Making the Suburbs Subversive
Okay, the suburbs may never truly be subversive. But a girl can dream!
Last fall, The World Wildlife Fund came out with its 2024 Living Planet Report, and it paints a grim picture. Global wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73% in the past 50 years. This is the kind of statistic that is staggering, harrowing, and yet, utterly invisible, and to be honest, irrelevant to most of us, I would guess. We’re living through this planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and most of us have no idea.
Unless you’re a birdwatcher, naturalist, or somebody else whose relationship with the natural world and its non-human creatures goes deeper than mowing the lawn, going for a walk, or shuddering at unwanted rodents in the alley (I see you, Chicagoans), you probably don’t feel this unfathomable loss. There will, however, come a time when we all feel it, whether we want to or not. And it won’t feel good.
I’ve taken a lot of roadtrips in my day, and I’m old enough to remember when I used to have to squeegee my windshield at the gas station regularly to scrub bug guts off it. Gradually, so gradually that I hardly noticed - until I did - those bugs disappeared. Now I can take a seven hour drive to northern Michigan with hardly a splat. Sad that one of the biggest ways I recognize our global biodiversity loss is because my fossil fuel guzzling bug exploder isn’t exploding as many bugs anymore.
I wrote last fall about fall leaves, and why what we do with them in the suburbs is stupid. I’ve made my contempt for suburban landscaping known many times. But I want to go deeper on what more we can do, if we’re lucky enough to own a little patch of land somewhere. Because if we get a bit more subversive about this whole private property thing we’re so obsessed with, we could be doing some way better stuff with the millions of acres we have in suburbia.
According to entomologist Doug Tallamy, we have about 135 million acres of typical residential landscapes in the US, and we’re developing about 800,000 more acres of residential land a year. Much of this land has your standard suburban landscaping: Thirsty, high-maintenance, non-native lawns, garden beds with exotic species, sterile landscapes that are also, if I may add, utterly banal. This kind of land use contributes significantly to the collapse of biodiversity.
But it’s also an opportunity. If we worked to “rewild” our little suburban yards, we could turn those millions of acres into vibrant havens of biodiversity (this is the goal of Doug Tallamy’s nonprofit, Homegrown National Park).
So, what if we stopped thinking about our suburban yards as: “My land! And I get to do whatever I want with it! And I get to complain about my neighbor’s yard if they’re not doing what I want them to do with it!” Instead, we could think about our yards as land that we have the responsibility and privilege to steward, because other creatures live on it, and it’s important that it’s healthy.
Or, more succinctly: Not mine, ours.
I’ll confess, I haven’t gotten rid of my lawn entirely. Someday, I hope. Though, as ecological horticulturist, Rebecca McMackin says, lawns should be area rugs, not wall-to-wall carpet. So there’s a place for lawns. Just a small one.
Hopefully, with spring on its way, you’re contemplating what you’re going to grow this year, or thinking about giving your yard a little makeover. So, over the coming weeks I’m going to deliver a little series on radical land use for the suburbanite or other person lucky enough to have any land at all.
By the way, if you think you’re hampered by your little dictatorship, the HOA, don’t be so sure. If you’re in Illinois, you’re definitely not. We passed a law recently that says HOAs can’t ban native plants. If you’re not in Illinois, look into it. You may have similar laws on the books, or you may be just the right person to lead the charge and either change your HOA’s mind, or use the Illinois law as a model to lobby your own state to protect and encourage native plants!
Listen, things are pretty shitty right now. Politically, obviously, but also ecologically. When it comes to the planet, you may feel helpless and hopeless. The problem is too big (it is) and you’re too small to fix it (you are). That doesn’t change the fact that there are a million things you can and should be doing, and many of those things are now about building a more resilient and prepared community around you. A resilient ecosystem is a thriving and biodiverse one that is native to your ecoregion. An ecologically managed landscape can help protect from fires and floods, has richer soil for growing food, has plants with deeper root systems that are better able to weather drought. You see what I’m saying? Your Kentucky bluegrass will be a whiny, needy loser when climate chaos comes for us, but you pick the right native grasses for your yard conditions, or throw in some echinacea or common milkweed, and that stuff will outlast even the rats in your alley.
Also, if you’re sad about the planet, nothing will make you feel better like growing a native garden. Although we should keep taking whatever actions we can to live more sustainably, it can often feel fruitless when we can’t actually see the results of our efforts. But when you start to see birds and bugs come around your yard that you’ve never seen before, you’ll realize you actually did a thing - tiny little you on your tiny little plot of land - that made a difference!
So in the upcoming series I’m going to talk about:
Private property, where this actually bizarre idea came from, and the things about it that are stupid and harmful
Growing food, soil health, and compost
More resources on growing natives and increasing biodiversity in your yard
Design, including: Permaculture! Matrix planting! Square foot gardening! Spirals! (but not these spirals!)
Radical land use, culture change, and stewardship
I may have some other types of posts interspersed throughout the series, but you can expect them to come out in relatively close succession.
I’m partly doing this because I’m working on a book right now, and I need to get ahead of my Substack posts so I can focus more on my manuscript. And I’m also doing it because land use in suburbia matters, and we could be doing so much better.
So stay tuned on how to make suburbia subversive!
I wanna, I gotta, and I don't know howta. So, yes please to the forthcoming guidance about how to use my property for the good of wildlife.
We have been slowly killing off our grass and replacing it with native plants, food garden, and “food forest” plants. We have the back yard as grass for the dogs and kid, part of the side yard for the fire pit, but the rest of our half acre yard has been altered. I slowly add more every year! This has been a five year project full of tarping, using an absurd amount of cardboard, saving our leaves (and the neighbors), and shoveling three full loads of wood chips over probably a fourth of my yard. We always keep our neighborhood guessing what we will be up to next. 😅 This year I’m hoping to plant a ton of sunflowers and build some cool yard art that will double as wildlife homes. My goal is to make my yard as wild as it can be.