You don’t need to be a farmer to engage in regenerative techniques. Our lawns also have tremendous capacity to store carbon, and how we care for them can either interfere with that capacity or enhance it. Here are some ways to use this year’s growing season to help flatten the curve of the climate crisis:
- Support healthy soil life — don’t apply herbicides and pesticides: Healthy soil is teeming with The microorganisms that hang out with plant roots support healthy plant growth and make carbon sequestration possible. Herbicides and pesticides damage that soil biodiversity and keep soil from holding carbon.
- Keep soil covered and don’t disturb it: Getting exposed to air, heating up, and being dug up causes the carbon in soil to get released as CO2 into the Protect against this – and at the same time feed the hungry organisms in your soil – by making sure exposed soil is always covered with mulch.
- Avoid synthetic fertilizers: Produced with fossil fuels, the carbon footprint of fertilizers is high, and their use also generates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than CO2. Organic ways to fix nitrogen – clover or alfalfa in your mix or even just leaving grass clippings on your lawn – are a much more climate friendly way to give your plants the nutrients they need.
- Aim for deep roots: Encourage deeper roots in your grass by letting it grow taller before cutting it and watering deeply but less frequently and incorporate plants into your lawn that have deep tap roots. The deeper the roots, the deeper the soil microbes will deposit carbon, and the better chance that the carbon will safely avoid being exposed to air and off-gassed into the
- Replace fossil-fuel powered equipment for electric or, even better, muscle- powered: The amount of carbon draw-down we achieve in our yards is the amount of carbon that’s sequestered in our soil minus the amount of carbon we emit when managing Along with ditching fertilizer, ditch your power mower and leaf blower and reacquaint yourself with push mowers and ordinary rakes. Your health and the climate’s will thank you!
“I do not believe that the world would be entirely different if there were more women leaders. Maybe if everybody in leadership was a woman, you might not get into the conflicts in the first place. But if you watch the women who have made it to the top, they haven’t exactly been non-aggressive – including me.”
“I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly
killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.”
