While being highly sustainable, native pollinator plants increase the resiliency of the environment. // Photo courtesy of Jacob Lewis.
In honor of Earth Day, Hofstra’s Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) hosted a series of events on Tuesday, April 19, educating the Hofstra community on how to be more sustainable and environmentally conscious. A big emphasis of the day was the importance of native plants.
These species of plants are native to the local environment and are incredibly important to creating an ecosystem that is sustainable and adaptable, according to Anthony Marinello, secretary of the Long Island Native Plant Initiative (LINPI), who came to speak to Hofstra students and faculty about native plants.
“We are starting to see issues all over Long Island,” he said. These issues include a mass extinction of insects, over-development of plants, invasive species, climate change and pollution. All of these problems can be addressed by planting native pollinator plants, according to Marinello. Additionally, Hofstra was originally home to the Hempstead Plains, the only tallgrass prairie east of the Allegheny River. It was once 40 thousand acres. Now, less than 1% remains.
“Native pollinator plants are important because they bring in native pollinators,” said Natalie Correa, a sophomore sustainability studies and geography major and garden liaison for Hofstra through the National Center for Suburban Studies. “They bring a great biodiversity to the area, which is important because it makes the environment so much more resilient to change.”
Native plants also create the perfect environment for native wildlife. “The biggest issue for wildlife is habitat,” Marinello said. “So once we incorporate these native plants into our residences and back into our communities, the wildlife tends to just flourish.”
According to Marinello, an abundant amount of benefits can come from native gardens, including cleaner air, water, soil and a healthier and more resilalso preserve soil and decrease stormwater runoff.
The Center for Civic Engagement educated the Hofstra community on being sustainable and environmentally consious. // Photo courtesy of Jacob lewis.
To celebrate Earth Day, CCE organized the planting of Hofstra’s first native pollinator garden in the student garden at Stuyvesant Hall. In addition, Dr. J. Bret Bennington, professor of geology, environment and sustainability, presented a proposal to incorporate native plants into Hofstra’s ecosystem. “The objective is to transform spaces on campus that are currently unused and ecologically sterile into productive spaces that provide opportunities for our students to experiment with and promote best practices for creating a more sustainable suburban environment,” read the proposal.
The proposal outlined the planting of native plants such as milkweeds, coneflower, black-eyed Susan, ironweed and native grasses in a number of spaces around campus. However, the university has only approved two gardens: one on the side of Monroe Hall and the other in front of Bernon Hall, according to Correa. “Admissions is putting a considerable amount of money towards having these put on campus,” she said.
Correa thinks that this could benefit the Hofstra community in a myriad of ways. “The native plants already have all that they need here,” she said. “They’ve adapted to this climate, and they have the organisms to help them survive. And they support the natural ecosystems of the area.”
Native plants also tend to grow longer root systems, so they require less water. They will also grow back each year instead of plants needing to be replanted every year. “It seems like such a convenient thing to do because they require less work [and] because they’ve already adapted to the environment,” Correa said. “They don’t need a lot of extra resources.”
Elissa Cano, a sophomore anthropology major and a CCE fellow, said that planting native plants would be more environmentally friendly than Hofstra’s current system of implanting different exotic plants around campus. “I think there’s more that the university could be doing, and honestly, I don’t know why they don’t,” she said. “We import thousands of tulips a year. The arboretum space could be used to foster the ecosystem instead of just making it pretty.”
Bennington’s proposal outlined a plan to plant and maintain these gardens. “This can be accomplished by providing tuition remission/stipends to graduate students to compensate them for training student gardeners and managing the operations of the gardens,” read the proposal, “and housing/tuition stipends to pay undergraduate students to maintain the gardens throughout the year.”
Correa encourages students to show their support for the planting of native plants and contribute to a more environmentally conscious campus. There will be an event on Friday, May 6, where students will be doing work in the student garden. Correa will also be organizing a group of students to garden on Saturday, April 30, at the Roosevelt Community Garden. Marinello also encourages people to volunteer at LINPI’s seed harvest at the Sisters of St. Joseph.
