Translator: Denise RQ
Good afternoon. I need your help.
I have a number: six hundred million.
It's a big number, an important number, and I need you to remember it
because we're going to circle back to it in a few minutes.
I have a confession to make: I am a beekeeper.
I spend a lot of time talking to different groups about bees, different ages,
and it's really interesting when I talk to children,
- I love talking to children about this; they're so honest -
the first question they almost always ask is,
"Have you ever been stung?"
(Laughter)
They want to know if I've been stung. They want to know if it hurts.
But adults, when they find out that I'm a beekeeper,
I think they want to ask that question, but they almost never do.
Instead, they'll ask, "Why would you do that?"
(Laughter)
The short answer is I became a beekeeper because of our prairie.
Many years ago, we took a small little sliver of our front yard
and reverted it to native wildflowers and grasses; to prairie.
So you can walk across our front lawn
and go wading into the wildflowers of our prairie in midsummer.
It's like going from desert to ocean. It's two entirely different ecosystems.
The intensity of life in the summertime prairie is just astonishing.
The air is literally humming with activity.
As the story goes,
I'm standing in the midst of our prairie one July afternoon, a few years ago.
I think this is my cave time;
my cave time is not a clicker, and a basement, and a bag full of chips,
it's standing in my prairie in the middle of the summer.
I'm noticing these honey bees
that are working a particular kind of flower
with a kind of zeal I hadn't really noticed before.
They were almost frantically pined at this flower
and drawing out the nectar, loading up, and flying away.
And as they flew away,
it was obvious they had a heavy load of nectar.
They were bobbing through the air as they flew away,
they were having to recalibrate their trim, I think.
I had this realization:
that was my nectar
(Laughter)
flying away with that bee.
It was going into someone else's bee boxes and becoming someone else's honey.
It was going on someone else's toast in the morning.
(Laughter)
I wanted my honey on my toast in the morning.
So I became a beekeeper.
Because of my prairie, right, not because I'm selfish.
(Laughter)
The North American prairie, in the 1700s,
was the dominant landscape feature of our continent.
It was an ocean of wildflowers and grasses
that extended from the Ohio River Valley to the Colorado Rockies,
from central Canada deep into the heart of Texas
and just about everywhere in between.
It was marked by extraordinary diversity in deep roots -
hundreds of species of wildflowers and grasses.
To the east, there were wildflowers 15-feet tall,
with a thick, heavy carpet of roots that extended down ten feet deep.
To the west, in the rain shadow of the Rockies,
there were short grasses, short wild flowers,
maybe two feet tall.
Through the middle, there was a mixture of both,
it was called the mixed grass prairie.
Scientific theories on how the prairie formed
generally involve fire and ice over a very long period of time.
There were these ancient volcanoes far to the north,
up in the Arctic,
that blew out of the middle of the Earth
these rocks and boulders that were rich with minerals,
just loaded with minerals.
Then, later, there were glaciers that pushed those rocks southward,
grinding and pulverizing them
under these unimaginably thick sheets of ice,
and releasing those minerals to become the substrate
for this rich prairie soil.
All of this taking place over hundreds and thousands of years;
maybe longer.
Whether you believe the North American prairie was formed
by the hands of time or the hand of God,
it was beautiful, it was exquisite, but it was doomed.
In the 1700s, the settlers began moving West across the continent.
While they might have found the prairie beautiful,
they also found it something to be conquered,
something to be wrestled into submission.
To them, the prairie was an economic desert.
The roots were so thick it'd break the blades of their plows.
If you read the writings of the early settlers,
they talk of the pinging sound
the roots would make as the blades would break.
But then, in the 1800s, in the 1830s,
there was a young blacksmith by the name of John Deere.
He invented the steel blade plow that could slice through those roots.
That began the fall
of the American prairie,
and the rise of America's bread basket.
In the 1900s, in the 2000s, even to this day,
we continue to trim away at the edges of the prairie.
We chop, we burn, we spray,
we pave over the small little bits and pieces that remain.
We call them weeds.
Until less than 1% of the original prairie remains.
All of that: gone.
Coinciding with the fall of the prairie landscape
is the rise of the great American lawnscape:
Kentucky bluegrass.
Contrary to its name,
Kentucky bluegrass does not have its origins on the Eastern seaboard.
Experts believe those seeds first came to this continent in the 1600s,
and in the 400 years since then,
it has become our number one non-native plant species.
Satellite images tell us
in this country, we have three times the acreage of grass in lawn
as we do corn, soybean, and wheat combined.
It is an ecological desert.
The typical American lawn has more chemicals per square inch
than the most intensely farmed crop lands,
and it provides virtually no benefit to the bees,
the pollinators that are responsible for 30% of the food that we eat.
All of that comes at an enormous cost.
Alright, that number.
