Before I started working with Rich Hatfield, I more or less thought that “wildlife” started with birds and went up from there. But a brood of baby birds needs thousands of caterpillars to grow, fledge and leave the nest.
That’s a lot of insects. And that’s Rich Hatfield’s delightful, diverse and beautiful world. Rich Hatfield is a conservation biologist with the Xerces Society, the only international conservation organization exclusively focused on invertebrates. His yard in Portland, Oregon is a little swatch of native Willamette Valley prairie abuzz athrum achomp and humming with insects. He has been working in bumblebee conservation for twenty five years. He’s a good, skeptical scientist; a father; and a fine teacher of enthusiastic amateur naturalists like me.
And I wanted to talk to him because working with him, over the last several years of contributing to the Pacific Northwest Bumblebee Atlas, has changed my lens for what effective action for Earth can look like—and feel like.
As Rich says in this episode, several times: most people are good. We want to help. And what he has done, what the Xerces Society has been doing, is given people who want to help clear pathways to help.
> Pathways that inform scientifically solid conservation efforts, like the Bumblebee Atlas, which started here in the Pacific Northwest and is now engaging thousands of volunteers to gather bumblebee data with a common set of protocols across much of the continental U.S. Follow the link to get engaged.
> Pathways like empowering farmers, restoration practitioners and other land managers to use best practices for “pest” management and pollinator enhancement on the lands they tend. If you manage land, get in touch with Xerces to learn more.
> Pathways like habitat kits and plant lists that can help anyone with a yard or a porch (you?!) create habitat for the 97% of species that are not only interesting, not only beautiful, but also absolutely foundational to human flourishing.
After all, we’d have no fruit, no healthy soil, and very little complex life without these creatures that pollinate, create fertility, and feed the other animals.
You can help, and what you give will come back to you. Anyone can help. As Rich affirms, early in this episode, it’s a lot easier to build habitat for a bee than it is to build habitat for a polar bear. And building habitat? That’s agency, my friends. That’s real. Build it and they will come.
I hope this episode lights you up with possibilities. For more opportunities to practice deeper kinship with the more than human world, become a free or paying subscriber to Kinward at kinwardmoves.substack.com. Thank you!
