2 tablespoons tomato paste

If you have a lot of lawn, you get a lot of runoff, and you’re polluting your watershed with the fertilizers and the pesticides you put on the lawn. When you have a well-planted property, it keeps the water on site, cleans it, helps it soak into the ground and recharges your water table.TALLAMY: Choose plants that are going to support that food web, the ones that will share the most energy with other living things. That’s the problem with plants from other continents; our insects can’t eat them. So, there are no insects for the birds, and the food web stops.

In 84% of the counties where they occur, oaks are the No. 1 plant for passing along that energy. If you’re going to plant a tree, that is the best plant to choose.TALLAMY: I included chapters like that because we were never taught these things. How can I expect somebody to understand that conservation is important when they don’t know what biodiversity does, when they don’t know how much we depend on it totally? Or what evolution or natural selection is.So, it’s a little primer to basic ecological knowledge that will help you understand how important these issues are.

TALLAMY: Well, I’m getting closer to retirement, but I just graduated a master’s student who is looking at how we landscape underneath our trees.in creating the caterpillars that drive the food web. But those caterpillars drop from the tree and they pupate in the ground. And how we landscape under those trees determines whether or not those caterpillars will survive. So, that’s really an important addition to our landscape management tools.

You want uncompacted areas where we’re not walking, which means beds around our trees. If you’re mowing or walking under it, you’re squishing all those caterpillars.

So, we ranked all of the plant genera in North America in terms of their ability to support caterpillars and keep that food web going. We haven’t published it yet, but now we’ve got that data for every country in the world.Despite the death and harsh realities, it is a hopeful book overall.

Green takes stock of the history, looking at the vicious and virtuous cycles that led humankind to where we are now, posing a challenge and a question rolled into one: Which type of cycle will we foster?The Oscar-nominated animated charmer “Robot Dreams” and Lindsay Lohan starring in the Christmas romantic comedy “Our Little Secret” are some of the new television, films, music and games

Also among the streaming offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’: HBO has a documentary about yacht rock, there’s another entry in the reality genre of seniors looking for love called “The Later Daters” on Netflix and the Fab Four’ first trip to America is chronicled in the documentary, “Beatles ’64.”