Interview with the Pollinator Pathway | NESAWG

Louise serves on the Board of the Pollinator Pathway; is also president of the Norwalk River Watershed Association; a member of the Norwalk Mayor’s Water Quality Committee; and a steering committee member of the Hudson-to-Housatonic Regional Conservation Partnership (H2H).

NESAWG: It is a pleasure to have you with us today, Louise. Thank you for taking the time to interview with NESAWG. Maybe we can start with you telling us a little bit about yourself, about the Pollinator Pathway and where this pathway is located.

Louise: I am Louise Washer, and I am a co-founder and current Board member of the Pollinator Pathway, an organization that started as a small Pollinator Pathway Project in 2016 in Wilton, CT. I came to the Project through the Norwalk River Watershed Association with great concern about pesticides, and about how to restore habitats without pesticides. 

Our Board members at the Pollinator Pathway are a group of volunteers from town conservation organizations working together to establish pollinator-friendly habitat and food sources for bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinating insects and wildlife along a series of continuous corridors.  

As more towns and cities started to join the Pollinator Pathway Project, it developed into a grassroots movement of individuals focused on restoring pesticide-free, native plant habitats across town lines, initially connecting NY and CT. Now the Pathway extends throughout the Northeast Coast with established pollinator corridors in over 300 towns and cities in 11 states: CT, NY, MA, NJ, MD, PA, NH, VT, RI and Ontario, Canada; and it is currently developing in the West Coast in Oregon and Washington State.

NESAWG: What is the approach, the goals and the scale of the Pollinator Pathway?

Louise: Most native bees have a range of about 750 meters, so the goal is to create corridors and pollinator pathways by connecting properties that are no farther apart than that. These properties can be public or private.

The Pollinator Pathway has a three-pronged approach:

  1. Planting native plants
  2. Avoiding pesticides
  3. Rethinking our lawns – mowing less often, leaving the leaves in fall, reducing the size of lawn area

The Project initially started working in suburban areas educating, bringing awareness and encouraging homeowners to rethink and move away from the idea of monoculture watered lawns using pesticides. Native Pollinator Garden Designs for Your Backyard

However, in recent years, the Project expanded and started working in urban and rural areas as well, primarily in:

  • Community garden projects
  • Replacing tree canopy in cities, for example by adding native trees & shrubs in two parks and restoring the tree canopy in between the parks in Southwest Connecticut.
  • Encouraging people who live in apartments to plant native pollinator plants in window boxes and towns to add planters along streets. Ideas for container plantings.
  • Working with NOFA CT farmers to grow local genotype pollinator plants at their organic Farms

The Pollinator Pathway spans from small scale apartment projects in window boxes all the way up to large scale projects with governments and land trusts that own a lot of open space. To date, we have distributed 9,000 signs that people can add to their mailboxes stating that they are participating in the corridor of the Pollinator Pathway. Hopefully, as the signs go up in people’s yards, we are spreading the idea and getting others inspired to spread the idea even further. Vermont is a state that is relatively new. The Pathway is really starting to spread in RI. That is the state where most of our sign shipments are going right now.  The Pathway is located mainly in the Northeast, but we are interested in spreading the idea of a Western Regional Native Pathway, as well.

We encourage people to join the Pollinator Pathway by:

We also have a step-by-step guide and Pollinator Pathway Toolkit if people want to start a Pollinator Pathway in their community. 

NESAWG: Your website is incredibly helpful and rich in information. I would now like to take a deeper dive into the importance of planting native plants. 

NESAWG: Why are native plants so important?

Louise: “Native plants provide food and shelter for 10-15 times more species of birds, butterflies, and other wildlife than non-native plants.” – CT Audubon. Native plants provide nutrient-rich pollen and nectar to many native bee species and other pollinators. Native plants also support plant-eating insects and caterpillars, which become good sources of protein for a large percentage of birds, bats and other wildlife species. As we all know, there has been a drastic decline of pollinator species in the last few years with declines in Monarch butterfly populations of over 90%, colony collapse reducing honeybees survival, 96% declines in North American bumble bees, all coming to be known as the insect apocalypse. It is crucial to realize that Native plants are important because the local and native insects, birds and wildlife use the native plants for their shelter and food. They have evolved together.  Our native oaks support over 50 species of moths and butterflies. If you plant a Chinese ginko it supports only 5 species of native insects and butterflies, according to research by University of Delaware author and entomologist, Doug Tallamy, in his landmark book Bringing Nature Home. (Resource: Where to buy Native Plants)

  • Natives vs. Invasives
    I like to tell the story of two dogwoods. Our native dogwood, Cornus florida, serves local wildlife in several ways. It is the host plant for the blue azure butterfly. The caterpillars camouflage with the branches of the trees, and the flowers bloom just as the butterflies emerge needing nectar. The berries at the end of the season are food for our local birds.
    The Kousa dogwood, which seems to be the preferred ornamental dogwood to plant these days- plays host to no species of butterflies, and the cherry-like fruits it makes in fall sustain Japanese monkeys. (2 pages from powerpoint).

