Blog
Biodiversity
Posted May 22, 2022 by Dr. Wei Z
On this World Biodiversity Day, I want to show how biodiversity supports lives and human well-being. The pictures on the left are from my yard. Since we moved in 7 years ago, we didn't use any herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, or fertilizers on our yard. With TreeDiaper® tree/garden mat products, we didn't even need irrigation.
From early spring to late fall, we have plenty of food sources for pollinators: dandelions, clovers, peaches, apricots, azaleas, maple, false indigo bush, wild black berries, blueberries, rose, crepe myrtle, hydrangeas, marigolds, irises, tomatoes, over-ripen fruit from peach and fig trees, and many more flowering plants I can't recognize. Microbes and worms keep the soil as healthy as it can be, so we didn't need fertilizers. No pesticides, so we have a lot of worms, grubs and bugs; then we have gophers and moles keep them in check. While they do that, our lawn is aerated. And foxes keep these underground rodents controlled. So far, we didn't have to do anything about foxes. Vehicles on the road did kill a couple over last year.
There are too many ways for human being to benefits from this biodiversity, but I just want to mention one thing. There are many studies linking pesticides and herbicides to Parkinson's disease (PD), birth defects and other health problems. You can read the articles by clicking the links below if you are interested. I copied a paragraph here:"...individuals with PD were significantly more likely to report direct pesticide application than their unaffected relatives..."
So when you apply chemicals to eliminate the "weeds" and "insects", you risk your own health, most times symptoms won't show up until years later.
The picture on the right is a lawn a few houses from ours that was professionally treated 3 times a year.
- How many species can it support? ONE!
- How many pollinators will it feed? ZERO!