News Reporter: Climate Coach: Turning your yard into a tiny national park

PUBLISHED BY

READ ONLINE | SIGN UP


Down-to-earth advice for life on our changing planet.

The owner of this yard in Utah is killing off 60 percent of his Kentucky bluegrass and will replace it with water-wise clover and native grasses. (James Roh for The Washington Post)

By Michael J. Coren

Welcome. This week, animals in your plant-based meat and rethinking one-day shipping. But first, how to turn your lawn into a tidy wildland.

This year, a Tasmanian yard that hadn't been watered in years and featured a dead brushtail possum won the title of ugliest lawn in the world. The contest, organized by the island of Gotland in Sweden, rewards those who turn over their yards to nature to save water and change the world's perception of the ideal lawn.

It also raises an important question: Who wants an ugly lawn, really? Most people just want a nice yard that won't provoke their neighborhood homeowners association.

"If we're saying we're all going to have the ugliest landscape in the world, that's not going to catch on," insists Doug Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware who's proposing a different approach. "I'm trying to reduce the area of lawn and do it in an attractive way so you're not thrown out of your neighborhood."

Tallamy is part of a growing movement to create ecological Edens out of yards while keeping them palatable to society. Want an unruly meadow? Carve a path inviting you in. Planting a profusion of native trees and shrubs? Border it with a strip of manicured grass.

These subtle but crucial signals differentiate a mess from a "lawn." That might be enough to move wildlife conservation beyond public lands to the backyards — and even balconies — of millions of people, propagating tidy wildlands across the country.

How much land has been lost?

Americans have transformed 95 percent of the natural landscapes in the country. Around half the Lower 48 states are now cities and streets, infrastructure such as airports and shopping centers, or isolated habitat fragments, with farms covering much of the other half.

That's hardly enough to sustain wildlife.

For America's biodiversity to survive, Americans need to share their land, says Tallamy: "We need ecosystems to function everywhere, not just in parks and preserves."

He's enlisting private owners of more than 83 percent of the United States to create what he calls "homegrown national parks" from tiny city plots to corporate campuses.

What's wrong with my lawn?

Imagine your yard as a buffet. Insects evolved over millions of years to feast on hundreds of regional cuisines made up of native plants from Florida to the Pacific Northwest. Some, such as the monarch butterfly larvae, depend on a single endemic plant species. If all you have to offer are turf and ornamental plants, mostly from Asia and Europe, you might as well be growing AstroTurf. That leaves insects and everything that depends on them — including the roughly three-quarters of all the flowering plants on Earth they pollinate — out of luck.

Can my lawn really help wildlife?

Healthy landscapes perform four ecological functions: nourish the food web, supply clean water, pull carbon out of the air, and feed and shelter native insects and pollinators. Lawns do none of them at the moment. But they could, on almost any scale. Tidy wildlands could restore nature's banquet table, and all the wildlife that relies on it, across U.S. cities and suburbs.

How do I make it beautiful?

The typical objection to "natural" yards and native plants boils down to one word: "messy," says Haven Kiers, a landscape architect at the University of California at Davis.

The public perception of lawns is binary: clipped and manicured or abandoned and ugly. Kiers is charting a third way, transforming her own scraggly grass lawn in Davis into an explosive profusion of native plants combined with a few ornamentals that people and pollinators love.

The key is a landscape philosophy called "cues to care." First introduced in a 1995 paper called "Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames," it argued that intentionally-designed elements — mowed grass margins, flowering plants with crisp edges, or trimmed shrubs — should delineate larger "messy" wildness such as a meadow or prairie gardens. These signs of human presence make the landscapes socially acceptable, while preserving their ecological value, which is often invisible.

Ultimately, the lack of social acceptance is what makes the "ugly" frame such a hard sell. Yards are not afterthoughts for most people. They are status symbols and artistic expressions. To make native landscapes acceptable, we need to marry human touch with ecological function.

Want to create a tidy wildland? Read the full column to learn more.

Click here to read the column

Have photos or stories of your own tidy wildland?

Share them at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails.

Field Sample

For thousands of years across the western Mediterranean, workers have carefully peeled away the bark of cork oaks, a job that takes precision and years of practice, writes Marta Vidal for The Washington Post.

The material — durable, waterproof, light and pliable — is now experiencing a revival as industries search for sustainable alternatives to plastic. Portugal's exports are now at an all-time high of 670 million euros ($728 million) for use in everything from flooring and furniture to clothes and insulation for electric cars.

A pile of cork at a farm in Coruche, Portugal, on June 6.

Harvested during summer, cork oaks slowly regenerate their bark. After nine years, they are ready for another harvest. The oaks provide critical habitat for wildlife, part of an ancient agroforestry system called montado — as well as steady income for the region.

In Coruche, known as Portugal's "cork capital," there's a saying passed down for generations: "Those who care about their grandchildren plant cork oak trees."

Learning Curve

Welcome to the parental pickup era, writes The Post's Andrew Van Dam. The school bus is on its way out.

Since the 1960s, the share of students biking or walking to school has plummeted from more than half to around 10 percent. Now, 53 percent of U.S. students are getting dropped off at school or driving themselves, according to our analysis of the recently revamped National Household Travel Survey

For many, like University of Kansas economist Misty Heggeness, who relocated from school-bus-friendly Maryland to transit-challenged Kansas City, Kan., that's created a "deeply personal hell" as she's forced to idle for hours in the school pickup line as outside exhaust finds its way into classrooms.

Why is nobody fixing this? A lot of reasons.

"We've moved our schools to where land is less expensive and more expansive, but less accessible to those walking and bicycling," says Dave Cowan with the nonprofit Safe Routes Partnership.

"When we build schools on the edge or out of town, we create a long-term transportation problem because now we commit to a lifetime of transporting students to that school."

That's been made worse by the pandemic, which prompted more parents, especially those with well-paid remote jobs, to move to places with worse bus coverage.

The Second Degree

After my last column on whether plug-in hybrids or electric cars are right for you, a lot of you asked about the economics of using home solar panels to refuel. If you're living in California, or any place with expensive electricity, you can't beat the price of panels. At around 10 cents per kwh on average, that's nearly three times cheaper than the prevailing utility rates in San Francisco, where I live, and below the average almost anywhere.

And an update on my "Green Liberty Notes" investment from 2023. Modeled on the war bonds, they allow you to put away small amounts of money with a fixed rate of return over a year, and fund projects that reduce emissions or address environmental problems.

How did I do? The $100 I invested with Connecticut Green Bank for financing new solar projects with the state's small business energy projects earned 5 percent interest. I was able to renew it at 5.5 percent this year. Connecticut Green Bank says about 60 percent of its retail investments are at or below $1,000 with note buyers from 35 states.

On the Climate Front

From The Post:

Your plant-based meat could soon have animal fat.

In Kenya, the king of the jungle faces a new challenge — ants.

You should think twice about one-day shipping. Here's why.

Washington state's pollution tax raised $2 billion. Can it survive the backlash?

From elsewhere:

CNN reports centuries-old sea sponges could rewrite the history on how fast the world has warmed.

Invasive pigs and donkeys: Ecosystem salvation or scourge? asks the Hill.

Clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built, reports USA Today.

Parisians voted to triple parking fees for SUVs to €100 ($108) for a few hours, says Bloomberg.

Marion of Illinois snapped these tracks in the snow after a mass of Arctic air plunged the Midwest into a deep freeze last month. "The critters are out and about," she writes.

Have photos of critters in your neighborhood? Send me your snapshots at climatecoach@washpost.com.