The Nature Principle

While many yards are grass lawns, Karen Harwell decided to make her urban yard a garden oasis open to her community. Her yard has bees, native plants, a duck pond, fruit trees and a garden, and teenagers and their families visit her yard to enjoy the urban nature and help harvest. Harwell is part of a growing community of “home nature-restoration” in which nature is locals restore nature instead of searching in typical wilderness settings.

The home nature-restoration trend is turning into a marketing and architecture design trend, with “housing design philosophy” placing emphasis on “conserving energy, using earth-friendly materials, and also applying biophilic design principles to promote health, human energy and beauty” (161). As companies search to make their buildings eco-friendlier, some have even included electronic nature scenes, which are proven to be more beneficial than no nature scene, but less so than actual windows to nature.

Louv explores how urban gardening and suburban planning can work to reincorporate native flora and fauna into the environment. He recognizes that while wilderness is ideal, humans must learn to co-habituate with nature in a way that restores and sustains local wildlife and plants. Tallamy, a professor of Entomology, emphasizes the importance of native plants on rebuilding local food webs and sustaining insect and animal populations.