© Marlene A. Condon
February, 2014

One summer day when I was a young girl of about 10 or 11, I was in the back yard when our pet cat brought home a nestling Blue Jay. The dead chick was naked (without feathers) and therefore it had probably only recently hatched.

I immediately brought the cat into the house. Growing up with one or more cats at a time living with us, I knew all about their behavior. Cats were killers of all kinds of wildlife, from insects to mice to birds and anything else they could catch.

(This isn’t a statement to demonize these felines. It’s simply a statement of pure fact. Anyone who tries to say that cats are not eager hunters that are extremely proficient at this activity is either being dishonest or is ignorant of cat behavior.)

Unfortunately, any cat that has ever been allowed outside is a cat that can never be kept inside, especially when it knows there is a nest of baby birds to plunder. The cat will meow and meow until someone lets it out and that is exactly what happened at my house.

One of my siblings or parents, being annoyed by the cat’s crying, let it out again—and again and again as I kept bringing it back inside each time it brought home one nestling, then another and another until it had killed the entire brood of five chicks.

At the time, my only feeling about this was one of extreme sadness because I felt there was no reason for the baby birds to have been killed. The cat didn’t need to kill to survive and, indeed, pet cats rarely eat what they catch.

But now, as an adult with much more knowledge, I realize the tragedy was far worse than just having the lives of those five young birds cut short for no good reason. Another aspect concerns the Blue Jay pair, which often mates for life.

The male and female had invested an incredible amount of energy and time into gathering twigs and other plant materials and building their intricate nest, not to mention the huge amount of energy that goes into bringing forth another life inside each egg.

All of that effort had been for naught. In fact, this activity is so energy-and-time consuming that Blue Jays typically nest only one time per year. Thus the entire reproductive potential of that pair may have been robbed that summer.

As time has marched on, I’ve watched our “civilized” world become more and more inhospitable to wildlife. It’s quite frightening because our lives are totally dependent upon a properly functioning natural world. And that world can only be kept running smoothly by the wildlife that people, generally speaking, show so little appreciation for.

There’s nothing wrong with having an affection for cats, especially if you show that affection by keeping your kitty indoors where it won’t get hurt or killed horribly as most of the cats of my early years did.

At that time, when both cats and dogs were allowed to run free, I was horrified one day to see a dog with a lifeless cat hanging out of its mouth and I often witnessed dogs and cats run over by traffic.

Yet all these years later, there are people who continue to think that pets should be allowed to roam free. I truly find it hard to understand.

They often try to justify their belief by suggesting that cats are a part of nature and predation is natural. But this argument is fallacious.

No native predators (which cats are not) would be anywhere near as numerous in the environment as cats that are companions to an overly abundant human population. And, adding insult to injury, some people assist feral cat colonies that are outdoors 24/7 and truly taking an enormous toll upon the natural world.

Some folks think that cats should be considered helpful to gardeners, but this idea is particularly egregious. It’s based upon a lack of understanding of our natural world. In point of fact, pure and simple, gardeners who experience problems in the yard are doing things incorrectly.

When you choose to ignore the reality of the universe, you choose to have difficulties because you are choosing to ignore natural laws. Humans are not God; they have no power to successfully alter the way the world works.

Contrary to horticultural belief, “pest problems” are not a given. It should not be considered normal to encounter a variety of critters attacking your garden and interfering with your desire to grow favorite plants.

I know because I’ve successfully grown enough fruits and vegetables to eat fresh, give away to friends and neighbors, and to can and freeze without ever employing pesticides. The same is true of the ornamental plants I’ve grown, the number of species of which are too numerous for me to even estimate.

Consider the idea that cats will put an end to the activities of voles and bunnies. Yes, they certainly will have an effect because cats may very well wipe out every bunny in the area and make quite a dent in vole populations.

But a gardener who wants this outcome to occur is also a gardener who is blind to the impact his pet is having upon the natural world—and his garden.

Those voles (a type of mouse) are not just an important food source for other kinds of critters, such as hawks, owls, and foxes; they are also aerators of the soil you grow your plants in. By digging burrows they allow air and water—both of which are essential for plant roots to grow—to enter the earth.

Yes, voles do eat grasses and forbs (herbaceous flowering plants other than grasses, sedges, and rushes). In the natural world, one of their roles is to help limit plant numbers so plants do not become overcrowded.

