Refugia Gardening

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With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.

– UN secretary general António Guterres at COP15 in Montreal (December 2022)

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Mass Extinction Crisis

Life on Earth has survived five mass extinctions, periods of time when large percentages of species died out, all due to natural calamities such as the meteor that doomed the dinosaurs. Now life here is experiencing a sixth mass extinction. We know the drivers of this extinction and their ranking by impact:

1. Land and ocean use changes to feed and house humans
2. Overexploitation due to harvesting and hunting faster than species can reproduce
3. Climate change occurring quicker than species can adapt or migrate
4. Pollution that reduces health and/or reproductive success
5. Invasive species that disrupt ecosystems and compete with indigenous species

What do these drivers have in common? They are all caused by human activity. This is why António Guterres rightly describes humanity as a “weapon of mass extinction.” Those words are intentionally jarring. They are meant to alert us to the peril we have caused. But this isn’t just about what we humans are doing to other species. Their destruction is also our destruction. Without the biodiversity upon which we depend for food, clean air, and clean water, our species cannot survive. If there is a Law of Ecology, it is this: All of life is interdependent.

Conservation Conundrum

So what do we do? One of the proposals adopted at COP15 is called 30×30: conserve 30% of Earth’s land and marine habitat by 2030. Essentially, this plan will entail establishing a global network of diverse habitats that would support migration and adaptation of biodiversity. On the surface, this sounds like a great idea, but it is opposed by some indigenous groups who are concerned about the history of this conservation paradigm. To understand why, we need to do a little exploring.

National parks are often called “America’s greatest idea.” Coming to fruition in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the U.S. national park system was established to preserve spectacular places and the inherent biodiversity for the enjoyment of people. To safeguard these places from human spoiling, a policy was established to remove human inhabitants so that these places could be enjoyed by visitors. Many indigenous communities lost their ancestral homelands as a result. By measures that mattered at the time, this idea was deemed an economic and ecological success. And so it grew… and was exported.

Globally, the growth in conserved lands has been impressive – from under 10,000 preserves in 1950 to over 100,000 preserves in 2009, a total area roughly the size of South America! Spectacular places and beloved species have been protected. And yet there is a sad irony: despite this success in conserving habitats, extinctions have accelerated! Why?

To make sense of this conundrum, one must examine what lies beneath the surface. The underlying assumption of the traditional conservation paradigm is that humans are not part of nature. For nature to thrive, humans must withdraw. This is the key idea in a word we often use to describe pristine nature, wilderness. But this way of thinking blinds us from realizing our broken relationship to the natural world is the root cause of the mass extinction crisis. If we are going to change the trajectory on biodiversity loss, we need a new conservation paradigm that revitalizes our relationship with nature.

	Historic Conservation	New Conservation
Key priority	Nature for nature’s sake (intrinsic value) Human well-being is not a strong priority; however, mutually beneficial outcomes are possible	Nature for humanity + nature’s sake (win-win) Human well-being (or at least avoiding harm) is a strong priority, and mutually beneficial outcomes are possible
Pristine areas	Pristine areas should be strictly protected, off-limits to human habitation except for tourism	Pristine nature does not exist. Promote conservation everywhere, including non-natives and highly modified areas
Human impacts	Reduce impact by reducing human population growth Concern that rich people have a larger impact than poor people	Reduce human population growth and reform global trade to reduce impact Income level not a strong determinant of human impact
Role of markets	Conservation can (needs to) work with capitalism, but market-based solutions are not a high priority	Some heavily favor market-based solutions in conservation while others are concerned about capitalism’s devotion to unending growth

Although these are turbulent times in the conservation community, a New Conservation movement is beginning to take root there. While the details are still debated, the emerging consensus around New Conservation principles reveals important contrasts with historic conservation (see chart). Most importantly, New Conservation recognizes that human well-being is inextricably linked to the natural world and that mutually beneficial outcomes are possible when one sees humans as a part of nature. Because of the pervasiveness of the top drivers of extinction, the movement rejects the notion that pristine nature still exists. This frees humans to promote conservation everywhere, including in highly modified or novel ecosystems that some are now calling “anthromes.” At the same time, many in this movement advocate for indigenous wisdom honed in places over centuries as crucial for the success of conservation efforts. While acknowledging that affluence and technology do affect human impacts, New Conservationists recognize that poverty is often a driver of habitat destruction. Therefore, they are inclined towards solutions that couple poverty reduction and conservation. Some in this movement are interested in market-based solutions (such as cap-and-trade) while others are concerned about economic models that ignore the natural limits of growth.

