Deadline: Proposal email: May 31st 2023
Contact: Michael Stephens, Professor of English, Johnson & Wales University, Charlotte, NC
Email: mstephens@jwu.edu
Phone: 8034176444
Call for Manuscripts for Edited Volume
Working Title: The Ecology and Spirituality of Gardening with Native Plants
Lexington Books (A Division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc)
Edited by Michael Stephens PhD (Johnson & Wales University)
In Maryland in 2020, a couple successfully filed a complaint against an HOA when it tried to prevent them from keeping their yard as a bee and wildlife friendly habitat. A law, passed in 2021 by the Maryland State Legislature, now limits the power of HOA’s in that state to dispute eco-friendly yards. This case marks one inflection point in a growing debate over the meaning and purpose of the American yard, driven by climate change, drought, and the destruction of ecosystems and wildlife habitats by developers. The recent United Nations Conference on Water Use clarified the relationship between water use and climate change: “Climate change is primarily a water crisis. We feel its impacts through worsening floods, rising sea levels, shrinking ice fields, wildfires and droughts. However, water can (also) fight climate change. Sustainable water management is central to building the resilience of societies and ecosystems and to reducing carbon emissions. Everyone has a role to play – actions at the individual and household level are vital” (UNWater.org). Water shortages in the Western United States are now motivating local governments in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, New Mexico and Arizona to restrict the use of turf grass in landscaping. These states now offer monetary incentives to remove and replace lawns with “sustainable, desert-friendly landscapes.” But even in states with the rainfall to support lawns, some gardeners are seeing the environmental value of making their yards a home to native plants and the wildlife these plants sustain. The National Wildlife Federation notes that habitat loss and fragmentation, largely due to housing and commercial land development, “is the primary threat to the survival of wildlife in the United States” (nwf.org). Gardening with native plants has huge benefits for water use, wildlife conservation and climate change as authors like Douglas W. Tallamy and Dave Goulson have shown. This transformation has both ecological and spiritual dimensions. Benjamin Vogt writes: “each garden places us firmly within the context of all life, awakens us to the web, humbles us as we become aware of ourselves as a node in that interlinked web”. In this volume, we will explore the benefits of and barriers to restoring biodiversity by gardening with native plants.
The aim of this volume is to solicit manuscripts that trace the economic, cultural and environmental forces that have shaped the American yard, the yard’s potential for environmental transformation, and the change in values involved in dedicating yards to native plants and nature and wildlife conservation. Topics might include, but are not restricted to:
• The Great American Lawn Replacement: The well-kept lawn is an American institution and a traditional indicator of good citizenship in suburban communities. Yet lawns are ecologically sterile monocultures that do nothing to sustain wildlife and native plant species. Lawns drain and pollute billions of gallons of water each year. Attitudes towards the American lawn are changing rapidly, as the increasing press attention to this topic shows: Scientific American (“The Lawn Grass Probably Isn’t Greener”, 11/3/18), The Washington Post (“Ditching Grass Could Help Your Backyard Thrive”, 6/30/21), The New York Times (“Where Lawns are Outlawed (and Dug up and Carted Away”, 5/3/22), The Economist (“The going gets turf: do lawns have a future in the age of drought?”, 8/16/22). The climatological, ecological and social pressures to replace the American lawn deserve serious analysis from a variety of perspectives.
• Greening the yard industry: The American yard currently supports herbicide, pesticide and seed manufacturers, lawn-care companies, mosquito-control franchises, and commercial growers like Metrolina Greenhouses, the largest heated greenhouse in the USA, which produces 32.5 million annuals each year for Lowes. The plants in Lowes and other big box garden stores are grown, distributed and sold nationwide with little or no thought for how these plants fit into local ecosystems. Can the cottage industry of native plant nurseries compete with corporate garden stores? What forces sustain the American yard’s current paradigm? Can native-plant gardening change this paradigm?
• Challenging HOA’s: One central goal of early HOA’s was to keep black people out of suburban housing developments. The idea of “community standards” stems from the implicit assumption that suburban communities were white. Preserving property values also meant directing white homebuyers away from using their yards as spaces to raise chickens, store broken appliances or work on cars. HOA’s thus became America’s yard police, and today’s ecologically sterile suburban landscape is the result. What are the connections between HOA’s repression of racial and ecological diversity? How can HOA’s be challenged to make biodiversity and water conservation community priorities?
• Cultivating weeds: A weed is a plant “out of place” – but what does out of place mean in gardening with native plants? If English roses and Japanese Maples are out of place in a Southern yard while milkweed and pokeweed are at home, how does gardening with native plants change aesthetic hierarchies in gardening and reconstitute the horticultural “other”?
• Gardening with Native Plants as a form of Eco- Spirituality: Gardening with native plants changes the individual’s relationship with the land. In restoring land to its place in the surrounding ecology, people experience the natural world, not just for a few hours on a visit to the woods, but each day in the changing life of plants and wildlife in their yard. Interacting with nature has been shown to reduce stress, but in addition to the health benefits of bringing nature home, there is also a sense of connectedness to a power greater than the individual and a value system higher than private property. Gardening with native plants is a form of nature spirituality that has not been explored by writers on green religion and ecofeminism. The spirituality of gardening with native plants deserves a full critical examination.
Chapter Parameters:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (R&L) uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., as style and spelling guides.
Completed chapters should be 20-30 pages, double-spaced, 12-point font.
Please send brief biographical information, your proposed title, and a 500-word abstract of proposed content to mstephens@jwu.edu by May 31, 2023. Please acknowledge in the email your willingness to adhere to the timeline below:
Proposal Email: May 31, 2023
Acceptance Notification: June 30, 2023
Completed Chapters Submitted: August 31, 2023
Peer Review Feedback: September 30, 2023
Revisions: October 31, 2023
Editorial Work: November-December 2023
Full Manuscript Sent to Lexington Books: February 2024
Posted on April 28, 2023