I have voles on my property, yet they have never been problematic. Why? I also have numerous kinds of snakes that I rarely see, but they keep vole numbers so limited that the chunky creatures do not pose a serious threat to my gardening efforts. In fact, and to my dismay, I hardly ever get to see a vole.

Snakes are the prime predators of voles and everyone who’s ever told me about vole problems have been people who have killed off these sinuous reptiles. As pointed out previously, these are people denying the reality of the universe.

And the idea that you need cats to kill bunnies that are so adorable to see is ridiculous. Vegetable gardens should always be fenced. (It’s called living in agreement with nature.) Flower gardens can be made less attractive to rabbits by simply allowing so-called “weeds,” such as Common Plantain that they prefer to eat, to grow in the lawn.

A lawn should not be a monoculture for its own best health and well being anyway.

Allow White Clover to grow—which Eastern Cottontail Rabbits also prefer to eat instead of flowers—and it will collect nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil, naturally fertilizing your grass. Then you don’t need to go to the expense of buying and applying petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizer, too much of which is often applied, which then runs off and harms the Chesapeake Bay.

In other words, create a nature-friendly garden and you will be not only a successful gardener, but a gardener at peace with the world and virtually every wild critter in it.
etgazette.com/2014/02/09/blue-ridge-naturalist-cats-and-predators/”>

 

© Marlene A. Condon
July, 2014

My husband and I were in a card shop one day when I suddenly heard him exclaim, “Hey! That’s you!” When I looked at the shelf to see what he was grinning about, I saw Lucy van Pelt (from the Charles Shultz comic strip “Peanuts”) behind the wheel of an old-timey police car.

On the side of the car where it would normally say “Police” it instead said, “Common Sense Patrol.” Now Lucy is my writing companion, off to the right of my keyboard.

Common sense is most often defined as sound practical judgment based more upon one’s personal experience rather than specialized knowledge or training. However, very few people have faith in what their own eyes tell them or are confident in their ability to make decisions without the advice of, or confirmation by, one or more experts.

For example, you will read in gardening magazines that the feeding activity of a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, a woodpecker that makes shallow “wells” in the surface of tree bark to access sap, is deleterious to trees. But an astute observer can find many huge trees that are covered with ancient sap wells as well as more recently made ones.

Obviously the woodpeckers that have visited the trees through the years did no harm of any consequence; otherwise the trees could not have lived long enough to have gotten so big! Therefore common sense should tell anyone who pays attention to the natural world that this gardening lore is just plain wrong.

Yet when I point out the fallacy of these kinds of accusations against wildlife, people are often reluctant to employ critical thinking that would lead them to the truth. If they know someone with Ph.D. after his name who is a supporter of a supposed truth, they are going to put faith in that person’s purported credentials instead of in what reality tells them is true.

Consider an experience I had one autumn more than two decades ago. I visited a nature preserve every morning for a week or so to make notes about the plants and animals that could be found there. I’d been asked to write a nature column for the newsletter that was mailed out monthly, and I wanted to make sure I mentioned the appropriate organisms.

Many wildflowers were in the process of going to seed in the fields while other plants, such as goldenrod, were beginning to bloom—just in time to provide nectar that would be especially valuable to Monarch butterflies migrating south at that time of year.

The fields were absolutely bursting with life! A variety of insects visited plants for their final meals of the year while numerous species of birds poked about to feed upon seeds, insects, or both. Bees buzzed and birds chirped. It was exhilarating.

Then, within the course of just 24 hours, I returned to find the place quiet and lifeless. Every single field had been cut; every plant was lying on the ground. Virtually all of the activity that had been taking place just the day before had ceased.

The insects and the birds had been forced to move on to find other sources of nourishment and cover; the Monarchs would get no help from this nature preserve as they tried to get to Mexico.

I immediately expressed my dismay to the person in charge, providing her with the details of my observations. I explained why the fields should not be cut in the fall, but rather only in early spring so as to minimize the detrimental effects of mowing upon wildlife.

She listened intently, and I thought she understood how sensible my explanation was. But even though the course of action I was recommending for future management of the area was logical, common sense didn’t prevail.

When I next visited the area and talked to her, she told me she hated “to pull rank” on me, but she had asked her husband, a U.Va. biologist, what he thought. He had disagreed with me. He felt mowing would impact critters no matter when it was done, so the timing didn’t make one bit of difference.