Interestingly, traditional conservationists and New Conservationists have both turned toward the refugia concept with thinking about biodiversity conservation in the face of climate change. Traditional conservationists have turn to mapping technologies in their efforts to identify in nature reserves potential areas that may serve as different types of refugia (see below). Not limited to official preserves, New Conservationists have turned to places outside of the conservation norm, especially urban areas, as potential refugia sites. Given the daunting challenge of changing the trajectory on biodiversity loss, both strategies are likely to bear good fruit.

Different Types of Biological Refugia

• Predation/herbivory refugia: Places that serve as “safe havens” where individuals can better avoid being eaten
• Disturbance refugia: Places that avoid the worst ravages of an ecological disturbance, such as drought, flooding, fire, hurricane, volcanic eruption, pest/disease outbreak, etc.
• Climate refugia: Places that are relatively protected from the impacts of weather extremes as climate changes
• Bio-cultural refugia: Places that harbor place-specific social memories related to food security and stewardship of biodiversity

Can Refugia Gardeners Really Make a Difference?

Refugia Gardening fits especially well into the New Conservation paradigm. As a key contributor to this emerging paradigm, Emma Marris answers our question in her book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World:

 “If we fight to preserve only things that look like pristine wilderness, such as those places currently enclosed in national parks and similar refuges, our best efforts can only retard the destruction and delay the day we lose. If we fight to preserve and enhance nature as… the living backyard to human lives, we may be able to win. We may be able to grow nature larger than it currently is. This will not only require a change in our values but a change in our very aesthetics, as we learn to accept both nature that looks a little more lived-in than we are used to and working spaces that look a little more wild than we are used to.”

Marris’ words may have inspired the Convivial Conservation community. That word convivial denotes ‘living with’ and echoes the New Conservationist paradigm which this community intertwines with ecological, social, and political-economic goals. You can read more about this community and their movement below. 

The real power of refugia gardening occurs when neighbors build networks, a key to forming conservation connections and corridors that enable migration and adaptation in the face of environmental challenges. Here is how we envision this working:

1. Refugia gardens, each with slightly different “experimental combinations” of plants, are established city-wide. These are depicted by green dots on the map above.
2. Gardeners form networks to coordinate conservation efforts.
3. Over time, different areas are affected by different environmental stresses. These are depicted by the colored areas on the map above.
4. Through the network, gardeners learn which “experimental combinations” are adaptive and adjust their refugia gardens accordingly in ongoing cycles.

Finding Sources of Inspiration

Refugia gardeners looking for inspiration will find an array of online resources, especially if they know some useful keywords to use in their searches. We suggest the following conservation-related terms:

• Ecological or ecosystem gardening – As the terms suggest, the focus here is on ecological functions (typically with native species) that enhance local biodiversity and resilience. Douglas Tallamy’s books, Nature’s Best Hope and Bringing Nature Home, are an inspiring and informative place to begin this journey, along with his Homegrown National Park website. Matt Rees-Warren’s book, The Ecological Gardener: How to Create Beauty and Biodiversity from the Soil Up, is also an excellent guide for novices and experts alike. 
• Urban rewilding – Rewilding is a strategy for restoring natural ecosystem functions in places affected by human disturbance and domination. Many rewilding efforts center on nature preserves and rural areas. But there are a growing number of organizations, such as UK-based Citizen Zoo, that are now focusing on urban rewilding. The Citizen Zoo website offers a very good overview of urban rewilding and its potential for resetting our relationship with nature.
• Reconciliation ecology – In his 2003 book, Win-Win Ecology: How the Earth’s Species Can Survive in the Midst of Human Enterprise, Michael Rosenzweig introduced this concept to describe ecological restoration in human-dominated landscapes. One organization that has taken up this paradigm and applied it to urban environments is the National Wildlife Federation, which provides many helpful ideas and resources via their website. Our colleagues at Calvin University also wrote an informative article about reconciliation ecology from a Christian perspective.
• Convivial conservation – Convivial conservationists combine ecological, social, and political-economic perspectives into a comprehensive Whole-Earth strategy that aims to transform human-nature interactions on a personal and a societal level. This movement has taken root in Europe with inspiration from a book, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene, written by Dutch social scientists Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher. You can learn more about the movement’s transformative vision and research projects at their website.

For further inspiration and information, please visit our Resources and Inspiration page. You won’t find resources that explicitly explain “refugia gardening” (because that is a concept that we are introducing, and we haven’t yet written a book). However, you will find these resources to be helpful for immersing yourself into this important at-home conservation work. We also encourage you to Contact Us with your questions, ideas, and suggestions.