How to Heal Yourself and the World at the Same Time by Creating the World’s Biggest National Park

The nature and scale of ecological degradation can provoke empathy distress that devolves into depression, despair, anxiety, antipathy, avoidance, and outright denial. But ecological awareness and ecological education can help us to see how much power we have when we become attuned to spiritual and ecological realities. We can actually help to heal the world—each and every one of us, wherever we live. 

If we live on Turtle Island (a.k.a., North America), we can envision the largest national park in the world. Imagine a national park bigger than Yosemite, bigger than Yellowstone, bigger than the Grand Canyon. Imagine a national park bigger than all three of those combined. 

Now imagine a national park bigger than those three combined with the addition of the Adirondacks, the Grand Tetons, the Great Smoky Mountains, Denali, Olympic, and Sequoia—bigger than all of those put together! Imagine all the wild beings doing the work they do to further the conditions of life, all the work they do to make your life and my life possible. Imagine those beings thriving, and imagine humans thriving more in the process. 

Finally, imagine that this park can become a reality—and that reality depends on you. It doesn’t depend on you in some burdensome, terrible way. You don’t have to give yourself a spiritual or physical hernia. Rather, it depends on things you can do at your own scale, something enjoyable and rewarding. And something done in the key of wonder, something that can open up the ecology of your own mind. 

This describes Doug Tallamy’s project, detailed in his book, Nature’s Best Hope. This is a good news kind of book, and it can dispel our feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, replacing them with beauty, wonder, wildness, and mutual empowerment. 

Doug is the T. A. Baker Professor of Agriculture in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 112 research publications and has taught insect related courses for over four decades. His principle research goal involves arriving at a better understanding of the many ways insects interact with plants, and how these interactions create diversity in animal communities. 

Doug’s books include Bringing Nature Home, The Living Landscape (co-authored with Rick Darke), The Nature of Oaks (winner of the American Horticultural Society’s 2022 book award), and Nature’s Best Hope (a New York Times Best Seller). In 2021 he cofounded Homegrown National Park with Michelle Alfandari (HomegrownNationalPark.org). The Homegrown National Park is the park we tried to imagine—the world’s largest by far. 

And we would grow it in our own back yards, as we all turn ourselves into a society of conservationists waking up from conquest consciousness. In an excellent reflection of that conquest consciousness, the vast majority of land in the U.S. remains privately owned—78% overall, with 86% of the land east of the Mississippi in private hands (which may include private commercial interests). 

But the idea that this is “my” land makes no sense to Nature. As far as She sees things, every bit of the land is Hers. But we have divided ourselves apart from—and against—Nature, rather than seeing that we cannot thrive, and may not survive, without taking care of the very conditions of life we depend on. 

When speaking with Doug, I brought up something the Dalai Lama said. It appears in his book,  A Call for Revolution, and it’s something that bears repeating—often. He said, 

“I have been inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution that were adopted as the motto of the French Republic: Liberté, équalité, fraternité. I adopted the same motto. As a Buddhist, the aim of my spiritual quest is to free myself of the fundamental ignorance that has led to the notion that there is a division between people and the natural world, which is at the root of all our suffering.” (2017: 36-8)

That’s the root of all our suffering!

We in the dominant culture should reflect on this. The suggestion comes from one of the most important philosophers of our time, one given exceptional training in the Buddhist philosophical traditions. 

This means, among other things, that Buddhist philosophy reminds us the problem of conquest consciousness doesn’t belong exclusively to “white” people. It also suggests that philosophy involves, as an essential aspect of itself, the reindigenization of human beings to their home—their Earthly and Cosmic home. 

Indigenous peoples, though estimated to comprise roughly 5% of the global population, care for and protect 80% of the biodiversity of our world. It seems we all need to reindigenize (i.e., create a culture functionally attuned to the wild—for wisdom and wildness are not two things, and we must end the segregation between wildness and “civilization”). 

