After successfully organizing to register Lake Bluff as a Community Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation, a Lake Bluff nature group is joining broader efforts to push for state regulations of a common insecticide they warn is killing pollinators.
Growing Native Habitat Lake Bluff, which started during the pandemic as a book club focused on nature and native plantings, celebrated their NWF designation earlier this month. It’s the second Lake County community to achieve the designation, after Highland Park in January.
The NWF, founded in 1936, is one of the largest nonprofit conservation organizations in the country. It runs the Community Wildlife Habitat program, which recognizes wildlife-friendly municipalities.
The designation is given to communities with a sufficient proportion of certified, wildlife-friendly properties and environment-related education and outreach. Residents can get their gardens certified by the NWF if they meet certain requirements, such as sufficient food and water sources, native plants and sustainable gardening practices, meaning no herbicides or pesticides.
Growing organization
Growing Native Habitat Lake Bluff president Sue Raymoure and member Ann Vertovec spoke to a Pioneer Press reporter at a native plant demonstration garden at Artesian Park. The two Lake Bluff women were driving forces in the designation effort, which they said all stemmed from a book Raymoure read several years ago now — “Nature’s Best Hope,” by entomologist Douglas Tallamy.
It lit a spark for Raymoure, and she organized a book club with a handful of people during the pandemic. That group has since expanded both in mission and members.
“Once I read this book, it was a calling,” Raymoure said. “I have grandchildren that live in town, and I read this book, and you think about the world and where we’re going, and I had to do whatever I could.”
The idea for the certification came after Vertovec read an article about Highland Park receiving the NWF verification earlier this year. They met with the organizers of that effort and began the undertaking.
While they celebrated the win earlier this month, Raymoure said they’ve got more work ahead of them. They’ve been reaching out to legislators like State Senator Julie A. Morrison, D‑29th District, to push for regulations of neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide, for what they call “ornamental” use, like in home gardens.
According to experts, neonicotinoids, which were first widely sold in the 1990s, are the most common type of insecticide in the United States, despite being banned in the European Union for their risks to pollinators.
Paul CaraDonna, conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden and associate professor at Northwestern University, said neonicotinoids are “systemic,” meaning the plants absorb the chemicals and express them in all of their parts, including nectar and pollen.
They’re “really good at what they do,” CaraDonna said, but that means all bugs, not just pests, but caterpillars and pollinators, are impacted.
Rosemary Malfi, policy director at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said their organization generally encourages home gardeners to reduce pesticide use in general, especially neonicotinoids, which can be toxic to bugs even in small quantities.
“If someone’s not really following that label and applying more than they should be, that can be introducing a huge amount of toxicity into the environment,” Malfi said.
Someone trying to attract butterflies and bees to their gardens could be inadvertently doing serious damage to them at the same time, Malfi warned.
CaraDonna said neonicotinoids are considered “one of the big threats” to declining pollinator populations. In the gardening world, CaraDonna noted a lack of regulation and restrictions surrounding the insecticide, which leads to its overuse.
“The simplest thing is avoiding these gnarly chemicals,” CaraDonna said. “I don’t want those toxins in my garden, I don’t want my daughter rubbing against them, or every time I touch the plant, having to think about the intense chemicals and toxins I put on them.”
There’s also the concern of bioaccumulation, Malfi said. She pointed to a Minnesota Department of Natural Resources study, sampling deer spleens, which found that 61% of 799 deer spleens collected in 2019 and 94% of 496 samples collected in 2021 tested positive for the presence of neonicotinoids.
Small steps
Raymoure and Vertovec have no illusions about their goals — they said they’re not trying for regulations in the agricultural industry, which they view as a much bigger fight than themselves. They’re focused on the horticulture industry and what they call “ornamental plants.”
Their own yards are filling up with native plants, and while they encourage others to create native plantings, they understand not everyone wants to transform their entire yard. Even Raymoure says she’s “not a bug fan”
But the bugs are critical for biodiversity, she said, and people need to understand how to give proper habitat and food, instead of potentially “encouraging these bugs to come to your yard, and then … killing them.”
