Adrian Ayres Fisher

Everywhere, it’s necessary to pay attention, to get to know the neighborhood and its denizens, the non-human citizens whose families probably have been living there longer than you maybe have been alive. To learn the lay of the land—literally.

Honest gardening requires that we take stock of and work within existing conditions, that we don’t try to make the garden something that it isn’t or couldn’t be.  Honest gardening is a kind of truth telling, the way art or literature can be.

The “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF), approved by the 15th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity clearly states the goal of protecting, conserving, and restoring 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030.

We must eat. But the land sacrifices so that we may live; the land ethic asks that we live in ways that show we are responsible citizens of the land community; and the law of reciprocity asks what we are giving back in return for that gift of life.

The answer is that to avert the worst effects of climate change, tamp down on pollution, and avoid ecological destruction and the sixth extinction, everything—ethics, economics, business practices, basically the whole of modern industrial society, needs to change, to be conducted along different lines, and fast.

Wild native shrubs have a place in nearly every garden, and the benefits they bring to humans and the other species with whom we share our ecosystem far outweigh any effort involved in caring for them.