Chandra Clarke

Offering Light and Laughter Wherever I Can

  • Home
  • About
  • Books & Shorts
  • Press & Awards
  • Citizen Science
  • Contact Me

In Your Garden

October 24, 2022 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

Drive through any city, and you’ll see suburban houses with neat and tidy gardens out front, probably a decent number of tree-lined streets, and maybe some veggie plots. All looks pretty “green” in the environmentalist sense, right?

Possibly not.

There are a number of problems with modern urban landscaping, and these issues are contributing to — not improving — habitat degradation, and biodiversity loss.

Let’s start with habitat.

Garden centres, nurseries, and landscaping contractors sell ornamental plants based on two factors: how easy they are to look after, and how pretty they are.

But unless those plants are ‘native’ to your region, they’re almost useless to your local wildlife.

(As is your veggie garden, because you work to keep those “pest” free so you can eat the produce. Which is reasonable, so let’s keep this about ornamental plants.)

Butterflies, for example, require certain host plants on which to lay their eggs and to eat as caterpillars. As adults, they need other plants to feed on.

Now, you might be thinking that no bugs is not such a bad thing, because who wants a lot of creepy crawlies around? And bug-chewed plants aren’t super attractive.

Well, all of the other plants that need pollinators (including food crops!) want those bugs around. As do all the birds, frogs, toads, and other insects that eat those bugs. A single nest of songbirds, for example, needs hundreds of caterpillars to feed their young. And certainly all the creatures that eat birds, frogs, toads, and bigger insects need something to dine on too.

To put it another way, imagine if you were surrounded by buffets that either had completely empty trays, or were only filled with things that you were allergic to (or just can’t stand to eat). That’s what your garden looks like if doesn’t have any native plants in it.

Worse, some of the plants that are sold in stores can be ‘invasive.’ That is, they escape the garden and get established in the wild. There, they can sometimes flourish, outcompeting native plants and destroying habitat. They do this by seeds (which can be relocated miles way by birds or wind); cuttings or through a weed pull where the debris isn’t baked by the sun or composted into mush; through ‘runners;’ or rhizomes. So, even if that invasive plant looks like it’s behaving itself and staying put, it probably isn’t.

Which brings us to biodiversity loss.

If we’re losing bugs and the things that feed on them, we’re reducing the biodiversity of the ecosystem. What that means in plain English is that the whole system becomes a lot more fragile. When you have lots of different bugs, and plants, and animals, and birds, one single disease, or one food source reduction isn’t going to turn the whole area into a desert for you too. The fewer creatures you have in your system, the more vulnerable the whole thing is.

You Can Do Something About This!

That’s the bad news. The good news? This is something you can definitely fix.

Let’s go back to your garden. Figure out what you have already, either by asking gardener friends, snapping pix with the iNaturalist app or using Google Lens, and getting identifications. (You might also have receipts you can look at, or you could ask for a local landscaping company to come and do an audit.)

If you have anything that identified as invasive in your area, target that stuff immediately. Pull it up, cut it down, stick everything in black garbage bags, do the bags up, and leave them in the sun to cook for several days. (Be sure to clean up seeds as much as possible). You want to make sure there isn’t any live material or seeds or cuttings that could spread once you dispose of it. Once it’s thoroughly cooked, you could compost it, or if you must, put it in the trash.

Next, target anything else that isn’t native and consider replacing it. Here’s where you can make use of free resources like your local library, your local state or provincial environmental departments, gardening groups, and horticultural societies. Or you can even do a search online for the term “plants (or trees, or shrubs) native to my area.” In some districts, enthusiasts have started “plant this, not that” lists, which give you similar looking plants to the ones you want to replace.

You don’t have to do everything all at once, of course, as time and money will be considerations. But here again, check out the free resources. Many libraries have started “seed libraries,” where you can “borrow” seeds in the spring to start plants and then you harvest seeds from your plant to take back to the library. There are almost certainly plant or seed exchanges where you live too.

A few words of caution. Be careful of plants labelled “native” or “pollinator friendly” in nurseries or garden centres, because they might not be. For example, “butterfly bush” does attract and feed butterflies, but it’s originally from Asia, and has been declared invasive in several regions of North America. I always take a list of what I want to buy with me, using those hard-to-remember Latin names, so I know I’m getting the real deal. There are also now nurseries specializing in native plants, so check their reputation and then you can shop for everything there with confidence.

And, if you have pets, make sure you’re not planting anything that would be toxic to them in places they access. Your veterinarian can likely point you to a list of things that are bad for cats and dogs.

Join a Group Doing This Work

You don’t have to do this all by yourself either. In Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation has a Butterflyway Project with resource materials and volunteer coordinators set up to encourage more native gardens. The Rotary organization, which is a worldwide service club, also has a pollinator garden initiative. Why not meet new people and make new friends while doing a good deed? See what’s available where you live.