I didn’t know what this man’s area of expertise was supposed to be (he had a Ph.D.), but I could tell that it was not wildlife land management. I was very surprised that he would voice his opinion when he obviously had neither personal experience with, nor personal knowledge of, the circumstances of this situation.

The professor was overlooking the fact that a fall cutting meant the plants, along with their seeds and any eggs laid upon them by invertebrates, would be prone to rotting as they lay upon the ground. If they’d been allowed to stand tall throughout the fall and winter, they would have been able to dry out by swaying in the wind following a rain or snow storm.

If the seeds and eggs rotted, plant and animal species would not be perpetuated, and wildlife trying to survive the coldest months of the year would not be fed. And, of course, with the plants on the ground, they couldn’t provide cover or shelter for wildlife during harsh weather.

In other words, cutting the fields in fall creates conditions that are problematic for wildlife, whereas cutting the fields in early spring—the best time to cut them—would follow the example of Mother Nature herself.

By springtime, dried plants are beginning to decay and fall over; animals have been fed and sheltered when they needed it most; and the seeds and eggs not discovered and consumed have a chance to start the cycle of life over again.

Although I find the idea of following Mother Nature’s example to be intuitive, my experience has been that people ignore common sense and instead try to fight this suggestion at every turn. It certainly doesn’t help when “experts,” who may not possess much knowledge about a situation, don’t hesitate to offer their opinion as seemingly sound advice anyway.

In truth, a Ph.D. following someone’s name does not automatically imply expert status with regards to any subject, no matter how distantly related to that person’s field of study. It’s simply proof that the person successfully mastered a particular topic.

Unfortunately, when people seen as reliable sources of information provide poor advice regarding our natural world, there can be seriously detrimental consequences for its welfare (and ultimately, for ours) as a result.

But no one needed a Ph.D. to understand the logic and common sense of managing the fields as I had explained. A little bit of analytical thinking about the deafening silence of the cut fields after they had been so full of life should have made obvious the correct course of action to follow.

So now you know why I always have to be on common sense patrol!

Blue Ridge Naturalist: Common Sense Patrol

 

 

© Marlene A. Condon
June, 2013

Earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled Board of Supervisors of Fairfax County, with the help of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, successfully fought the EPA’s attempt to regulate storm water flow into Accotink Creek.

The EPA was trying to keep the creek from being drowned in sediment from storm water runoff. The board was trying to keep from using taxpayer dollars to adequately fix this problem that was totally caused by inappropriate development.

The sediment from Fairfax County storm water runoff does not just impair Accotink Creek. It affects the Potomac River, which the creek enters, and the Chesapeake Bay, which the Potomac flows into.

Therefore the county of Fairfax and the state of Virginia effectively ignored a moral duty to preserve a natural resource that has been historically one of the most productive estuaries on the planet—an economically important source of food and recreation (fishing, birding, boating) for all Virginians.

In Charlottesville, the Rivanna River feeds the James River, which flows to the Chesapeake Bay. Because of the huge amount of impervious surface area that people maintain on most properties, rainwater runs over the ground instead of soaking into it as would happen in natural landscapes.

The rainwater picks up pollutants, such as oil and grease from machinery as well as pesticides and fertilizers from yards, and is carried by ditches, drains, and pipes straight into local streams and rivers without the benefit of water treatment.

Thus virtually all of the pollution created in Charlottesville and picked up by rainwater ends up ultimately in the Bay. The EPA has been trying for years to get governments and citizens in the Bay watershed to voluntarily take steps to limit adverse effects upon the Bay.

People create the situations that result in storm water runoff, so they need to take responsibility for fixing them (unlike Fairfax, that shirked its duty). In Charlottesville, officials are giving the impression that they are taking steps to address the deleterious effects of runoff on the Bay by instituting a fee system, which Albemarle County may soon emulate.

The city will charge citizens for the amount of impervious surface area (such as rooftops, driveways, parking lots) on every developed property other than those built and maintained by government. The fee—referred to as the “rainwater tax” by some folks—is part of the city’s Water Resources Protection Program (WRPP).

The point of the WRPP is “to address Charlottesville’s storm water related challenges in a comprehensive and economically and environmentally sustainable manner.” Unfortunately, the main point of the fee is simply to raise money to resize or rehabilitate existing pipes to remove storm water from impervious areas more quickly.

