Native Gardening and Climate Resilience

As we interface with an increasingly erratic and unpredictable climate crisis, shifting away from conventional landscaping and agriculture to methods that nurture our planet and ecosystems is more vital than ever. Changing your home, neighborhood, or business is a small but real way that you can benefit the natural world for years to come.

Native plants don't just benefit wildlife, they make real impacts to the larger world. Native plants have been shown to be extremely effective in sequestering carbon into the ground and out of our atmosphere. Drawdown planting and agriculture is not only a necessary step in addressing the climate crisis, but provides tangible benefits to your gardens as well, increasing the nutrient availability of your soil and eliminating the need for chemical fertilizers.¹

Eliminating the need for chemical additives is likewise necessary in our fight for ecological restoration. Pesticide usage has not only been shown to cause life threatening, and often fatal, diseases in humans,² but has severely threatened native pollinators and insects,³ creatures vital for our entire food web. Doing away with fertilizer usage also protects our beautiful Michigan waterways from things like Harmful Algae Blooms that kill our fish and wildlife and jeopardize human safety.

1. Lockhart, S. R. A., Keller, C. K., Evans, R. D., Carpenter-Boggs, L. A., & Huggins, D. R. (2023). Soil CO2 in organic and no-till agroecosystems. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 349

2. Bassil, K. L., Vakil, C., Sanborn, M., Cole, D. C., Kaur, J. S., & Kerr, K. J. (2007, October). Cancer health effects of pesticides: Systematic review. PubMed Central.

3. Guzman, L. M., Elle, E., Morandin, L. A., Cobb, N. S., Chesshire, P. R., McCabe, L. M., Hughes, A., Orr, M., & M’Gonigle, L. K. (2024). Impact of pesticide use on Wild Bee distributions across the United States. Nature Sustainability, 7(10), 1324–1334.