers, leaves, rocks, and waters.
That’s why I plant Maryland species in Maryland for the animals who depend on them, and it’s why I hope gardeners in Oregon will plant species that have coevolved with animals in the Pacific Northwest, and those in Japan will plant species native to their regions, and so on. Conversely, it’s also why I can and do welcome all humans to my community: My habitat is their habitat, my home their home. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we all need the same things to survive. And we can’t meet those needs without protecting and restoring the healthy ecosystems we, too, depend on for clean air, water, and soil.
When Pollan wrote his article, we didn’t have as much data on the value of native plants to wildlife and the harm caused by some nonnatives, which can displace habitat and even poison animals unfamiliar with vegetation from outside their historic ranges. But now an ever-increasing body of research supports the case for planting as many natives as we can, not for selfish human reasons but on behalf of all the other life forms now dependent on us to nurture their last remaining habitats.
Does that mean those advocating for wildlife-friendly landscaping want a return to the exact plantings that grew in some nebulous, pre-human era, as detractors so often claim? No. Such claims feel like cheap shots from tired playbooks that attempt to discredit compassionate, progressive, science-based causes by portraying them as extreme. Even if such a state were desirable, we all know it’s outlandishly unrealistic. You don’t have to be a gardener for long to understand that. My yard still has turf grass that was here when my husband and I bought the house 16 years ago, and it still has plants that threaten wildlife habitat. But it also has hundreds more native species than it did back then. I look at it as a lifetime project—and a lifeline project for the many more creatures who have now made a home here, simply because they can find what they need.
Far from being mutually exclusive, environmental justice and social justice are inextricably linked. Unfortunately, the new administration appears to care little about either, implementing policies detrimental to both humans and animals. Wildlife don’t recognize geopolitical borders, let alone those demarcated by impenetrable barriers that restrict their movement and may destroy their last remaining habitats. They’re already deeply affected by climate change, the science behind which our president chooses to ignore. Some of their last refuges, our public lands, are under siege by silencing orders, corporate pressure for oil and gas drilling, and threats to further defund their operations.
It’s more important than ever that we do what we can in our own communities for both animals and people—and that we ourselves pay attention to the science, not political rhetoric, behind native plants and other critical habitat needs. We can’t take care of the planet in the long term unless we take care of each other now. And we can’t take care of each other in the long term unless we take care of the planet now. I believe in human rights, and I welcome the other citizens of this earth with open arms. I believe in the rights of our fellow species to make a home here, too, and I welcome them with the plants they need to survive. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
For Further Pondering …
Many journal articles, essays, books, interviews, and discussions with friends and colleagues have informed my thoughts on these issues over the years. Countless words have been written and spoken on the subject. Here are just a few of those writings that may be of interest to you.
Journal Articles: The Native Plant Debate
Those who conflate native plant advocacy with xenophobia often cite articles by Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, including The Ideology of the Nature Garden and The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia? These and similar essays contain virtually no discussion of the ecological role of native plants, as ecologist Daniel Simberloff points out in Confronting introduced species: a form of xenophobia? Researcher and author Frank Uekötter also challenges contextual references to Nazi policy, arguing in Native Plants: A Nazi Obsession? that many attempts to discredit the native plant movement ignore evidence that Nazi policy was far from settled on the matter—and that a continued focus on human political history “threatens to poison an important cross-disciplinary debate” about the ecological value to other species and the planet.
In Botanical decolonization: rethinking native plants, published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, three social scientists explore the history of displacement of Indigenous people and plants following European settlement. Communicating Invasion: Understanding Social Anxieties around Mobile Species is a fascinating look at public reaction to scientific and media-generated communications about negative impacts of invasive plant species in Switzerland. And when a group of scientists called for evaluating plants based on their function in a Nature essay, Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins, a counter-group issued a helpful rebuttal, Non-natives: 141 scientists object, that concisely lays out the arguments for continuing to protect native species and monitor nonnatives for potential harm to local ecologies.
Books: Understanding the Science Behind Native Plantings
Bringing Nature Home by entomologist Doug Tallamy provides well-researched proof of the value of native landscaping to wildlife, particularly birds who rely primarily on insect specialists to feed their young. His second book, The Living Landscape, written with Rick Darke, adds helpful ideas for applying this knowledge. In Planting in a Post-Wild World, Claudia West and Thomas Rainier explain why ecological plantings have long been unfairly cast as difficult to establish and maintain, outlining a roadmap for more successful cultivation through greater understanding of plants’ natural growth habits. Carefully explaining their view that natives are an important but not exclusive part of sustainable landscaping, they attempt to defuse what they view as loaded terminology by emphasizing the need to evaluate a plant’s ecological function just as much as its origins.