About Us

Purpose

If you’re reading this you probably care about reforesting Miami too. This website was created to be the place where you can send your friends and neighbors to help them learn more about the importance of native plants, and to get excited about restoring the native habitat where they live and work.

In his book Half Earth, E.O. Wilson writes that we need to protect half the land and sea in order to manage sufficient habitat to reverse the species extinction crisis and ensure the long-term health of our planet. This has to start at home as we’ve built on all the best land and simply preserving deserts and mountain ridges won’t work. Nature shouldn’t just be a place you visit once in a while.

Most people want to do the right thing and we can help by giving them the information they need and making it easy to get started. We encourage you to share this website to help spread our message about the importance of reforesting Miami, and about what everyone can do to help.

About Reforest Miami

Our Mission is to protect the biodiversity of South Florida by motivating the community to restore the native habitat where they live and work.

We want to build a future where people live within nature rather than living instead of nature. Why do we have to live in a concrete jungle with no native life? Why can’t we have the tranquility and beauty of a cabin in the woods right at home, and protect our biodiversity at the same time?

Do we really need another organization?

We believe so and we want to be the marketing department for the South Florida native plant community. Local scientists, conservationists, and the native plant industry, are doing amazing work to preserve our biodiversity. We aim to work with them to bring their message to the mainstream, inspire the public, and change our relationship with nature.

Strategy

The most impactful way to drive change in the world is by making it fashionable.  Government and economics are also important tools, but the biggest behavior changes come from changes in social norms which (for example) drove the reduction in smoking and littering in the US over recent decades.  We want to use similar means to get people to care about protecting nature and the biodiversity of native life in their area. We want to make native plants a status symbol, and make invasive plants socially unacceptable like littering. Creating demand will drive private restoration and also lead to the conservation and policy action that we desperately need.

Things have changed and the time is right. Attention to climate change is thankfully higher than ever and we believe there is tremendous potential to link biodiversity and climate change causes as part of a greater mission to protect the planet and motivate individual action across the globe. A future where we’ve addressed climate change but lost our biodiversity to monoculture planting and invasive plants is unacceptable.

Outreach Goals

Educate the public on the importance of:

• Maximizing native plant life where they live and work

• Reducing the use of exotic plants and removing invasive plants, which threaten the ecosystem

• Reducing the use of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, lawns and artificial ground cover

Please get involved, we have some exciting programs coming up and we need your help. This website is just an informational resource and we’re planning a lot of other activities like community outreach, online and outdoor advertising, and influencing policy. Please engage with us on social media, sign up for our newsletter below, or for inquiries, email info@reforestmiami.org. If you don’t live in South Florida and want to do this for your city, get in touch and I’ll help you get set up.