I've been thinking a lot about fear lately, how too many of us are raised either by family or culture to be afraid of other species and even of wild places. More than once I've been on a landscape design consult and the client expresses concern about attracting bees or wasps or "pests" like mice or snakes. Almost all of these creatures are beneficial to our garden, our cities, and the long term success of our own species. Bees pollinate (native bees especially pollinate our native plants); wasps control infestations of unwanted pests or help naturally manage wanted species that can get out of hand at times; snakes eat mice and voles, the latter which are too efficient at eating Liatris corms.

How can landscapers shift their thinking and education when they meet with clients? Knowing the research and how healthy ecosystems function is a start -- and how good, beautiful, low maintenance gardens are ecosystems (not to mention the last vestiges of home or hope for countless displaced species in our urban world). One day I came in from the garden, sat in front of the tv, and it wasn't for an hour or two that I noticed a bumble bee resting on my jeans. That's not scary, it's cool. I feel so incredibly honored to see life moving, living, thriving in the garden -- and I believe that for most of us that's exactly why we want a garden. A landscape may be first about and for us -- we are a dominant species who sees the world through individual perception -- but in the end a landscape is about equality, empathy, and compassion. If all life doesn't thrive we don't thrive in real physical and emotional ways. Every day in our world sees fewer insects and birds as our ecosystems diminish in their ability to sustain life. And somehow, our fear of other species has contributed to this extinction crisis, and even to political deadlock when "environmentalist" is a dirty word meant more as derision than compliment.

Maybe I can sum it up like this.... Most of us feel threatened by nature many times in our lives. It can be a storm or a wasp, or an ominous feeling walking in a cave or forest. But too many of us also feel threatened by those who talk about nature by extolling its virtues or defending its existence. Obviously, part of the problem is a culture of extraction, and another is one species practicing supremacism in other less tangible ways. Fear holds us back from compassion for other lives and other places. Fear makes us rush to anger, use names to label new ideas and people we don't understand but that make us feel uncomfortable or vulnerable. In a time of climate change and mass extinction we're being asked to navigate if not fast forward the evolution of our primal brains, to see survival as something not solely immediate and personal, but long term and communal.

Why does every year go faster than the previous one? It doesn't help that phenology shows that for each decade, spring emergence of specific plants and insects is roughly three days sooner. Springs that arrive earlier shorten the sense of seasons and the demarcations of time our primal brains have evolved to live by. Our minds and our hearts, perhaps our connective spirits to all of life, are being radically altered in imperceptible ways.

It's the same phenomenon occurring in our daily lives when nature is absent. I mean real nature, not a single street tree or a line of roses or some lawn with a robin standing still in the middle. What happens when views out of classrooms and office buildings and homes are devoid of extravagant local plant and animal life? What happens when the rich layers of plants are instead one simple layer smothered in wood mulch? What happens when instead of bird or fox calls we simply hear the constant, overriding drone of lawn mowers and leaf blowers? Somehow we need to recognize that our human supremacism is making us sick in physical and metaphysical ways. It is certainly a painful recognition, because it will call into question everything we believe or thought we believed about natural order and our cultural lifestyle. We are changing the world without compassionate wonder and without speaking up for the least among us to whom we owe our miraculous lives.

I know many of us here, reading and thinking together now, unequivocally understand the profound, empowering value of flower beds and pollinators and sitting in silence in the wild -- even though that silence is the noise of dozens of species calling through and past us. How are you engaging with others and creating wildness in our daily lives? What lines do you draw, what passions do you cultivate, what lessons do you teach? Are you learning to speak the language of a certain plant or animal, and which one? What is being said to you? What are your garden plans in this new year as we cultivate empathy and joy in all others who walk this life with us?