Gardeners can slow climate change

The problems for wildlife noted in Britain (plants, flowers and insects which many animals/birds feed on/nest in are shifting their habitats and changing breeding patterns) and suggestions to gardeners apply in the US as well. For more specific suggestions on supporting local wild life and conserving water use, read the whole article.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1795001,00.html


Gardeners can slow climate change (headline)

Experts appeal for the land around every home to become a sanctuary for endangered wildlife (subhead)

Juliette Jowit, environment editor
Sunday June 11, 2006
The Observer


Britain's gardeners are being asked to open up their borders, lawns and shrubs to help tackle the world's greatest environmental threat: climate change. More than a million species in the world are in danger from a warmer planet - including many of the UK's birds and other creatures expected to lose feeding and breeding grounds - as warmer, drier summers and wetter, stormier winters become more common.
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'Every garden is a habitat for wildlife,' said Chris Gibson, a senior conservation officer for English Nature, which will launch its campaign at the BBC Gardeners' World Live show this week at the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham. 'Even the most unnatural garden is a habitat for some natural wildlife and gardeners can do their bit to create little bits of habitat wildlife can use.'
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'Wildlife gardening' - making gardens more welcoming to wild creatures - is increasingly popular with conservation-ists as a way of providing new habitats between breeding areas. Among the tips suggested by English Nature is planting pollen-rich and bell-shaped plants for bees, colourful flowers to attract butterflies, leaving log and leaf piles for hedgehogs, and spurning slug pellets.
Creating boggy areas or ponds can help amphibian species - one third of which are said to be threatened - and bats which feed off the insects.
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Each gardener and patch of land might seem too small to solve a global problem, but together they could make a huge difference, say the experts. Nearly two-thirds of British adults are gardeners - more than twice the number who watch football. The total area of UK gardens is also greater than all the national nature reserves, said Morag Shuaib, the Wildlife Trusts' project officer for Gardening for Wildlife, a scheme run jointly with the Royal Horticultural Society. 'It does make a difference because of that,' she said.

encouraging species that eat pests too.

I can imagine how it really could help build up populations so that they could postpone demographic failures of some species.

I'm less inclined to believe that it will slow global warming.

Wow, just looked out my back window and there's a doe chomping away on some of my naturescape. Good luck to her - they have bow and arrow hunting open season here every couple of years to keep down the deer population, which I intellectually know is necessary, but I do love to watch her.