April 1, 2025
Spring Caring
Habitat loss is the biggest factor behind species extinction. Here are a few easy actions you can take this spring and summer to help mitigate this. Most of the actions on this list should be fun for you, too:
- Visit a park or nature preserve: Parks and nature preserves are one of the most effective, long-term ways of maintaining large swathes of habitat. We can support them by visiting and appreciating them. This can also be a great way to support yourself. Taking a walk in nature can be calming — it certainly helps me shut off the voices of anxiety in my head. Of course, this is something to do when there isn’t a constant spitting of frozen substances out of the sky like what’s happening while I’m writing this.
- Plant native flowers for pollinators: If you have a place to make a garden, consider filling it with native plants that attract pollinators. Things like monarda, wild geranium, columbine, and milkweed are all spring flowers that can help support pollinators. Milkweed is extremely important for monarch butterflies because it is the only food source for monarch caterpillars. If you have space for this, plant some of these and let them go a bit wild.
- Pick up litter: This may be less fun than the other items on this list, but it’s probably the easiest. If you’re outside and you see a piece of litter, pick it up. Habitat degradation is part of habitat loss. For instance, a normal plastic bottle for water or soda takes around 450 years to decompose. So, a plastic bottle that isn’t disposed of properly has centuries to harm habitats by leaching chemicals, being ingested by animals, and damaging plants. So picking up litter is important and an easy accompaniment to spring walks.
- Buy sustainably sourced chocolate: This can literally be any product. I chose chocolate because even though we’ve just finished spring break, we’re coming to the end of the semester, and there are going to be some stressful moments. Chocolate is a comfort food for me. Unfortunately, some cocoa farms destroy rainforests to create farmland. Buying from companies that don’t do this is a simple way to help protect rainforest habitats. Look for Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, and World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO) logos on the packaging. These all indicate that the products they appear on are more sustainably sourced than other similar products without these logos. Again, this isn’t just chocolate, if that’s not your comfort go–to. Chocolate can be a good starting point if you want to think about buying food that has less of an impact on the environment.
Helping to protect the environment doesn’t always have to be hard. Sometimes it can even be fun.
—Neesa Peak, Eco-Actions Editor