Doug’s book serves as a guide to help us do some of the work. Doug is a scientist, not a professional philosopher. Since science is the servant of philosophy, that makes his book implicitly philosophical, but not always explicitly so. 

That doesn’t count as a serious criticism. It’s a book worth reading, and worth having around as a handbook and field guide to getting started improving your own wellbeing together with the wellbeing of your family, friends, and community—in a way that serves the whole community of life. 

In addition to (or altogether with) our possession of land, we find a second symptom and cause of our problems in the way we relate with land: In order to possess it, we of necessity fragment its essential wholeness. The physicist-philosopher David Bohm wrote about the problem of fragmentation in his wonderful book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order: 

“It is especially important to consider [the question of wholeness and fragmentation] today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.” 

Bohm implicates academia, the sciences, society, and also each of us as individuals, with inner conflicts that function like a kind of fragmentation. The inner and the outer fragmentation thus go completely together, in a terrifying feedback loop of insanity. We separate ourselves into nations, religious groups, research specializations, job types, and so on. And we separate the living, loving landscape into industrial parks, individual farms, parking lots, highways, shopping centers, and so on. Bohm points out that, 

“The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder, and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who have to live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”

We fragment ourselves first and foremost. We develop a style of consciousness and a style of thought reflecting our fragmented condition, then we apply that style of thought to the world, and thereby transgress against the inherent wholeness and holiness of the world. As Bohm notes, 

“. . . . wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to [human] action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that [human beings], with [their] fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response. So what is needed is for [human beings] to give attention to [their] habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Our approach to reality may then be whole, and so the response will be whole.”

Wholeness is what is real. When we become fragmented, the world responds to us with fragmentation—it breaks apart. But if we begin to approach reality in wholeness, reality can respond in kind. 

In his luminous essay, "The Etiquette of Freedom," Gary Snyder offers us an essential clue as to how Bohm’s insights fit together with the Dalai Lama’s, and can then feed the project Doug Tallamy invites us into. The Dalai Lama suggested that the root of all our suffering is the division between human and Nature. Bohm links this to a mind of fragmentation. Snyder notes that, “To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be whole.” 

In the same essay, Snyder gives us the following graceful suggestion: 

“Thoreau says “give me a wildness no civilization can endure.” That’s clearly not difficult to find. It is harder to imagine a civilization that wildness can endure, yet this is just what we must try to do. Wildness is not just the “preservation of the world,” it is the world. Civilizations east and west have long been on a collision course with wild nature, and now the developed nations in particular have the witless power to destroy not only individual creatures but whole species, whole processes, of the earth. We need a civilization that can live fully and creatively together with wildness. We must start growing it right here, in the New World.” 

That suggestion could feel daunting, inspiring, or maybe both. But we can begin so simply. All we have to do is let go of our lawns. That’s it. Tallamy only asks for half of our lawn, but we can surely do better than that. Lawns are ecological dead zones, and Tallamy documents the experience of ordinary people who transformed those dead zones into refuges of biodiversity. 

So, give as much of your lawn as you can—knowing that the process can heal you and the world at the same time, that it can connect you with wildness and wonder, that it can bring you closer to friends, family, and strangers, that it could blossom one day into a better world for all of us. And let Thoreau give you some final inspiration—though, get a copy of Doug’s book too! 

Links for the Dangerous Wisdom interview with Doug in the comments. 

From Thoreau’s “Walking” . . . enjoy his lawn bashing 😉 

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that. 

 . . . . in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind . . . 

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony . . . Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure . . . 

. . . . Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him . . . 

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps . . . I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, — the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, — all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks, — to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front-yard? 

. . . The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access on that side to citizens . . . 

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me! 

. . . . A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey. 

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man . . . 

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, England — have been sustained by the primitive forests . . . They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers . . . 

. . . . In short, all good things are wild and free . . . Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. 

 . . . . While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world [Greek: Kosmos], Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact. 

 . . . . Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. . .