This means polluted water will be moved to the Bay more quickly, which means the fee simply enables people to continue to harm it. As too often happens, local government officials are not attacking the root cause of a problem, but instead taking the most expensive route to accommodate the problem.

As with the decision to spend a lot of money to build a new dam at Ragged Mountain instead of getting people to continue to reduce their water usage, local government officials have decided to spend a lot of money for construction work instead of getting people to change their landscaping to minimize storm water runoff.

People can’t get rid of rooftops or perhaps even parking lots, but they can replace most of their impervious landscaping. If the City took the intelligent route, they would discourage the societal push for artificial landscapes that are overly manicured and sterile, lacking the life forms necessary to keep them functioning as the natural world is meant to do.

Right now, non-environmentally friendly landscapes are enabled by laws and regulations that forbid (city “weed” ordinances, suburban covenants) or discourage (county land-use regs) the nature-friendly landscaping that would not only make land in the Bay watershed permeable, but also perfectly functional without the use of pesticides and excessive amounts of fertilizer.

Consider that lawn and turf grass is now considered the largest crop grown in the Chesapeake Bay watershed—“more than 3.8 million acres covering a staggering 9.5 percent of the watershed’s total land area. Turf cover now exceeds total pasture cover (7.7%), hay/alfalfa acres (7.4%) and the acreage of row crops (9.2%—corn, soybean, wheat) grown in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.” (chesapeakestormwater.net/2009/06/the-grass-crop-of-the-chesapeake-bay-watershed/)

Farmers are used to getting blamed for causing many of the problems affecting the Bay, but finally some scientists are recognizing that non-farmers (i.e., homeowners) are just as guilty by their cultivation of a turf “crop.” As reported in the same paper:

About 19 million pounds of pesticide active ingredients are used each year (mostly herbicides to kill otherwise fine-looking “weeds”). These pesticides are reaching local streams and rivers. According to USGS monitoring data, one or more pesticides were detected in 99% of urban streams, and one out of every five samples exceeded water quality standards to protect aquatic life.

Our compacted lawns produce extra runoff to the Bay. Thus, if we truly want to save the Chesapeake Bay, we can no longer ignore the elephant in the room. We must face the reality that every person who maintains more than a minimum amount of lawn for relaxing—especially one that is a thick carpet of grass grown as a monoculture—is contributing to the continued impairment of the Bay.

It’s unbelievable that some government agencies, universities, and lawn care companies claim that lawns are “green.” Here are just some of the reasons that a lawn can never be considered environmentally friendly:

A lawn consists of one or more nonnative (i.e. invasive) grasses. To maintain the green color of the grass, a lawn tends to be over-watered and over-fertilized (a source of nutrient runoff).

People are told that a lawn should not contain “weeds” or insects, thus they apply poisonous herbicides and insecticides.

Continual mowing throughout the growing season is a huge source of air and water pollution from engine exhaust.

The continual mowing, week after week, year after year, compacts the soil (especially if it has a high clay content), thus making a lawn a prime source of storm water runoff.

If lawns were permeable (as the city of Charlottesville apparently believes since it plans to only charge a fee on hardscaped surfaces), lawn care companies would not need to sell aeration and dethatching services in an attempt to make lawns permeable for the benefit of the grass roots.

However, the degree to which a lawn care company can even make a lawn temporarily permeable is minimal. Manmade aeration consists of making holes just a few inches deep (as opposed to the depth of wildlife-performed aeration), leaving the compacted soil below that depth to act as a barrier preventing further penetration of water. Thus a lawn does little to hold back storm water runoff.

At its web site, the city boasts that the Stormwater Utility Ordinance is truly a partnership between local government personnel and leaders/partners within the community. It then immediately names numerous conservation-related organizations that support its fee system. This is exactly what Charlottesville and Albemarle County officials did to “sell” the need for the new Ragged Mountain Dam to area taxpayers.

It’s truly puzzling that the city, in concert with all of these conservation-minded groups, could have totally overlooked lawns as a serious contributor to the storm water problems facing this area as well as the Chesapeake Bay. It’s also deeply disturbing.

Charlottesville Stormwater Utility Fee Won’t Help Save the Bay (Part One: The Problem)

 

 

The Solution—Changing Minds, Changing Lawns, and Changing Landscape

 

© Marlene A. Condon
July, 2013

To address the deleterious effects of local runoff on the Chesapeake Bay, Charlottesville has instituted a fee system, which Albemarle County may soon emulate.

