Nature’s Best Hope

Recent headlines about global insect declines, the impending extinction of one million species worldwide, 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. Tallamy will discuss simple steps that each of us can- and must- take to reverse declining biodiversity and will explain why we, ourselves, are nature’s best hope.

Doug Tallamy

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware, where he has taught insect taxonomy, behavioral ecology, and other related subjects. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities.

Doug won the Silver Medal from the Garden Writer’s Association for his 2007 book, Bringing Nature Home, widely recognized as one of the most important books of its kind. More recently, he authored another book, The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden with Rick Darke (2014). To date, he has written 90 research articles. Among his awards are the Garden Club of America Margaret Douglas Medal for Conservation and the Tom Dodd Jr. Award of Excellence in 2013 and the 2018 AHS B.Y. Morrison Communication Award.

Doug was a post-doctoral fellow in Entomology at the University of Iowa (1980–1981) after earning a Ph.D. in Entomology at the University of Maryland (1980) and a M.S. in Entomology from Rutgers University (1976). He regularly teaches classes on Insect Ecology and Conservation, Behavioral Ecology, and Advanced Ecology. His current research centers on the behavioral ecology of insects, conservation of biodiversity, impacts of alien plants on native ecosystems, and plant-insect interactions.

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