There is a particular kind of attention you can only give to one square foot of ground. You have to kneel for it. You have to look until your eyes adjust. And then, slowly, the ground stops being ground and starts being a city.
Ants moving in lines. A beetle the size of a sesame seed. A spider you didn't know lived where you live. A single small flower you've walked past a thousand times without seeing. That experience is available, for free, to every single one of us. Most of us no longer take it.
We made backyard.bio because we think that's the loss underneath all the other losses. The numbers about biodiversity decline are real and they are serious — but the thing that came first, and the thing that has to come back first, is wonder. You cannot ask people to protect what they have never noticed. You cannot ask children to inherit a world they've been taught to fear instead of love.
A relationship that needs repair.
For most of human history, the people who lived in a place knew that place — what bloomed when, where the water ran clean, which mushrooms were edible, which birds came back in the spring. That knowledge was practical and it was sacred at the same time, because there was no useful distinction between the two. To know a place was to belong to it.
Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped knowing. Not because we got worse at noticing, but because we stopped being asked to. We moved into houses where the ground arrived already covered, where every plant in the backyard was decorative and every insect was a problem to be sprayed. We taught our children that "nature" was something you visited on weekends — somewhere far away, somewhere you needed a permit to enter — rather than something living in the soil three feet from the back door.
The work of conservation, in the end, is the work of restoring a relationship. Between humans and the ground we live on. Between adults and the children who watch what we pay attention to. Between a person and a tree they planted in the backyard with their own hands, and the small beings that show up to make a home there.
Honest about where we are.
We are not naïve about where we are. The current path is not sustainable. Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of harm. The science on biodiversity loss, on insect decline, on the unraveling of the ecological systems that keep the planet livable for us — that science is real, and we should be honest about it.
But we also believe — really believe — that the way we get to a different path is not through fear. Fear has been the dominant register of environmental communication for forty years, and the data is in: it does not work. People shut down. They tune out. They feel guilty and then they feel tired of feeling guilty, and then they stop reading altogether.
What works is curiosity. What works is the small, almost embarrassingly modest practice of noticing what's living on the patch of ground you happen to have access to, and learning what it needs. Multiplied by tens of millions of patches, that practice is the largest conservation tool we have. It is also, not coincidentally, the most enjoyable. The people who do this work tend to love their lives.
The inheritance question.
Children are watching. They are watching what we look at, what we point to, what we notice out loud. If we walk past the dandelion without seeing it, they learn that dandelions are not worth seeing. If we kneel down and say "look at this," they learn that things on the ground are worth kneeling for. There is no neutral ground here. We are teaching all the time, whether we mean to or not.
We want to leave the next generation something better than dread. Not a world without problems — that's not on offer — but an inheritance of attention. A habit of wonder. The understanding that the planet they are inheriting is unimaginably interesting, and that they are part of it, and that the small choices they make about the small patches they have access to are not insignificant. They are the work.
A nine-year-old who can name three kinds of bees in her backyard, and tell you what each of them feeds on, and worry over which ones haven't come back this year — that child is going to grow up to make different decisions than a child who only knows that bees sting. That's the actual lever. That's the thing we think is worth our working life.
What we will and won't do here.
We will write about what's living in the small backyards around us — whether yours is a yard, a window box, a strip of dirt next to a parking lot, a schoolyard, a courtyard, a balcony. We will pass along what we read and what we notice. We will be specific. We will name plants and birds and insects by their actual names. We will get things wrong and correct them in public.
We will not be doom-y. We will not be twee. We will not lecture. We will not pretend the problem isn't real, and we will not pretend it's hopeless, because neither of those is true. We will try to be the calm, curious, slightly excited voice that you'd want on a walk with you — the friend who says "wait, look at this" instead of the friend who says "we're all going to die."
The site you're reading is the place to begin. Read whatever pulls you in. Subscribe if you want a weekly letter from us. Plant something native this season. Notice what shows up. The work is small and the work is local and the work, multiplied across enough patches, is real.
Welcome. Glad you're here.
— The editors