What You Can Do In Your Yard To Limit Climate Change and Species Extinction
"Unless we modify the places we live, work, and play to meet not only our own needs but the needs of other species as well, nearly all species of wildlife native to the United States will disappear forever." --Douglas Tallamy, BRINGING NATURE HOME: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens (Timber Press, 2007), p.31.

GETTING STARTED

1. Reduce the size of your lawn to the point where it can be mowed with a push mower. Maintaining a large lawn is costly in terms of water, fossil fuels, and carbon emissions.
2. Stop using power equipment in your yard. Whether powered by gasoline or electricity, such equipment has high environmental costs, and most of it emits huge amounts of carbon.
3. Replace lawn with trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses native to your region and appropriate to your site. The extensive root systems of native wildflowers and grasses sequester carbon much better than lawngrass does, and native plants are greatly superior to nonnative plants in their ability to support wildlife. Aim for as great a diversity of plant species, and of plant height, shape, and texture, as you can manage.
4. Plant coniferous trees in order to protect your house in winter from the prevailing winds (generally from the north or northwest) but not so close to the house, or so thickly, as to block sunlight or form a solid barrier. Coniferous trees also protect birds from harsh weather and predators.
5. Plant deciduous trees on the south, southeast, and southwest sides of your house in order to shade it in summer and allow the sun to light and warm it in winter.
6. Use shrubs with needles as foundation plants in order to insulate your house.
7. Use trees and shrubs to shade air-conditioning units.
8. Plant long-lived native trees that will sequester carbon year after year, and take good care of them. Put them (and shrubs too) in large beds extending out to their driplines where their roots won’t have to compete with lawngrass for water and nutrients. Fill these beds with native plants, whose extensive root systems capture water more readily than lawngrass does and transfer it to the trees’ roots.
9. As scarcity of water will accompany climate change in most regions, do all you can to reduce the strain on your city's water supply. Keep rainwater on your site with mulch and beds of native plants (whose extensive root systems capture and slowly release the water). Use pipes or channels to direct water from gutters into rainbarrels, rain gardens, bioswales, and other artificial wetlands.
10. Design walks, patios, and driveways so that they are permeable. "If you have a solid surface driveway, cut shallow channels horizontally across the width of the driveway so water drains into vegetated areas next to the drive instead of into the street and the storm-water system. Line the channels with brick or stone for a decorative effect" (Patricia Hill, Design Your Natural Midwest Garden, 2007, p. 165).
11. Enrich your soil with organic material so that it will hold water longer. Native plants threatened by increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall may be able to hang on longer in our yards than elsewhere. (At least, John Pastor, in:Global Climate Change and the Preservation of Wild Flora,: Wild Ones Journal [Jan./Feb, '08], 10, seems to imply this.)
12. Keep yard waste on your property instead of sending it to landfills, which produce methane, a greenhouse gas still worse than C02. (And, of course, transporting yard waste to landfills, or to a central site for composting, consumes energy.)
13. Use yard waste creatively, to enrich your soil and to help wildlife. Use fallen leaves as mulch and to kill lawngrass for new planting areas. Allow fallen leaves to stay under trees, where they nourish and mulch the tree and also protect overwintering insects. Leave twigs and small branches in flowerbeds for use by nesting birds or as support for insects and other organisms. Use larger branches to make a brushpile that will shelter small mammals, birds, and insects. Leave dead trees standing, if you can do so safely, for cavity-nesting birds. At least leave tallish trunks and stumps.
14. Compost remaining yard waste, for example, excess leaves, grass clippings, weeds (seedheads removed), and appropriate kitchen waste. Don't compost seeds; diseased plants; invasive nonnative plants; or stalks and grasses cut down in early spring. The latter may still be sheltering beneficial insects that have wintered over inside them. Gather such stalks and grasses into small bundles and lay them along the edges of your plantings, where they will soon disappear from view.
15. Fertilize your plants with compost and leaf mold (from dead leaves that you have stockpiled) rather than with conventional fertilizers. The energy costs of conventional fertilizers include their manufacture, packaging, and transport; such fertilizers also pollute local streams and lakes with unneeded nutrients.
16. Stop using herbicides and pesticides, too--for your own sake, for the sake of the water supply, for the sake of wildlife, and because these products, like conventional fertilizers, have high energy costs.
17. Use recycled materials for structures in your yard, e. g., raised beds, decks, sheds, compost bins, etc. Avoid treated wood, which may contain toxic chemicals.
18. Make your own yard a model of environmental friendliness, and encourage relatives, neighbors, and friends to adopt environmentally sound practices in their yards.

THINGS YOUR LAWN DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW

• The EPA estimates that the total amount of residential lawn in the United States ranges around 40 million acres, making turf grass the nation's biggest irrigated crop.
• Americans pour as much as 238 gallons of water per person, per day onto lawns during the growing season.
• The U.S. lawn industry is a $70 billion annual business.
• America's 50 million or so lawnmowers burn through 800 million gallons of gas every year. Using a power mower or a power leaf blower for an hour puts roughly the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as driving your car 200 to 300 miles (estimates vary, according to source—some are lower, some considerably higher).

Sources include U.S. EPA: Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program
  
"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."
--From "The Land Ethic," Aldo Leopold"s final essay in A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC (1949).