Hey team, and welcome back to one5c! So much advice for living a more climate-conscious existence centers on telling folks not to do things, which can become kind of a bummer. Don’t eat that burger. Don’t drive when you can walk. Don’t buy another WNBA T-shirt. (That last one just me?) That’s why we here at one5c spend a lot of time zeroing in on the things you can do to make an impact. This week, though, we’re circling back to one of the best exceptions: Don’t rake your leaves. Hear that? You never need to rake leaves again!
Excited to kick back with a pumpkin-spiced something and revel in autumnal bliss? Cozying up on the porch is better with buddies, so be sure to share this with all your fall-loving friends. —Corinne
THE BEST WAY TO HANDLE FALL LEAVES
By Leslie Horn Peterson (additional reporting by Olivia Gieger)
Fall foliage draws leaf peepers outdoors to glimpse the colors, and enthusiastic yard-tenders to the garden shed reaching for their rakes. Or worse, for their leaf blowers. The gas-powered lawn tools run on rudimentary, inefficient engines; the motors put only about 60% of the fuel you put in to work making wind, while the rest is emitted as aerosols. This medley of carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, and hydrocarbons is 300 times more potent than what comes out of the tailpipe of a pickup truck.
Even if you are using a rake, you might want to slow your roll. Though many towns and states collect and pool lawn waste to turn into communal compost—the EPA estimates 22.3 million tons of yard trimmings meet this fate—some 10.5 million tons, including leaves, wind up in methane-spurting landfills each year. Yup, you can add obsessive leaf-clearing to the list of sins of the American lawn, right alongside all the water it sucks up and the native species it pushes out.
Everything that lives on your personal patch of turf—from the insects in the soil to the trees themselves—depends on nutrients in those dead leaves and the habitat they can create within the topsoil. Keeping that plant matter in the system is crucial to the nutrient cycle of your lawn’s microecosystem.
“The best practices for leaves are just like the best practices for water,” says Doug Tallamy, an ecologist at the University of Delaware and founder of Homegrown National Park, a group dedicated to restoring our yards’ natural ecosystems. “You want all the water that falls on your property to stay on your property, and you want all the leaves that fall on your property to stay on your property.”
But not everyone can just let tree detritus pile up on their grass. Even responsible people may feel compelled to succumb to pressure from nosy neighbors to rake, or they may be required to do so by an HOA. Even if that’s the case, there are still ways to practice responsible leaf removal, and there are levels to how this can work:
Good: Compost your leaves
If you need to remove the leaves entirely, pile them into a compost heap on your property (although some HOAs get bent out of shape about those, too). You can eventually spread the composted leaf litter, which is naturally rich in nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, around the yard as a replacement for mulch or fertilizer.
Better: Pile leaves in tree beds
Rake the leaves under your trees. As an added measure, consider increasing the size of your garden beds, especially those that are directly under those conifers. Why’s that? “If you remove [leaves] from your property, you’re starving all the plants,” Tallamy says, referring to substances like nitrogen, sulfur, and calcium that flora feast on. “We want to close the nutrient cycle. That means keep the leaves on your property, particularly under the trees that made them.”
Best: Leave the leaves
Let the leaves fall where they may. That litter scattered across the ground helps maintain soil moisture, provides winter homes for birds, bats, bees, and bugs, and harbors bacteria and fungi, which together help break leaves down into usable nutrients for trees and plants. “The leaves are creating a blanket over the soil community that maintains the soil humidity, because everything in the soil requires high humidity,” Tallamy says.
Leslie Horn Peterson is a New York–based journalist covering a broad range of topics—from music and culture to home and families. She’s contributed to Gizmodo, Vice, Deadspin, and Dwell, among other pubs.
The Roundup
In the news this week
As North Carolina recovers from Hurricane Helene’s historic flooding, experts are re-examining the notion of a climate haven. The city of Asheville, N.C., has famously seen an influx of new residents, owing to its cool temperatures and distance from flood-prone coastlines. But those upsides, The Washington Post’s analysis lays out, are no match for a supercharged storm like Helene. Warmer air holds on to more water vapor, which means tempests in a climate-changed world can unleash months’ worth of rainfall in a matter of hours.
In an open letter to the USDA, a group of organizations is asking the agency to remove the dairy category from the next version of its dietary guidelines, which is due out next year. In the current recommendations, dairy is listed as its own category, meaning that Americans should eat a certain amount daily. The letter’s ask, which centers on the well-documented environmental and health impacts of consuming a lot of dairy, is that it be folded in as an option within the protein category. Canada dropped daily dairy from its food guide in 2019.
On Monday night, the United Kingdom shuttered the last of its coal-fired power plants, marking the end of an era. The U.K. was the first country in the world to open such a plant in 1882, and now it stands as the first of the G7 nations to step away from the energy source—the most-polluting of all fossil fuels. To put this historic phaseout in context, check out Carbon Brief’s excellent time line of U.K. coal use.
Ford is trying to nudge EV “fence sitters” into their first purchase. The pitch? The company’s throwing in a free charger with new EVs sold through the end of 2024. It’ll also cover the installation costs, though owners will need to foot the bill for any necessary upgrades to the home’s electrical panel. If you need a little more guidance about making the switch, check out our quick-glance guide to going electric.
And lastly, human-caused climate change came up early in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. While Vance stopped short of acknowledging the role carbon emissions play in driving hotter temperatures, both parties offered their view of solutions. Vance alluded to new nuclear facilities and increasing domestic energy production—though, as Grist points out, he didn’t specifically cite oil and gas. Walz, meanwhile, took the opportunity to tout the current administration’s investments in energy spending and jobs creation via the Inflation Reduction Act, but not his own climate record.