There is a delicate balance in nature, and planting invasives breaks down the ecosystem endangering the survival of ALL

People should also know that planting native pollinator gardens is not only beneficial to the livelihood, nutrition, shelter and survival of insects, but it is also beneficial to our human health and diet. One third of the produce we eat today is pollinated by insects, and 75% of all of our flowering plants are pollinated by insects.

NESAWG: People tend to see insects as pests, but they are mostly truly beneficial and much needed. Furthermore, those insects that have exploded in population growth – like ticks – are a result of the imbalance and the breakdown of the ecosystem brought about by settler colonial practices imposed on Turtle Island. 

NESAWG: Let’s talk more about the importance of insects.

Louise: Insects – if you limit biodiversity in backyards – you are destroying the food chain. Possums eat thousands of ticks, for example. Research in Virginia shows one opossum eats 5500 ticks per week. Urban development and sterile lawns limit biodiversity, leaving no place for possums, foxes, even insects. If we had more of a balanced ecosystem, we could help minimize the sorts of problems with pests that we are having now. We need to focus on how to create a better balance in our landscape. The best way to do that is to restore a diverse range of native plants to our landscapes and keep them pesticide-free.

NESAWG: That is correct. Ticks weren’t a problem for our Aboriginal People before colonization.

Louise: The Pollinator Pathway encourages people to experiment with letting a part of their yard grow free without interference to learn what seeds are in the seed bank, what will grow. Allow a section of grass to grow, and leave some old leaves, brush piles, and dead trees on the ground for woodpeckers, bees and other insects to use as shelter. Many pollinators over-winter in the leaves.  If you rake them all away, you rake away the luna moths and lightening bugs as well. Also, leave some dirt patches for ground nesting bees, such as bumble bees, to lay their eggs and survive. 80% of our 330 species of native bees are solitary ground nesting bees, and they don’t sting, according to the CT Agricultural Experiment Station.  Only bumblebees have a small colony. Bumblebees will sting you if you step on them or crush them in your hand, but they are not aggressive. Many wasps are also solitary and are not aggressive, like the black digger and the gold digger which has an orange and red body. These insects are beautiful, and they love mountain mints, one of our EcoRegion-59 native plants. The insects and bees we are most often stung by are not native to our land. The bees most likely to sting are the honeybees, and the wasps that sting big time are the yellow jackets. Both honeybees and yellow jackets are European, they live in colonies, and they sting to protect their colonies.  

Although the Pollinator Pathway is focused on mainly supporting native bees, we work closely with our allies, the beekeepers, on issues like pesticide regulation policy and research. We worry, though, that there is some misinformation out there about how people can best help reverse the declines in bee populations. Importing and raising European honeybees is a great idea if you are producing honey for consumption and/ or production/ sale, however, it is not a way to “save the bees.” Honeybees are important in agriculture for helping to pollinate vast orchards because they can be transported around the country for this service. However, introducing them to your backyard will mean they are actually competing with native pollinators. You are likely living in an area with not enough forage for the healthy and balanced sustenance of both the European honeybees and the local native bees. One solution is that if you add honeybees, make sure you plant enough additional forage for your bigger population. Learn more about Native Solitary Wasps

Recommendation: Don’t decide to get honeybees to save the bees. Just get pollinator plants and stop using pesticides.

NESAWG: These are important recommendations, Louise. Let’s talk more about recommendations for our lawns.

NESAWG: Let’s talk about lawns as crops with monoculture and irrigation practices that follow the harmful Monsanto model.

Louise: Yes, let’s address the sterile monoculture lawns that we water. This is depleting our drinking water supply and bringing in the pesticides. Lawns are monoculture crops that destroy biodiversity and ecosystems,  just like any Monsanto monoculture agricultural field. We have 40 million acres of lawn in the US, more than any crop we grow. Lawns are a status symbol; and one that submits the land to a monoculture system that depletes the land of its nutrients. 

It is also important to know that, on one acre of lawn people use 10 times more pesticides than the pesticides used on one acre of agricultural land for food production.

In terms of water usage – in Southwest CT 70% of the water is used outside to water lawns and ornamental plants, instead of it being used for drinking water. People also install irrigation systems on their lawns. Irrigation systems use 40% more water on average.

