Doug Tallamy, a widely acclaimed professor in the Dept. of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, is scheduled to give an in-person talk in West Chester on Sept. 15, 2021.

He gave this talk at the Virtual Siouxland Garden Show on March 26, 2021. His overall theme is that Nature is built from millions of specialized interactions, as between insects and plants, and that we destroy those interactions at our peril. In fact, people (and our food supply) are totally dependent on the very “ecosystem services” that we are threatening.

Here is his summary:

“Recent headlines about global insect declines and three billion fewer birds in North America are a bleak reality check about how ineffective our current landscape designs have been at sustaining the plants and animals that sustain us. Such losses are not an option if we wish to continue our current standard of living on planet Earth. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. Let’s look at simple steps that each of us can and must take to reverse declining biodiversity and explain why we, ourselves, are nature’s best hope.”

Being part of that hope means respecting nature: climate, water, air, plants, animals, and yes, insects. As summarized by the great entomologist E. O. Wilson: