This commentary is by Lucie Lehmann, of South Burlington. She is the vice president of the Green Mountain Audubon Society.
Across Vermont, the sounds of late summer compose a natural symphony. Birds sing, albeit less lustily than in spring. Bees and cicadas buzz sonorously, and frogs twang like well-plucked bass strings.
Other noises, less pleasing, are equally ubiquitous: the roar of gas-powered lawn mowers, string trimmers and leaf blowers.
Americans are obsessed with their lawns. They are the single largest irrigated crop that we grow — more than 40 million acres, or 2% of our land mass. Eighty-one percent of homeowners have a lawn, according to the National Association of Landscape Professionals.
We do not just mow those confoundingly green deserts. We obsessively water, fertilize and treat them with pesticides.
Americans collectively apply roughly 70 million pounds of fertilizer and a staggering 80 million pounds of pesticides annually to achieve the perfectly green, but lifeless, quilts that blanket most yards in the United States, according to the Pesticide Action Network.
That does not include the 9 billion gallons of water a day that Americans use for landscape irrigation; the 3 billion gallons of gas needed to mow and edge the lawns every year; or the ecological toll those actions inflict on the environment, on lawn care workers and on unsuspecting people who walk barefoot on treated lawns or ingest the chemical fumes.
It certainly does not factor in the loss of habitat for wildlife or the deleterious effects of chemical runoff on our drinking water sources, lakes, rivers and other bodies of water.
The planet is growing hotter and drier every year, and extreme flooding is more prevalent. Aquifers are draining at unprecedented rates. The linkages between toxic chemical use and rising rates of cancer and other diseases cannot be dismissed, and we are experiencing a catastrophic crash of bird, insect and amphibian species, among others. Still, most American homeowners continue to subscribe to a deadly, 1950s vision of the endless, perfect lawn.
We simply cannot afford to do that anymore.
Three years ago, with the approval of my homeowners’ association, I took out my 20-by-20-foot front lawn. Clustered tightly together, the gardens in my neighborhood — such as they are in newer developments — were devoid of almost any life.
While I had not expected the abundance that I had enjoyed on the farm where I lived for decades, I also was not prepared for the utter sterility of my new environment, a neighborhood that touts its self-proclaimed eco-friendly footprint. The mowers that roared over our identical green patches barely disturbed anything alive.
By contrast, as soon as I took up the lawn and replaced it with native perennials, including grasses, honey bees appeared, followed quickly by a wide variety of native bee species. Hummingbirds arrived and found the tubular flowers of the penstemons and other nectar-rich blooms. Butterflies sipped milkweed blossoms. Sphinx moths appeared at dusk to pollinate, and tree frogs sang from my gutters, portending rain.
Now, during spring and summer, there are regularly 10 species of birds singing in my yard, and bluebirds and chickadees nest in my boxes. When I added a rain garden to mitigate the runoff from the houses behind me, the new vernal pond became an amphibian breeding hotspot. Today, damsel and dragonflies swoop over the shallow water while mixed flocks of songbirds bathe together.
It was not just the wildlife that noticed the changes in my yard. So did my human neighbors. At first the garden attracted curiosity, then admiration. People asked questions about what I had done and what plants I had used. Before long, other people began eliminating part or all of their lawns and planting pollinator-friendly gardens.
It is an encouraging trend.
Every change matters, but imagine what we could achieve collectively in Vermont if we reimagined the outdated and often lethal model of what a yard should look like. If everyone who owned a lawn replaced even a part of it with a patch of something beneficial.
You do not have to be an avid gardener to make that possible — but you do have to care more about the environment than you do about a perfect lawn. There are wonderful low-maintenance native shrubs and grasses that provide food and habitat for birds and pollinators. There are lots of local resources to advise people on what might work best for their yard.
Nature will always try to rebound when given the chance, but we have to act before it is too late. At a time where many of us feel impotent to effect positive change, you would be surprised at how empowering it is to create a living space that welcomes nature in, rather than continuing to extinguish it.