The City will charge citizens for the amount of impervious surface area on their developed properties. “Impervious surface area” is defined as “any surface coverings that do not absorb water, including roads, roofs, and parking lots.”

In other words, Charlottesville officials are making people pay for the impact of structures they require. Although you can and should limit the size of your dwelling, you do need a place to live. That means you probably also need a “road” (driveway) or a parking lot (if you live in an apartment) to access your dwelling, so you are being asked to pay a fee on necessities.

Because there is not much an individual can do to avoid needing these particular impervious surfaces, it does seem a bit immoral to assess a fee on them as if anyone has much choice. (The same is true for food—commodities such as meat, dairy, vegetables, and fruits—should never be taxed.)

However, because lawns are optional and highly detrimental in many ways to our environment in addition to contributing to storm water runoff, there would be absolutely nothing unjust about assessing a fee on the amount of lawn area on a property.

There is now a legitimate and compelling reason for government to encourage, via the power of taxation, the creation of more natural, and thus more environmentally friendly, landscapes that would not only make land in the Bay watershed more permeable, but also perfectly functional without the use of pesticides and excessive amounts of fertilizer.

What government should be doing is allowing a minimum square footage of lawn around the house and charging a fee for the amount of lawn area beyond that amount. The reality is that most lawns see little, if any, use and the only reason that most people have lawns is simply because it’s the accepted form of landscaping in our society.

A lawn could—and should—be replaced by whatever combination of flowers, wild grasses, vines, shrubs, and trees a landowner enjoys seeing. The idea that a lawn with a few plants here and there will function without problems is an idea born of ignorance.

There absolutely must be a variety of plants to support a variety of organisms because the critters are the ones that keep the environment functioning properly. For example, the animal activity that takes place in a nature-friendly garden is responsible for helping it to retain even heavy rain.

A natural area with large numbers of plants of different heights comprises a vast multilayered canopy that must have all surfaces dampened before a drop of rain even reaches the soil.

When a droplet does hit the ground, the soil will accept it because of the innumerable kinds of invertebrates living within the soil, aerating it with their activities. Additionally, most mammals either dig for food, tunnel through the soil, or make their homes underground, allowing water to enter the earth through the holes that they make.

Yet the unnatural landscape dominated by lawn that supports very little wildlife is favored by development covenants and city and county officials even though it is doomed to being problem-prone from the get-go. People, including government officials, must change their minds about what our immediate environment should look like. Abolishing “weed” ordinances and instituting a lawn tax would definitely be a start in the right direction.

When I’ve spoken with government officials about why they seem obsessed with limiting the height of grass and other plants in yards, the word “vermin” always comes up. Again, this is a display of the ignorance in society about our natural world. The word “vermin” is typically used as an excuse for people to kill particular animals that they fear or view as competitors, such as foxes, coyotes, rats, mice, and even hawks.

Right here in Albemarle County in the 1980s, hawks were shot and killed illegally as “vermin” on billionaire John Kluge’s estate. Coyotes are being killed nowadays with the approval of the Game Department, even though they offer a better way to keep deer populations in check than waiting for disease to take its toll (the means of last resort for Mother Nature when other population-control methods have failed).

It’s time for people to accept the fact that the consequence of eliminating predators is dealing with overpopulations of their prey. While government officials worry that mice and rats will be a problem if they allow citizens to create meadows around their homes, these animals are legendary for their abundance in big cities where there are no meadows—and few, if any, predators.

In Albemarle County, many suburban neighborhoods are governed by covenants that severely restrict the kind of landscaping that is allowed. People who live in these areas are going to have to decide whether they want to rescind the covenants so people can landscape in a more intelligent manner and not pay a tax, or whether they want to keep covenants in place and pay for the “privilege” of harming the Chesapeake Bay.

In the rural areas of Albemarle, supervisors must make a case to our state legislators to change laws to allow supervisors to give tax breaks to everyone who creates a nature-friendly landscape. Right now, only owners of large properties get huge breaks on real estate taxes—even though they aren’t usually doing a thing to help the environment or the Bay to be healthy!

People who grow grapes (please note that wine is not a necessity) pollute the landscape with pesticides throughout the growing season.

