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Posted by Adrian Ayres Fisher

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Celebrating Wildflowers (USFS)

Center for Humans and Nature

Center for Neighborhood Technology

Chicago Botanic Garden

Chicago Wilderness

Cook County Forest Preserve Volunteer Info

Dr. John Hilty: Illinois Wildflowers

Garfield Park Conservatory

Illinois Natural History Survey

Invasive Plant Atlas of the U. S.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Midwest Invasive Plant Network

Morton Arboretum

Native Seed Gardeners (Illinois)

Nature Conservancy Illinois

Quaker Earthcare Witness

Sustainable Sites Initiative

Thatcher Woods Savanna Restoration Project

Tree of Life Web Project

USA National Phenology Network

USDA Plants Database

vPlants--Virtual Chicago Area Herbarium

Wild Ones Native Plants, Natural Landscapes

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Popular Posts

Native Shrubs and Why They're Essential for Carbon Sequestration

“Shrubbiness is such a remarkable adaptive design that one may wonder why more plants have not adopted it.” (H. C. Stutz, 1989)

In light of the newest IPCC and US climate change reports, coupled with reports of the ongoing declines of wild species—birds, insects—you name them, just so long as they aren’t human, I have turned to thinking about shrubs. It is precisely their adaptive characteristics that give shrubs their potential to be powerful players in soil carbon sequestration and ecosystem regeneration in certain parts of the world, such as the Midwest.

Although alarming, the reports are not surprising to anyone who’s been keeping track. The IPCC report says human global society has 12 years to reduce carbon emissions to 45% below 2010 levels if there is to be any hope of holding overall average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). The US report, searchable by region, adds fairly detailed, equally dire scenarios for this country. No place on earth will be immu…

Backyard Carbon Sequestration: What Does Synthetic Fertilizer Have to Do with It?

Part two of a series exploring how regenerative gardening techniques can enhance carbon storage while improving soil health. In part one I discussed some of the principles behind the factors involved in soil health and how plants and the soil biological community work together to store carbon and build appropriate fertility. “Why Not Start Today: Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do” can be found here.

A brief digression about the term “regenerative gardening”
So what is regenerative gardening, anyway? Regenerative gardening is an umbrella term that embraces many styles and traditions of organic cultivation and adds explicit intentionality regarding carbon sequestration. The recent Rodale white paper, “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” says that, “regenerative organic agriculture refers to working with nature to utilize photosynthesis and healthy soil microbiology to draw down greenhouse gases.” The same goes for gardening. Like regene…

Why Not Start Today? Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do

Part one of a series about using regenerative gardening techniques to enhance carbon storage while improving soil health.

To make it simple as a crayon sketch, there are two ways to mitigate climate change that, in tandem, could work. One is to lower emissions. To decarbonize, if you will—and de-nitrous oxide-ize, de-methane-ize, and de-soot-ize as well. It is true that to keep the earth’s average temperature from warming more than 2° C (3.6° F), emissions will have to fall. Drastically. Which means lifestyles, in fact whole cultures and economies, will have to change, and everyone, especially the well off, will have to share in the sacrifices and changes to be made. This necessity is the real inconvenient truth implied by the inconvenient truth of climate change and one mostly being ignored or rationalized away by pretty much everyone, except a small percentage of realists. Part of the problem, I think, might not be so much willful ignorance as a failure of imagination. Quite a few …

A View from the Air: Carbon Sequestration, Midwestern Farms and Biodiversity

One afternoon in early March I flew from Boston to Chicago, returning home from an Ecological Landscape Alliance conference. Cloud cover, white and lumpy as a rumpled hotel duvet, obscured the view, until over western Pennsylvania the plane crossed the edge of the weather system. Our country’s heartland unfurled below. The gently rolling terrain flattened as the plane headed west, divided by roads delineating a grid, with fields, towns, and even woodlots squared into the design.

This tidy, Grant Woods-esque arrangement is the relic of late 18th century surveying expeditions sent out to divide the Northwest Territory into 6-mile square townships, the better to sell off, settle and tame the nearly, at the time, unfathomable expanse. As they worked, the surveyors made detailed maps, including of vegetation; they used boulders, piles of rock or even notable trees as corner markers and confirmed corner placement with nearby “witness trees.” Today, restorationists use these maps to help f…

Let's Talk About Bees

Our bee problem is quite the topic of conversation these days--at social gatherings, in meetings, over coffee. Everyone agrees we should save the bees, though many of us think of them in the abstract as little buzzing yellow flying things, maybe as cartoon characters, or as creatures that exist to help us.

I could say, and have—for example at Christmas dinner when apologizing for my not-quite-stellar pumpkin bread—that last summer the CSA grower from whom I get my produce planted five hundred pumpkin plants and only got three pumpkins (so I had to buy canned, rather than processing my own). No pollination, he thought. And just the other day an acquaintance mentioned that friends who live in a tony suburb north of Chicago had, also last summer, had their own pollination troubles in their vegetable garden. Why? she wondered.

Constructing Hope: A Discussion of "Green Earth"

Neither hope nor its cousin joy are to be confused with optimism. The latter tends to be more a quality of temperament than a realistic assessment of prospects. As for the former, well, you have to go looking for them, or even, laboriously, construct them for yourself, at best in the company of other people. By combining found materials with what you’ve got with you—like, say, dried grass and twigs with the flint and steel in your backpack—you can, with effort, spark and and nourish a little flame that, once going, you’ve still got to work to maintain.

That’s been my project lately, in our seriously dystopic times, when my most innocuous activities—biking to work, leading woods restoration workdays for students, working on sustainability projects—sometimes feel like political activism. There’s no need to enumerate the ways that the actions of those recreating atop the federal government threaten not only civil society but also the biosphere’s wellbeing. For earth-centered folks who in…

A Nearly Infinitely Adaptable Recipe for Ecological Regeneration and Soil Carbon Sequestration

Though I have no personal aspirations of the farming or ranching kind, own neither property measured in acres nor livestock, and in fact eat no fish or meat (though I do eat dairy and eggs), I check in frequently with Soil4Climate, a Facebook group devoted to soil carbon sequestration and holistic grazing. I’ve learned a huge amount from the folks that post there, and enjoy the online conversation. It serves as a useful antidote to the news of destruction that emanates from so many places and sources on our beleaguered planet.

Even here, however, peace does not prevail. To me—urban gardener, land restorationist and soil carbon sequestration advocate—the theory and practice of holistic grazing makes so much sense for certain ecosystems that I’ve been startled to discover an ongoing, multi-faceted, sides-must-be-taken debate about holistic grazing’s efficacy in restoring ecosystem biodiversity while sequestering carbon in the soil. And then the ecological merits of eating/not eating me…

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