Palmerton, PA Imagine my surprise when, on the last full day of my vacation in the mountains of the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania, I discovered that the town in which I had been staying, Palmerton, PA, was the site of one of the largest EPA Superfund clean-up sites east of the Mississippi River. This [...]
Butterfly numbers plunge by 50 percent
Butterfly lovers have noticed an alarming trend–butterfly numbers are down over 50 percent this year. The North American Butterfly Association (NABA) has sponsored butterfly counts since 1992, and has noted significant drops in butterfly populations this year. Pat Sutton is a founding member of NABA and has participated in these counts since their inception. To [...]
Ecosystem Services and Your Ecosystem Garden: how your property contributes to healthy ecosystems
Ecosystem Services The World Resources Institute published an article describing how corporations can contribute to the health of essential ecosystem services. Our goal here is to show how every one of us can make the same contribution in our gardens. A healthy, intact ecosystem provides many critical services on which we as humans are dependent [...]
The New Monkey and your Conservation Garden: Everything is Connected
In Sunday’s New York Times, Natalie Angier wrote about the discovery of a newly discovered monkey species, the Saddleback Tamarin in the Brazilian Amazon. Since the 2005 summary of the worlds mammal species (totaling 5400 species) another 400 species have been discovered. This may lead you to say to yourself “See, there’s no problem with [...]
Have a Cup of Coffee and Help Save Bird Habitat
I recently had the privilege of visiting a family-owned organic, shade-grown coffee farm in Veracruz, Mexico. While there, I was amazed at the numbers of amazing butterflies and birds that we observed while exploring this site, and also by how much I felt like I was strolling through someone’s garden. The notable variety of the [...]
What does Conservation Gardening mean?
Conservation Gardening Conservation Gardening views every property — whether a small residential backyard or acres of woodland or the grounds surrounding your business– as an ecosystem. If each of us takes personal responsibility for the health of the wildlife on our property, we can improve the health of our planet. Because habitat loss due to [...]
Why Your Garden is so Important for Ecosystem Gardening
Habitat Loss due to Human Action is the Number One Cause of Species Decline We humans have an extraordinary propensity for building new things: shopping centers, malls, condos, office parks, suburban subdivisions, roads, parking lots, etc. This need to have more and more is really not a great situation for the wildlife that were thriving [...]
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