People who raise horses (again, not a necessity) tend to maintain a landscape that is every bit as manicured as a suburban lawn—and every bit as detrimental to our environment.

Some people own large tracts of open area that, if they can line up a farmer to cut hay, will get a tax break even though it would be far better for that land to be maintained in a natural state for the benefit of our wildlife.

We are losing numerous species of birds and other critters that need fields in which to reproduce—not a cut field that is, for all intents and purposes, just another, albeit larger, lawn. These animals have value, providing services that keep the environment in and beyond the field functioning properly.

It makes sense to give farmers a break on land assessments because they are feeding the rest of us. (However, even they should maintain some habitat for wildlife. Unfortunately, now days even farmers do away with natural areas.)

But what is the justification for allowing a break to owners of large tracts of forest? What is a 20-acre forest doing that a one-acre forest isn’t?

In point of fact, the one-acre forest protected from yet further development within an otherwise environmentally degraded subdivision is going to do far more to help that environment to function better than twenty contiguous acres elsewhere.

These regulations are not only senseless, they are also grossly discriminatory to most of the citizens in the county who pay far more in taxes on small pieces of property than do those who own much larger parcels.

The sad truth is that people refuse to recognize the true cost to our environment of maintaining unnatural landscapes. And, while well-intentioned, taxpayer-subsidized rain barrels and rain gardens are not sufficient to solve our problems.

What we need is an extreme makeover of our developed landscape. Otherwise, there can be no saving of the Chesapeake Bay.

Blue Ridge Naturalist: Saving the Bay, Part Two: The Solution—Changing Minds, Changing Lawns, and Changing Landscape

 

© Marlene A. Condon
December, 2013

The Green Infrastructure Center in Charlottesville has released a book to guide community efforts to maintain the natural environment that humans are dependent upon for their survival. Photo: Marlene A. Condon.
The Green Infrastructure Center in Charlottesville has released a book to guide community efforts to maintain the natural environment that humans are dependent upon for their survival. Photo: Marlene A. Condon.

Generally speaking, people have become so removed from the natural world that they no longer realize that the environment constitutes our life-support system. Many folks think that it’s not at all important to conserve natural “infrastructure”—the forests, fields, waterways, soils, and wildlife—without which mankind cannot easily survive.

The evidence that people feel this way is all around us. In the recent past, Charlottesville City Councilors continued their historical disregard of the intentions of Paul Goodloe McIntire when he donated a large swath of land to the city in 1926 to use as a park.

The councilors voted that the eastern edge of Mr. McIntire’s eponymous park should be destroyed so that a parkway could replace parkland. On the western side of the park, they voted to eliminate yet more parkland by allowing a huge building to be placed there.

In Albemarle (as elsewhere throughout the country), the desire to bring in more and more money—supposedly to limit the tax burden on the residents even though this has been experientially proven to be a fallacy—blinds many citizens and their government representatives to the more precious value of natural infrastructure.

Thus the Shops at Stonefield replaced woods full of wildlife with immense hardscaping that neighboring businesses across route 29 fear will create runoff problems for them. (A lawsuit has been filed against the county, the city, and the developers regarding storm water management.)

Most people have trouble discerning the true value of the natural world around them because they look out the window and not much seems to be happening out there. Trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants do not change their appearance much from one day to the next. Birds are often the only form of life that is on the move and obvious to the casual observer.

Therefore it’s difficult for someone to grasp the significance of the natural world to his own existence. However, uncountable interactions are taking place in the environment that are essential to every human being’s existence.

All of those green plants are making available to us the oxygen that we cannot survive without. The roots of those plants are holding the soil in place so that it does not run off and smother organisms, their eggs, or their larvae that provide food and/or services to humans within our streams, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay.

The soil itself functions to cleanse whatever harmful materials may get picked up by rainwater, such as agricultural and man-made pollutants that would degrade our waterways.

The plants we need for food and oxygen depend heavily upon innumerable organisms in order to grow and thrive. Recyclers (such as slugs and snails) and decomposers (such as bacteria and fungi) work on wastes and dead organisms to supply nutrients to the soil for the benefit of growing plants that will not be healthy without such assistance.

Pollinators (bees usually come to mind first for most people but there are actually many, many kinds of pollinators) help most flowering plants to reproduce so each species is perpetuated instead of going extinct.

