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I knew the neighbors would hate us. Within weeks of moving into our Seattle home, my husband and I donned yellow rain slickers and battled bitter January rains to rototill our picture perfect front lawn into a working wildlife habitat. We then eroded a 20 cubic yard mountain of steaming compost and manure by shoveling it over our entire front yard. In places, the odiferous layer stood more than a foot thick. I could see the neighbors wrinkling their noses and scowling, and we smiled as they turned their backs. Now our mature native landscape is dotted with mountain hemlock, vine maple, thimbleberry and Oregon grape. Besides appreciating the diversity, we value the yard's other benefits to the environment.

In fact, reducing one's lawn goes beyond improving biodiversity and wildlife habitat—it makes a household more environmentally friendly. Residential lawns in this country cover 25 million acres, an area the size of Pennsylvania. They need mowing, edging, leaf removal, chemical application (fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides) and lots of fresh water. Lawn care equipment uses nearly 600 million gallons of gasoline per year. The benefits of reducing lawn size include creating wildlife habitat, saving water and fuel, emitting fewer greenhouse gases and improving air quality.

Programs for Change: Wildlife habitat is lost to suburbs in the U.S. at a rate of 400 square miles per year. One attempt to counter this trend is a nationwide Audubon Society program, Audubon at Home, which encourages increasing backyard variety. Replacing lawns with native plants—those adapted to various regions of the country, such as cactus in the desert Southwest—cuts down on water, fertilizer and pesticide use. Native plants also provide the basic habitat needs of food and shelter for local birds and insects.

The national program was patterned after Audubon's Gardening for Life Program, developed in Seattle. "Our inspiration has been to protect urban habitat," says Lauren Braden, Seattle's program manager. "We spend a lot of time lobbying for more green spaces in the city. Six years ago we realized that 80 percent of the urban land is single family homes, and that is when we shifted our focus." Braden says the program is working: "In the last few years, interest (in creating backyard habitat) has snowballed." She estimates that 1,000 yards in Seattle have been converted. Braden attributes the trend to recent drought years and increased awareness of the harm pesticides and herbicides cause when they run off urban yards and damage streams, lakes and other waterways. The National Wildlife Federation has created a similar program for yards that provide food, water and shelter for local wildlife. They have certified 39,500 yards nationwide as Backyard Wildlife Habitat sites.

As lawns are gradually converted to native landscaping nationwide, habitat is recovered. If every household reduced its lawn size by 10 percent, 2.5 million acres could be returned to native habitat. That's 10 times the amount of land lost annually. Similarly, cutting every lawn size by 50 percent would restore 12.5 million acres or nearly 50 times the annual loss. Residential lawns are not the only culprits. Grass-covered commercial areas, office parks, golf courses, playgrounds and other parks add to the problem. These other grassy areas cover another 25 million acres.

Less Lawn — More Water: The average U.S. lawn uses over 4,000 gallons of drinking water a week. This is about one- to two-thirds of the total water used in a typical household, says F. Herbert Bormann in Redesigning the American Lawn. Of course some lawns use more water than others. Those in the deserts of the Southwest are the most extreme examples, some exceeding the two-thirds figure. Summer lawn watering coincides with critical low-flow and poor-water-quality months for rivers and streams. Our lawn watering habit of 2.5 trillion gallons per year means aquatic life suffers and can result in life or death to entire salmon runs. A 10 percent reduction in lawn size and related water use would save 250 billion gallons of clean fresh water annually.

Less Lawn — Saves Fuel: Lawn mowing alone consumes nearly 600 million gallons of fuel each year. That figure does not include some of the more fuel consumptive lawn maintenance devices such as weed edgers and leaf blowers. Cutting household lawn size by 10 to 50 percent would save at least 60 to 300 million gallons of fuel each year.

Less Lawn — Fewer Greenhouse Gases: Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are emitted primarily from burning fossil fuels such as gasoline and coal. These gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and altering the climate. Greenhouse gases have been linked with global warming, rising sea levels and other disruptions of the earth's climate. The Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) has extensively studied greenhouse gases. According to WHRC, although the bulk of the gases come from fossil fuels, about 25 percent of the problem is from clear-cutting forests and planting lawns or crops. Replacing lawn with a layered, varied landscape locks up greenhouse gases. A 10 percent reduction in lawn size would decrease greenhouse gases by over 139,000 tons per year. Cutting lawn sizes in half would decrease greenhouse gases by nearly 700,000 tons per year.

Less Lawn — Cleaner Air. "We needed to develop alternatives to implement EPA's Pollution Prevention Act. Lawn mowers were an obvious source of pollution," says Danielle Green, an EPA Green Landscaping Program manager. This 1990 act stresses cutbacks and prevention of pollution. Lawn maintenance equipment emits many greenhouse gases. These emissions contribute to local air pollution, regional acid rain and global warming. Native landscaping reduces or eliminates these emissions. Atmospheric scientists at Monash University in Australia have shown that newly cut lawns and grass clippings generate significant amounts of methane gas (emissions increase 100 fold from newly cut grass). Methane, another greenhouse gas, has a much greater effect on climate change than carbon dioxide, says Dr. James Hansen in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." To further the problem, many grass clippings are still dumped into landfills. Clippings can make up to 20 percent of all municipal waste—approximately 160 million tons per year. Methane produced from landfills is also a major contributor to greenhouse gases.

Lawns Define Suburbia: they are embedded in the American psyche. "The hardest thing for people is that they like the lawn aesthetic and worry about what the neighbors will think," says Green. Braden often encounters a similar attitude: "People like to control nature; they like the maintained look. It's ingrained in the American way," she says, but hopes the situation is changing. "When people do develop some habitat, they love to see wildlife, native birds feeding in their yards. Also, with everyone working more, they have less free time and don't want to spend it mowing the lawn," adds Braden.

My neighbors still talk to me. Ten years after that rainy January of shoveling, I sit amongst a haven of blooming columbines and lupines, a vegetable garden, fruit trees, buzzing mason bees, cedar waxwings browsing on Indian plums and chickadees nesting in tree cavities. Jean Rassbach, who lives just north of us, is no longer so skeptical. "When you first started, I didn't know what to think, but now I really like it."

Our yard's transformation seems to be infectious. Since our endeavor, our adjoining neighbors have reduced their lawns by expanding flower beds and adding a variety of perennials, shrubs and trees to their yards. Across the street, only a 10-by-10 foot plot of grass remains amongst stone terraces and shrubs. Try it yourself. Cut out some grass, or add a couple of native plants. Even decimating a little patch of grass will improve the air quality and habitat in your yard, neighborhood, city and on the earth. With luck these small starts will take root.

Marian Wineman is an environmental consultant and has an M.S. in environmental engineering from the University of Washington. She is an outdoor enthusiast who met her husband on a chair lift.

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