Origins

To keep a place is to know it, to experience it, to steward it.

Here is how it came to be, and why we made it.

Part One: The gap

In 1990, the journalist Tony Hiss published The Experience of Place. As a New Yorker, he began with the famous ones, Grand Central Terminal and Times Square, then ventured out to what was then the last working farm inside city limits, and finally to the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts.

He closed the book with a set of questions for the reader: What are your favorite nearby places, rural or urban, public or private, within walking or driving distance of where you live or work? What is the experience of being there, and does it change by day, by night, on a weekend, on a holiday? Is anything missing, neglected, or left unmaintained? How close do you feel to the people in neighboring communities, to the other living creatures around you, to the land itself? And where is the nearest wilderness?

These were questions built for a network that didn't exist yet. In the next two decades we witnessed the emergence of the popular internet, amateur publishing, and contributed maps on mobile phones. By 2010, location-enabled mobile apps had emerged, such as AllTrails for hiking and iNaturalist for recording natural specimens.

All of this set the stage for the rapid growth of wildlife-friendly native gardening.

Native plants had been a niche concern in gardening circles for most of the twentieth century. In 1973, the National Wildlife Federation launched the Backyard Wildlife Habitat program, in which homeowners certified their own yards as wildlife friendly on criteria such as water, natural shelter, and pollinator planting. Now called the Certified Wildlife Habitat, it has certified more than 340,000 habitats in the five decades since.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been enough. A landmark 2019 study in Science found that North America has lost nearly three billion breeding birds since 1970, close to a third of the total. Suburban development, pesticide use, and ordinary environmental neglect had done their work. Cornell's Bring Birds Back suggests a number of practical actions, among them using bird-safe glass, keeping cats indoors, reducing plastics, and replacing lawn with native species.

The native plant movement got a big boost from entomologist Douglas Tallamy of the University of Delaware. For the last two decades he has researched what native versus exotic plants do for native insects and, through them, for birds. His particular subject was the specialist caterpillar, which before its turn as a moth or butterfly is a critical food source for nesting birds. Tallamy developed the argument across several popular books, beginning with Bringing Nature Home (2007) through How Can I Help? Saving Nature with Your Yard (2025). His work culminated in the Homegrown National Park project, which maintains an interactive map with some 67,000 registered properties.

There is, however, a limit to how much we can collectively do with our backyards: private residential lots are only a small fraction of the land in the United States. Tallamy recognized this, and at the end of Nature's Best Hope (2020) he offered this idea: if everyone who owned land bordering a park took responsibility for controlling invasive plants along that border, the effect would be enormous.

That is a large assumption to rest on goodwill. Our answer is that goodwill needs a system. If we want people to find unstewarded ground and take care of it, the ground has to be in the system first.

I have seen this at close range, serving on my town's conservation board. The problems at ground level are more basic than the literature suggests. Our public works crews have no reliable way to tell a restoration planting from a weed patch, which is why physical metal signage and staff training are as much a part of the solution as any software. Scout troops have asked me which areas they may steward. I regularly come across spots that could be rescued, if someone knew where they were and what needed doing. In another part of town, residents have been reclaiming a weed-choked park, since named for the children's nature writer Jean Craighead George; we have documented the progress in photographs over several years, and there has never been an obvious place to put them.

In the team software projects I have worked on, people find things that need doing, put them in a backlog, and other people do those things. True, there is an art to prioritizing that work and seeing it finished. But publishing the backlog is the first necessary step.

The existing maps each do one thing. The National Wildlife Federation generates an annual map of certified yards. Homegrown National Park lets people register a property directly. iNaturalist records individual specimens over time. What I could not find was a tool that documents a place: a site, held over time, with observations accumulating against it. Which is roughly what Hiss asked for, before anyone knew it could be built.

Part Two: My journey

For me, all of this began with a house.

Six years ago, my wife and I bought in the deep suburbs. I had grown up in a suburb closer to New York City, on a neat rectangular lot where the only wild ground was a tangle of forsythia and brambles along the property line. This place was different: a deep slope, and a third of it woodland running into a larger forest. I was fascinated by it. We moved around the time Frozen II was the streaming event of every household with children. For a good while we were belting out "Into the Unknown" at any opportunity. Like most fairy tales, it had an enchanted forest in it. We seemed to have one as well.

At the time, neighbors in town were working to protect a parcel from residential development, the Buttonhook Forest. With the help of an ethical archaeologist, they established that the land had likely been sacred to local indigenous people centuries ago. But it was also sacred in a plainer sense: it was still wild. I looked at my own small edge of woods and wondered whether it might be worth something for the same reason. And what would follow if everyone looked at their own edge that way?

A few lots from mine is a wooded parcel of some fifty acres, held in preserve by an adjacent farm. We can't access it; it's private. My assumption is that it's in good condition, since it goes largely untouched by human shoes, which are efficient carriers of weed seed. But I don't actually know, and I don't have any special knowledge from being on the town conservation board. Even when a property is protected through a land trust, there is usually no way for the public to learn what condition it's in.

I brought these questions to the Westchester Land Trust a few years ago. What neither of us knew at the time was how fragile the national record was. The National Conservation Easement Database had been built in 2009, funded largely by private trusts until the U.S. Geological Survey took on much of the cost. By 2024 the USGS had pulled back its funding and pointed the public toward the U.S. Protected Areas Database, which is fed upward from state PAD databases. Having reviewed both the federal and state versions at the local level, I can say the coverage is far from complete. Neither offers public access to monitoring reports. The result is a patchwork across the country.

All of this coincides with the international effort to protect thirty percent of the world's lands and waters by 2030, the 30x30 movement. Many nations have adopted it. When New York State drafted its own 30x30 proposal, I submitted comments with one central request: commit to updating the map data from the local level up. Any change in a parcel's tax status tied to its use should flow into the county GIS, from there into the New York PAD, and ultimately into the USGS. New York State is now supporting direct submissions to its own NYPAD database.

The Westchester Land Trust team suggested I look up an author who had recently presented on his latest book, Rescuing the Planet, which argues for protection at continental scale. The author was Tony Hiss. That began a correspondence, and it sent me back to The Experience of Place. I asked him whether he remembered what he had written on the last page, thirty years earlier. We intend to make it real.

There are several ways to protect land. You can buy it. You can place it under a conservation easement, though that protection can go unrecorded if your local assessor never updates the tax rolls and the GIS. But in the end, land also has to be stewarded: watched firsthand and tended when it needs it. That work can begin at home, with the map, by seeing what needs care.

About the name

I considered a number of names for this work, and liked placekeeping best. It says plainly what the work is: keeping a place, rather than making one. I later learned the word already had a life. Placemaking, the practice of shaping public space around how people actually use it, has been championed since 1975 by the Project for Public Spaces in New York. A later, arts-funded version called "creative placemaking" drew a sharper response: around 2013 the cultural organizer Roberto Bedoya popularized the term "placekeeping" as a counter to it, insisting that keeping a neighborhood's cultural memory and its longtime residents in place matters as much as building something new. Others have since used "cultural placekeeping" for arts communities preparing to weather crises. The user here is a focused on land and its ecological life -- seems fitting to qualify it as environmental placekeeping, as need be.

So, let's get started. We've got places to keep.