Predators work to limit the numbers of other kinds of critters so that plant-eating animals don’t destroy the very plants they (as well as humans) depend upon for their survival. By limiting populations, predators are also making sure that the environment is not overwhelmed by wastes created as a result of life processes.

In other words, there is an incredible amount of activity taking place out there, even though most people are oblivious to it. The natural world is, in actuality, quite dynamic. Should it cease to work properly, humans will be in deep trouble.

We are steadily marching towards such a dysfunctional state as we eliminate organisms whose functions can be viewed like the cogs in a machine. Organisms may seem myriad in number and unimportant at the species level, but each species is essential to the most efficient and proper functioning of the environment as a whole.

Luckily for humans, the natural world does have a limited number of backup organisms that can take over the jobs of those organisms we continue to wipe out. However, the key word here is “limited.” Eventually, if we choose to continue down this ruinous path, the natural world will no longer be able to support us.

But we don’t need to follow the pathway born of ignorance. In Charlottesville, we have the Green Infrastructure Center whose mission is to assist communities to “restore, manage, and protect…the natural resources and working landscapes” that provide clean water and air, thus ensuring quality of life while recognizing that the local economy must be sustained as well.

These folks work to identify critical ecological systems within urban, suburban, and rural areas that should be conserved in order to maintain healthy human and wildlife communities. They employ an integrative approach to land-use planning that maximizes returns for both the ecology as well as the economy of an area.

The idea is for local governments to take into account the natural world when considering population-growth, tax projections, traditional infrastructure, and capital improvement costs. This way of doing things should have been obvious long ago, but better late than never!

If you are a land-use planner, a developer, a member of a community group interested in helping to preserve the proper functioning of our environment, or even just an individual who wants the knowledge to speak out accurately at government meetings, you can purchase a resource guide called Evaluating and Conserving Green Infrastructure across the Landscape: A Practitioner’s Guide by Karen Firehock (available at the Green Infrastructure Center by calling 434-244-0322 or by visiting www.gicnc.org/)

This book starts with the basics, providing an overview of the reasons for green infrastructure planning, including the history of the field and definitions to make things clear. It goes on to explain how to evaluate and prioritize natural assets, how to map them, and how to organize an initiative that takes into account the views of various stakeholders as well as experts.

The Green Infrastructure Center is a non-profit agency whose existence could not have come at a better time. I hope citizens and government officials alike will take advantage of this group’s expertise and assistance.

Marlene A. Condon
Condon is a naturalist, writer, photographer and speaker living in Crozet. She is the author and photographer of “The Nature-friendly Garden.”
Re: “Trapping the borer,” May 9 news story:
The purple boxes hanging throughout the state to detect the Emerald Ash Borer appear fairly innocuous, until you take a closer look.
A Roanoke Times reporter found a dozen Eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies — our official state insect — stuck to just one box in Botetourt County. In Virginia, 5,500 such (death) traps are being hung this year, effectively killing any insect that steps foot upon them.
Should people care about the unnecessary killing of nontarget insect species? Yes, because these insects all have important roles to play in the environment, and the numbers of insects are way down from what they were just a half-century ago.
This fact matters because our lives are possible only if we co-exist with unimaginably large numbers of insect species that provide services we require, such as pollination of plants to help perpetuate them and the necessary recycling of organic matter to enable optimal plant growth.
If this environmental cost doesn’t seem significant to you, then perhaps the colossal waste of your tax dollars will. Nine million dollars have been spent annually for these survey activities in each of the last several fiscal years, but what happens when a survey finds the borer is in a new area? A quarantine — a restriction of the movement of ash products capable of transporting this insect to nonquarantined localities — may be put into place to try to slow the spread of EAB.
However, enacting a quarantine after detection is too late — as has been empirically shown in Northern Virginia. EAB was found at multiple sites in Fairfax County in 2008, resulting in the establishment of a quarantine for 10 Northern Virginia counties and independent cities. Yet the quarantine had to be expanded in 2010 to two more counties and the city of Winchester due to additional EAB detections.
Instead of wasting tax dollars and the lives of numerous innocent insects, common sense dictates that quarantines and public education should be enacted before EAB has a chance to be transported from one locality to the next.
People should notify federal and state representatives, as well as Gov. Bob McDonnell, to stop funding EAB surveys.

“Freedom Tower”, published 09/30/2004, The Roanoke Times