We're circling back to that number now: six hundred million.
That would be six hundred million gallons of fuel every year,
just to manage our lawns.
Think about that number.
Six hundred million gallons of diesel and gasoline
to fertilize, water, and cut our grass week after week after week.
All across the country, every Saturday, there's an army of lawnmowers unleashed
(Laughter)
in neighborhoods.
In our state alone,
we have 500,000 acres of grass that line our highways.
Every blade of that grass has to be cut four times a year.
No one walks on that grass.
Now, 500,000 acres is a big number,
and I'm going to help you try to understand
just how big that is.
So, I want you to imagine this:
first of all, it's your turn to cut the grass,
so you get on your little red tractor, and you put on your ear protection
because you have to be safe.
You turn the key in the ignition, and you look up,
and you find yourself on the edge of Chicago.
You're going to cut Chicago.
And not just the lawns, and the parks, and the boulevards;
the whole thing;
every square inch, three times.
And you'll be just shy of 500,000 acres.
We're going to do that four times a year in just about every state of the union.
Those are really big numbers, and that's a really big problem,
But I believe there's something you and I can do about today.
And my hope comes from blueberries.
In 2009, a team of researchers from Michigan State University
published a study they had done
on commercial blueberry orchards in Michigan.
Like good researchers, they looked at the world through a different lens.
They went to commercial blueberry orchards,
took native wildflower seeds
and planted those seeds around the edges of the orchard.
Well, why is that different?
In today's world,
most orchards are paying to have honey bees brought in
to do their pollination.
In order to maximize the pollination of these mercenary honey bees,
they're removing the competing forage from the edges of the orchard -
the weeds, the wildflowers.
What these researchers did is the opposite:
they put more wildflowers in the edges of those orchards.
Here's what they found: they had more pollinators.
No surprise there. But they had more pollination.
They had more fruit, they had bigger fruit,
they had increased yields, they had increased revenue
and in just four years,
the new revenue paid for the seeding.
They had a net positive return on investment
for a native wildflower restoration project
in just four years.
That's a big deal. That is a new paradigm.
That is a new way to have a conversation about wildflower restoration.
Not just because flowers are pretty, and we love bees.
I mean, they are, and we do,
but we can put an economic rationale behind the restoration.
Think about it. In four years.
How many gallons could we trim from 600 million?
In four years,
how many acres could you trim from 500,000?
Those are big numbers.
Those are big challenges,
and smart people are going to figure that out.
But what about your front yard in four years?
What could you with a small little sliver of your front yard
in four years?
I'm going to tell you how to do it. It's five easy steps.
There's a hard way to do it, but there's an easier way to do it.
I'm going to give you five easy steps to do just that.
Step number one: you need to imagine.
Think about the last time you cut your grass
and that part of your yard you hate to cut.
You all have one, right? It might be the whole yard.
I'm not asking for the whole thing. Just part of it.
Too much sun, too much shade, too wet, too dry,
too hard to get at, whatever it is.
That's the target.
Step number two:
go to a hardware store and get yourself a roll of black plastic.
Bring it home, roll it out over that part of the yard,
put some rocks on it to hold it down, and let the grass die.
Do that early in the summer
and leave it all summer long, deep into the fall.
The grass is going to die a slow, agonizing death.
(Laughter)
No sunlight, no grass.
So while that's happening, step number three:
find a reputable seed dealer,
one who sells wildflower seeds for your part of the country.
They're out there, you'll find them.
Now step number four:
we've been killing the grass all summer long,
we're into the fall;
if you live in a part of the country
that has a killing frost - that would be us -
you take those seeds, and you put them in some pails
and mix them up with some dirt, some sand, maybe some sawdust;
it's filler. OK?
You're going to go down to that plastic, peel back the plastic and throw it away.
Maybe take a steel rake and scratch up the dirt just a little bit.
Take those seeds and just start tossing it out,
just toss it right over the dead grass.
Then there's step number five. This is the really hard one.
You have to wait. You have to be patient.
These seeds are going to grow down, and then, they're going to grow up.
That first growing season - you seed it late in the fall,
that first growing season,
you may not see a whole lot of the good stuff show up.
By that second growing season,
you should have a nice start on your little prairie garden.
And in four years,
you will have a nice little ocean of wildflowers in your yard.
If you do this with your neighbors, and you all do this together,
all the way up and down your street,
you could have little pockets of prairie
up and down your street in just four years.
Or what about your city? What if your city promoted this?
Then you would have a city, full of neighborhoods,
full of yards that have these small, little pockets of prairie.
That would make your city a pollinator sanctuary,
and Saturday afternoons would be just a little bit quieter.
Look, the North American prairie was beautiful.
It was exquisite.
It was doomed, but you and I could bring it back.
These are seeds worth spreading.
Thank you.
(Applause)