Your small backyard garden could do big things for the planet.
stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves.
It’s also reversing the longstanding assumption that growing food is straight-up bad for biodiversity because clearing land for agriculture necessitates removing native plants and animals. Ecologist Shalene Jha of the University of Texas, Austin says this idea was based on observations ofagriculture, where growing industrialized swaths of corn or wheat can be catastrophic for existing ecosystems. But that doesn’t hold for the urban farms, gardens, and even smaller green spaces.
Jha’s team characterized the biodiversity of 28 California urban gardens over the course of five years. Far from the mono-cropped monotony of a wheat field, they found rich ecosystems humming with activity that, in turn, increased species diversity. The researchers found predators like birds and ladybugs, which prey on crop-munching insects and thus help increase yields, and an abundance of pollinators like bees, which also benefit from crop diversity and increase plant productivity.
This biodiversity is largely due to a strategic trade-off. One of the challenges of urban gardening is that it requires intensive manual labor: You can’t drive a combine through a city at harvest time. But that limitation turns out to be an ecological blessing. Because everything is done by hand, urban farmers can grow all sorts of plants right next to each other, packed in tightly to increase yields.
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