Tell Your Neighbours

Talk up native plant gardening to your neighbours. If you’ve joined a group like I suggested above, there are often signs you can put on your lawn to explain the initiative and start conversations. They also provide flyers you can surreptitiously (or openly!) put in your neighbour’s mail boxes. Spread the word!

What About My City Plantings?

This is something you can influence too. Get together with existing gardening and horticultural groups, and start pressuring city hall to adopt more “native flora” planting policies. As always, see if you can find a way to make it about tax savings, property values, and quality of life. You don’t have to like the system, you can learn to work it!

Corporate & Institutional Plantings

Don’t forget to target corporate or institutional plantings as well. Think of all of those parking lot boulevards, apartment building planter boxes, large acreages around utility company buildings… the list goes on and on. A letter writing campaign can work wonders!

You could also involve your local Scouts and Guides troops, and encourage local schools to start pollinator gardens as teaching projects. Consider reaching out to local indigenous groups while you’re at it. Working together to bring back habitat can be a wonderful reconciliation activity, particularly if you spend a lot of time listening and learning. 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Let’s Talk About Lawns

October 10, 2022 By Chandra Clarke 1 Comment

The lawn as we know it is a fairly recent invention. You can find its origins in the manicured estates of the European aristocracy. Devoting acres of land to high maintenance grass was a way to flaunt your wealth. It meant you had so much land that you could take some out of crop production and devote it entirely to being decorative. And further, that you had the staff to maintain it to exacting standards.

The standard suburban turf grass lawn — green, neat, tidy — is still a status symbol. It implies that the owner is comfortably middle class or higher. It still requires staff to maintain it too: many a weekend is devoted to trimming, weeding, rolling, spraying, aerating, raking, watering, and fertilizing. If you are especially wealthy, you can afford specialized equipment for the job, or you can have a service in to all this work for you.

The lawn as a concept is so ubiquitous that some 128,000 square kilometres is devoted to it in the USA. According to NASA, that’s three times more acres of lawns than irrigated corn. 

Here’s the thing, though: from an ecological standpoint, that green lawn is a desert. Its also a huge contributor to carbon emissions. 

Let’s address the first point. We clip our lawns very short, so they don’t provide a decent habitat for anything but the smallest of ground dwelling insects. We’re careful to roll everything flat and fill in holes, so nothing dares burrow. We spray for “weeds” and eliminate any flowers for pollinators. We also don’t fancy bugs very much, so we kill grubs and other critters with pesticides.  So from a wildlife point of view, that’s tens of thousands of square kilometres that are essentially no longer habitable or food bearing.

As for carbon emissions, we can look at direct and indirect production. Most of us still use gas lawnmowers (and gas-powered weedwhackers and leaf blowers), which are highly inefficient. The US Environmental Protection agency (EPA) estimates that hour-for-hour, gas-powered lawn mowers produce 11 times as much pollution as a new car. The government of Canada suggests that a single lawn mower produces 48 kilograms of greenhouse gas in a season.

Oh, and they’re noisy and smelly!

Meanwhile, think of all the emissions generated to bring you: grass seed, weed killer, bug killer, and all the tools and machinery you use. While we’re at it, let’s think about how wasteful it is for every single household to have a dedicated lawn mowing machine. A number of lawnmower maintenance sites suggest that the average lawnmower is used for about 60 hours per year. That means it just sits around in your garage for 99.4% of the year.

Lawns are also water hogs. Landscape irrigation (lawn watering) is estimated to account for nearly 1/3 of residential water use, or 27 billion litres every day (EPA). 

Finally, all those lawn chemicals contribute to waterway pollution and fertilizer run-off, which creates algae blooms that kill wildlife.

So, there’s very little to love about lawns. 

All of that said, it’s easy to see why we still have them. They’re ‘normal’ to us, because we grew up with them. Kids and dogs like playing on them. And in areas where certain insects — like ticks, for instance — are problematic and bring disease, there are good reasons for keeping ‘nature’ at arms length. Plus, we like imposing order on our surroundings. 

How to make our lawns ‘greener’

Fortunately, there are a lot of easy fixes, many of which involve *less* work than what you’re doing.

