Got The Climate Change Blues? Try Delawning

I wasn’t surprised to see terms like ​“Climate Anxiety” and ​“Climate Despair” printed in the New York Times recently.

Just about every conversation with my peers and coworkers in the last five years has veered off into that territory, with millennials doing what we do best — snarking our way through the coming existential catastrophe. Maybe a desperate attempt to avoid the outcomes forecasted by those terms.

But making apocalyptic jokes about a crisis too big, too impersonal to wrap one’s head around is a matter of triage more than it is of care. It acknowledges the severity of the problem while still keeping it at a distance because of its perceived hopelessness. I knew that distance wasn’t doing me any favors.

In trying to remove that distance, my wife Eliza and I removed our lawn.

In doing that, we invited a little ecosystem into our lives, and made a small contribution to the resilience of our microclimate.

We’re growing annual vegetables, perennial plants and shrubs, mushrooms and even a few miniature fruit trees.

Some places belong to the weeds — but of course many plants relegated to the category of ​‘weeds’ are in fact valuable native plants, occupying a specific niche in the food chain.

We’ve lost count of the number of bee species we’ve seen visiting the various wildflowers in our yard, with moth and dragonfly tallies following close behind. Walking through the dew in the mornings, even on the hottest days, has become something of a ritual of amazement.

I didn’t think of this subject very often when I was younger, but I was the generation raised on ​“Captain Planet” and ​“50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save The Earth”. Most of our actionable steps about the subject of climate were ​“bother your parents”, and that had limits, at least the way I did it.

But in 2021, we have reached a point where to deny the climate crisis would require a fearsome effort in wishful thinking. Whether it’s the flooding in China and Germany, the record breaking temperatures from the heat dome effect in the Pacific Northwest, or even Connecticut’s recent bout with Tropical Storm Elsa, which caused massive flooding throughout the state, the visible effects of climate change are in the headlines. On the rare occasions there is good news on this issue, it always seems to be happening far away.

In taking a moment to focus on the green spaces you interact with daily, it can become easier to grasp the stakes — and to feel pride at the little victories. It’s not a panacea, but it has given me a valuable tool to use against my own climate anxiety.

The lawn is a curious thing. It’s a symbol of uniformity within a neighborhood; a space that is maintained for theoretical or occasional use; covered with an imported plant with shallow roots; tended with machines often powered by fossil fuels; fertilized and poisoned in alteration to give the appearance of vibrancy, but not too much. A way of having nature close at hand without having to get your hands very dirty.

But in smothering or removing grass, in growing food or allowing native perennial plants into even a small portion of a formerly manicured space, and in ceasing the application of pesticides, you get the opportunity to observe a complete ecosystem from the microbial level on up.

Greater variety of plants and root systems leads to greater water absorption, even during major rainfall events.

Native plants sequester and retain carbon at a much higher rate than most grasses. These attract a greater range of herbivorous insect species, pollinators and otherwise, and that diversity goes all the way up the food chain.

Praying mantises and red-tailed hawks are two of the apex predators we’ve spotted hunting in our yard, and they wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t enough food for them. What better way to get rid of pests in a garden than by inviting their natural predators in?

I don’t have any illusions about the aster in my yard saving us all from climate change. I know that scaling the impact of individual choice against business-as-usual for most industries is a nearly pointless exercise. And don’t get me started on green capitalism.

But I strongly believe that any society wishing to survive through climate change will need to be able to have a hands-on relationship with nature as it is, not as we want it to be.

By getting rid of your lawn, and replacing it with any number of trees, shrubs, native perennials, or food producing plants, you get that experience in full.

Imagine the joy, even to a slightly arachnophobic person, of watching orb-weaver spiders return to build webs in the yard, coupled with the severity of watching one trap a dragonfly.

Racing the birds for berries over the last week. Getting a handful of slug when going to pick an edible mushroom from a woodchip bed.

But also a lot of proud meals. A fierce sense of connection to a place.

And then imagine if one of your immediate neighbors did that? Then 10 of them? Then 30? Then, that every neighborhood you passed through during your day was host to its own bridges of green, its own vibrant ecosystem?

It starts with the space we have.