To the Editor:
With Earth Day approaching, many people are thinking about ways to protect and appreciate the natural world. They may be shocked to learn that their lovely, carefully tended lawn is neither natural nor good for the environment.

Kate Brittenham, an ecological landscape designer and founder of Front Stoop Gardens in Troy, says that the typical suburban lawn is the ecological equivalent of a parking lot. I have seen the extraordinary contrast between a natural landscape and a meticulously tended lawn on two properties a few miles from my home in Altamont.

One property has an absolutely untended field by the road with a jumbled mess of weeds flourishing on their own. Among them I saw butterflies, heard birds singing and crickets chirping.

The property directly next to it has a large new house with an enormous lawn that obviously gets a great deal of attention. I neither saw nor heard any living things other than the grass there.

While we may not want a jumble of wild plants in our yards, we can make room for nature by having a smaller lawn and planting native plants including trees, shrubs, and flowering annuals and perennials.

The population of monarch butterflies, one of our nation’s true natural treasures, is in serious decline, and one of the major causes of that decline is loss of habitat. The only plant that monarch butterfly larvae can eat is milkweed, which is not found in lawns. As more suburban homes are built, many with large yards, habitat for milkweed decreases.

While some folks may not be excited about providing homes and food for insects, we must remember that butterflies are insects, that many insects pollinate native plants as well as fruits and vegetables, and that many of our beloved songbirds eat insects. Without insects, it would be a much less interesting world.

There have been reports in recent years about “the insect apocalypse,” a drastic drop in the numbers of insects. When I was a child in the 1950s, a ride in the car on a summer night would end with the windshield splattered with dead insects. That doesn’t happen any more.

While a clean windshield is nice, the disappearance of all that life is chilling. Like the drop in the monarch butterfly population, the general insect apocalypse is caused both by heavy use of insecticides, on lawns as well as farms, and also by loss of habitat, much of it caused by suburban development.

When native meadows are replaced by suburban lawns, habitat for insects, birds, and small wildlife is destroyed. Fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides applied to a lawn are likely to leave the property and flow into local water bodies in a rain.

Altamont stormwater drains to the Bozenkill, which flows into the Normanskill, which goes to the Watervliet Reservoir, a drinking water source for the town of Guilderland. Lawn chemicals can cause algal blooms that harm the fish and amphibians living in those water bodies.

With a change in attitude, it’s easy to make your yard friendlier for wildlife. An article on sustainable landscaping by Daryl Beyers in the September/October issue of Horticulture magazine has several terrific suggestions, the first of which is to limit the size of your lawn: “A patch of lawn is nice, but unless you are fielding a sports team, there is no need for acres of resource-wasting turf.”

He suggests letting leaves lie where they fall to decompose naturally. A neighbor of mine noticed groups of robins eating insects among leaves that she left in her yard last fall, but no birds on her tidier front lawn. Byers recommends growing native plants that quickly become self-sustaining, need neither fertilizer nor watering, and provide habitat and food for insects and birds.

Information about native plants suitable for our area is available from the Nature Center in Thacher Park, phone: 518-872-0800; from the Audubon Society, because birds need native plants, website:  Audubon.org; and The Wild Ones: website, wild ones.org. Audubon Society and Wild Ones have local chapters. The Nature Center has a native plant sale every spring.

In Douglas Tallamy’s book “Nature’s Best Hope,” he says that by shrinking lawns and planting native plants, groups of homeowners can develop conservation corridors in our neighborhoods and protect insects, birds, and animals threatened by loss of habitat.

Tallamy proposes the idea of a “Homegrown National Park” that could be created if Americans converted just half their lawns into “productive native plant communities” that would add up to an additional 20 million acres of nature-friendly land, more than several of the largest national parks combined.

I can’t think of a better way to fulfill the Earth Day idea to “Make Every Day Earth Day” than by starting a piece of homegrown national park in your yard.

Edna Litten

Altamont