Havering Friends of the Earth

Everything is Interconnected

by Ian Pirie; first published 16-Jun-2023

White Bryony "connected" to a climbing rose - John Robinson

Havering Friends of the Earth have contributed articles to the Romford Recorder for over a year now. We have covered a variety of topics, and you can now see all of the articles on our website.

The danger with writing a new article every month is that we fail to communicate the connections between different topics. Here I want to stress that when we think about the environment, everything is interconnected. We can use a technical word ecosystems to explain this - or we can show these connections in real world examples, of which here are a few:

We have written about gardens, re-wilding and compost. We could have added that the soil in a garden is rich with billions of microbes all helping plants to grow; good soil absorbs CO₂ and helps prevent global warming; the leaves of plants are food for aphids and caterpillars (and these in turn are food for birds); the pollen of flowers attracts pollinators, who then fertilise our fruit and vegetable plants - and so on.

Take just one feature of gardens - weeds - and we have another good example of interconnectedness^*. In addition to the many features just mentioned, weeds have been used (for hundreds if not thousands of years) for medicine, as useful materials, and, as can often be seen from their names, for food for farm animals: chickweed is good for chickens!

In addition, weeds such as dock, with very deep tap roots, help to enrich and stabilise the soil so other plants can grow, and so that the soil is not worn away by winds in dry weather. Sadly, large-scale agriculture by ploughing up large tracts of soil, and then dousing it with herbicides, has made the soil less fertile.

It is good, then, to see the popularity of "No Mow May", and that gardeners are now recognising the value of leaving soil alone and letting some weeds flourish. In 2021 the RHS awarded a gold medal to a "weed garden", and this year one-third of the gardens at Chelsea Flower Show featured weeds.

So, what I have said about gardens and weeds applies to all other parts of the natural environment. Whatever you can do to help your part of the environment flourish will automatically connect to the "big picture". Everything is interconnected, and therefore every little helps!

^*I have used some of the information here from a fascinating article in The Guardian by Alys Fowler.