  • If you’re constrained by local bylaws or a homeowners association, and can’t (easily) change the composition of your lawn, you can still immediately decarbonize by switching to electric mowers and tools. The latest generation of tools have enough power and torque to handle most lawns and there are even decent electric riding lawnmower options now. You could also shop around for a ‘green’ lawn service that uses electric machines. If you have a small lawn, you could also just use a reel mower. 
  • On that note, you can call around to your local lawn service companies and ask if they use electric equipment (even if you already know they don’t). If they feel they’re losing potential customers by using fossil fuels, they might start decarbonizing their fleets.
  • You can reduce or eliminate your fertilizer needs by adding nitrogen fixing plants to your lawn. Clover, for example, used to be standard in lawns until weed management chemicals killed them off. 
  • Speaking of which, consider accepting imperfection, and give the weed killers a miss. If you must control weeds, switch to corn gluten application in the spring to stop weeds from sprouting in the first place. 
  • Get your lawn tested and investigate what local mycorrhizal fungi you should add to your lawn. These fungi have a symbiotic relationship with certain plant roots, and help plants absorb phosphorous, potassium, calcium, copper, and iron. They also help with water uptake.
  • You can reduce or eliminate your water bill by setting up rain barrels to catch rain water and save it for dry days. You can also reduce evaporation by watering very early in the morning or late at night when it’s cooler. More water gets to the plants this way.
  • Other water saving options include setting up ‘rain gardens’ and ‘grey water systems.’ A rain garden uses roof run-off and rain water to nourish water loving plants like lilies and reeds. Always use what’s native to your region. A grey water system reuses water from things like showers and sinks. Be sure you’re using environmentally-friendly soaps and not dumping anything bad down the drain.
  • You can also just let your grass go brown in peak summer heat. Grasses have a natural dormancy cycle they use to conserve nutrients, and they can generally stay that way for as much as a month. 
  • If you have looser local regulations, consider over seeding with a regionally-appropriate “low mow” or “no mow” seed mixture. These produce short grasses and flowers that need only a few lawnmower passes per year, or sometimes none at all.
  • You can reduce the total area of lawn you need to mow by planting native shrubs and trees.
  • You can also convert sections of your lawn to native flower gardens. Or go all out and convert everything! It doesn’t have to be a wild meadow – it’s possible to have an orderly wildflower garden if that suits you more. 
  • Finally, you might be able to get past local regulations by converting everything to food production. While this isn’t ideal from an ecology point of view, it does save on greenhouse emissions, and you get produce out of it, which will help you save on your grocery bill.
  • For the love of all that is holy, do not ‘fix’ the problem of lawns by paving it over or installing fake grass. Concrete production produces CO2, and paving everything contributes to flooding because rainwater can’t just soak away into the ground but must travel over cement. Fake grass is essentially plastic, which is terrible for the environment in all kinds of ways. 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Yes, You Can

September 19, 2022 By Chandra Clarke 1 Comment

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Jane Goodall

In an earlier section, we talked about how about 100 companies are responsible for most of the emissions being released right now. We also noted that we as consumers don’t really buy from them directly. So how do we fight back at the individual level? How can we curb emissions and cut other kinds of pollution?

By drying up the market for the products that these companies backstop. Voting with your wallet.

Again, I’m not talking about temporary boycotts. Nor am I talking about standing around in the grocery store debating the morality of choosing Brand A over Brand B while the kids are bugging you for chocolate bars or plushies. 

What I’m suggesting is a longer term solution and a systematic approach, whereby you take a look at one purchasing habit at a time, fix it, and then move on to the next habit. 

Let’s use an example. Consider this: Every toothbrush you’ve ever used in your life is almost certainly still around. 

Numbers vary, depending on the conditions and type of plastic, but most figures suggest that it takes hundreds of years for plastic to decompose. (And mostly it seems to go into smaller and smaller bits of plastic.)

Kind of a scary thought, yes? It gets worse if you start doing some math. 

Let’s say the average person changes out his toothbrush once a year. Now consider a small city with 1,000,000 people in it. That means one city generates a million used toothbrushes every… single… year.  

Thus, we’re creating mountains of used toothbrushes that will still be around in ~450 years.

And of course, since you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to tell you that most plastics come from fossil fuels, and that fossil fuels are responsible for CO2 emissions, air pollution, and that oil spills are incredibly devastating. 

So, is there a perfect, zero-impact replacement for plastic toothbrushes?

No. Not yet anyway. But there are products that are arguably better. 

And indeed, that’s the case with nearly everything we’ll look at in the coming sections. 

Nothing proposed will be perfect, and there’s probably no such thing as zero-impact. Given the size of the human population, the law of big numbers will mean that everything we do will have outsized effects on our planet.

But we no longer have the luxury of waiting for heaven-sent solutions. We have to start moving everything we do to at least less bad right now while en route to those solutions that are sustainable or regenerative.  

We’ll start with some of the biggest impact items in your household. One will be obvious, and you’ve probably been thinking about it already. The other might surprise you. 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

What’s Happening Where You Work?

September 12, 2022 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

— Edmund Burke.