Recommendations: Stop doing everything you have been doing in your yard, as an experiment, and let the lawn grow. Take at least a section of your yard and stop mowing it, stop raking it, and see what wildflowers come up.  See what is in your seed bank, and find out if they are invasive or not. Many pollinators overwinter in the leaf matter, so if I rake and blow off my leaves I am destroying the habitat where the moths lay their eggs.

Here we see the replacement of sterile monoculture lawns with colorful meadows rich in biodiversity and full of life. You can weed and trim around the edges of the property so that it looks tidy for the neighbors, but the yard can be left to grow freely with beautiful wild plants. You can also mow a pathway to walk through the natural landscape. Here is another reason why it is important to have the Pollinator Pathway sign in your yard, so people know your yard is a bit messier because it is pollinator habitat. Order a Pollinator Pathway Sign. 

NESAWG: People might wish to download the following apps to help them identify the plants that naturally grow in their lawn without interference. These apps will help you determine if a plant is native or invasive.

  • Seek by iNaturalist
  • PlantNet Identify

NESAWG: How do you deal with wildlife habitat fragmentation?

Louise: One of the big problems is the fragmentation of our pollinator habitats. Pollinator Pathway encourages property owners to connect their pollinator gardens with their neighbors’ pollinator habitats, so that wildlife can move from area to area. If we begin to manage our own yards organically and with native plantings, we can use them to connect parks and preserves, creating crucial corridors for wildlife. That is the idea behind the Pollinator Pathway. So, sit down and look at the existing pollinator wildlife habitat in your urban, suburban or rural area, and then think about how we can connect them. 

The Pollinator Pathway is also interested in connecting with organizations that have large areas and tracts of land, so that we can expand the pollinator corridors. 

It is important to keep the vision that we should all learn from each other and support each other to understand what works best in each community.

NESAWG: How does the Pollinator Pathway go about connecting the different communities in the Northeast corridor, so that they can all learn from each other? Do you hold monthly calls or meetings?

Louise: We have been communicating and sharing our stories through our Newsletter, but we have now hired a part-time staff for the first time who will be starting us with regional quarterly Zoom meetings for storytelling – so that we can share the stories from around the pathway. Up until now, it has all been volunteer work.  

Click here to sign up for the newsletter and add yourself to the Pollinator Pathway.

If you are interested in advocacy, reach out to us and get involved! Email us at [email protected]. We have sample native plant and pesticide Ordinances and Resolutions listed on our website.  

NESAWG: Speaking of Ordinances. Do you have some examples of ordinances that have been passed successfully?

Louise: Yes, we do! You might want to look into updating Blight Ordinances, which are outdated rules that require residents to mow their lawns. The Stamford Pollinator Pathway was able to update their city’s Blight Ordinance to allow for pollinator meadows. 

List of Municipal Actions, Resolutions, Ordinances & Policies by City & State
Here are some examples of municipal actions, resolutions, ordinances and policies that have been passed in different states and cities and that you may wish to see taken up in your own town or city: https://www.pollinator-pathway.org/ordinances-and-resolutions

NESAWG: Do you have any final comments that you may wish to add?

Louise: Yes! I do. Municipal rights to set pesticide policy are under attack at the national level.  A Congressional bill sponsored by Rodney Davis R from Illinois; H.R. 7266 would preempt and nullify the local ordinances that we are all working on passing. Davis is seeking to have it attached to this year’s Farm Bill.​

Tell your U.S. Representative and Senators to support communities by opposing H.R. 7266 and supporting the Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act (PACTPA), which contains a provision affirming local authority to restrict pesticides. Fill out the form here. 

NESAWG: How can people reach you?

Louise: People can go to our website or email us at [email protected]
 

Resources:

  • National Wildlife Foundation Sales – Garden for Life
  • Solitary Wasps
  • The Insect Apocalypse is More Nuanced Than It First Appears
  • Native Plants for the Small Yard: Easy, Beautiful Home
  • International Dark Skies Association in Massachusetts with Tim Brother
  • Map of US Pesticide Reform Policies (Beyond Pesticides)
  • ​​​​​​​Chlorpyrifos Ban​​​​​​​
    • Several states — including California, Hawaii, New York and Maryland — have banned or restricted the use of chlorpyrifos, and the attorneys general of those states, as well as those of Washington, Vermont and Massachusetts, joined a petition asking for a ban. Chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin that harms brain development in young children, is mainly used on golf courses in CT. Pollinator Pathway worked on CT legislation last year that has banned the use of Chlorpyrifos on golf courses. Please refer to this NY Times article.
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Neonicotinoids Ban for Non- farm use​​​​​​​
    • Neonicotinoids hollow out the ecosystem by harming pollinators, birds and fish. Neonicotinoids are likely causing harm to ⅔ to ¾ of endangered species according to a new study by the EPA.  Neonicotinoids are the most widely used pesticides. More information about how to fight them is at our website.