In previous sections, we’ve talked about how we desperately need systemic changes, and in particular changes in the way corporations do business.

And it’s absolutely correct to focus on the damage large companies have done to our planet. One only has to look at the damage caused by state oil company Pemex, which managed to set the freaking’ ocean on fire, to see that there’s a problem.

But it’s not just corporations — small- to medium-sized businesses have environmental impacts too.

And what are businesses, but organizations made up of people? People like you and me?

Sure, you might not be a CEO, or in the C-Suite at all, or even at the middle-management level. But even if you’re just a cog in the proverbial machine, you do have a voice. And it’s time we all started using our voices at work.

Here are some ideas for using yours. Remember to frame your suggestions or push for changes in a way that demonstrates the benefits to the organization:

  • Sit down with a pencil and paper (or your phone, or whatever) and start thinking objectively about how you do your job. Are there ways to make it cleaner and greener? (For example, if you are a courier, are you shutting down your vehicle when you make a delivery or are you leaving it to idle? What would happen if turning it off was company policy? How much pollution would that remove from the equation? How much would it save the company in fuel costs?)
  • Think too, about your section, unit, division, department, or whatever they’re called in your company. Maybe your specific job is pretty clean and green, but what about the bigger picture?
  • What consumables is your organization constantly having to reorder? Could they be replaced with reusables? Or done away with completely?
  • What happens to stuff that doesn’t get sold at your retail job? Does it get destroyed? Is it thrown in the dumpster? Can you push to have the stuff donated? Can you tally up how much the company is wasting and send a report up the chain?
  • Are you in charge of ordering supplies? Can you influence what gets purchased? Can you push for more ecofriendly versions of the things you use regularly?
  • What processes routinely produce a lot of waste in your company? Can you find a way to fix the process so it generates less waste in the first place? Can you find a way to reuse or recycle that waste?
  • What’s energy use like where you work? Are people constantly leaving monitors and lights on? Leaving windows open while the heat is on? What solutions can you propose at the next staff meeting that would be more efficient and save the company money? Typically, posting signs around the office doesn’t work, but maybe having, for instance, the IT department implement a computer network power saving policy that shuts things down automatically might.

So, we’ve covered some basic actions we can take to improve things. These are generally safe to do, and might even be good for your career if you’ve done it in such a way as to demonstrate initiative and a willingness to help the company’s bottom line.

What about bad companies?

But what if you’re working for a company that is genuinely a bad actor rather than being merely careless? You know the kind: flouting regulations, dumping illegally, not looking after the health and safety of its workers or its community. Or even just in an industry that’s been proven to be bad for people or the planet, even if they’re theoretically doing everything “by the book?” (Remember that old adage: Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right.)

What you do in these cases largely depends on your financial situation, your conscience, what legal protections you have and so on.

If it’s safe for you to do so — that is, you believe you’re in a position to push for change without losing your job and imperiling your family in the process, you could make those suggestions. (Just remember that businesses might demand loyalty, but rarely give it back, so assume you’re not truly secure).

If it’s not safe for you do so, then your priority should be to find a way to leave the job. Yes, leave it. You don’t have to be part of the problem. (And if you’re a young person just joining the workplace, don’t sign up to work for bad actors or industries in the first place.)

That might mean sacrificing evenings to attend night school and reskill; or if you already have transferable skills, start applying for new jobs; and getting your finances in order so you won’t be bankrupted (which is just a good idea anyway) by a change in, or complete loss of salary.

In other words, find a way to get off the treadmill that forces you to accept a status quo that is endangering us all.

Pulling in big bucks and being able to afford that house or nicer car won’t help you when your town sets temperature records and then burns to the ground, or when there are food shortages because you have a record-setting plague of mice.

And while I would never suggest that anyone break the law, I will say that whistleblowers are key to getting corporations and systems to reform. Fortunately, for anyone contemplating blowing a whistle on the activities of their organization, there are lots of articles freely available online on how to do so and protect yourself.

There are even search engines like DuckDuckGo that don’t track your activities, or special browsers like Tor, which helps you stay anonymous online. And there are a lot of news organizations that have anonymous tip boxes available too.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
« Previous Page
Next Page »

On Sale Now:

Recent Posts

  • Dolphin dollars and moose money
  • Better Laundry
  • Five Interesting Things – January 2023
  • A small town solution
  • In the Kitchen

Recent Comments

  • Edwina Cain on Coffee and civilization: coincidence?
  • Jay on 5 Interesting Things – November 2022
  • K R V Hari on Let’s Talk About Lawns
  • Joseph Davidson on Corporations
  • Marlee on Five Interesting Things – August 2022

Your Host:


Offering Whatever Light I Can

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Copyright © 2023 Chandra Clarke. All Rights Reserved.