Ecological Landscaping

We empower people to reclaim their greenspaces to improve local food security, climate resilience, and community engagement. Revitalizing urban areas that are currently vacant or underutilized holds immense potential to uplift neighborhoods, foster stronger bonds between neighbors, decrease crime rates, promote biodiversity by restoring native habitats, create opportunities for local food production, and serve as symbols of progress and vitality within the community.

Urban areas that are vacant or underutilized can degrade the appearance of neighborhoods, reduce engagement between neighbors, serve as hotspots for crime, host monocultures and/or invasive species, lack food production capacity for community, and stand as metaphorical indicators of the health of the community.

Plants consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the atmosphere. They shield us from extreme heat and cold, provide us with shade, produce food, and reduce noise pollution.

When it comes to the world’s biodiversity crisis — as many as 1 million plant and animal species face near-term extinction because of habitat loss ― Our urban spaces are part of the problem.

Our local insects, which evolved to eat native plants, starve because they can’t eat the invasive or ornamental plants and don’t recognize the invaders as food. This in turn threatens our birds, amphibians, reptiles, rodents and others all the way up the food chain.

Lawns, and those useless, ubiquitous cultivars of trees, shrubs and perennials sold by the major garden centers, are squelching the genetic variety nature needs to adapt to climate change. The resulting loss of native plants in our fragmented urban and suburban landscapes deprives both plants and wildlife of the contiguous habitats they need to breed and, over time, to migrate in response to climate change.

Many of these public lots languish in the middle of active blocks primarily in low-income neighborhoods of color, and they exist for years fenced off by the government but otherwise not maintained.

Urban sprawl is worsening both of the interrelated crises of climate change and habitat loss. Turf now covers some 50 million acres (the country’s largest and least useful irrigated crop), concentrated in suburban areas. These lawns suck up water and they don’t sequester as much carbon as forests and prairies.

Solutions

natives, adapted to our soil and conditions, don’t require fertilizer, soil amendments or, eventually, much watering. Over time, landowners and land managers save money on mulch and maintenance.
landscaping is adapted to the climate, geography and hydrology and should require no pesticides, fertilizers and watering to maintain, given that native plants have adapted and evolved to local conditions over thousands of years.

Case Studies

https://596acres.org/one-dollar-lots/

https://www.grownyc.org - over 1 million sqft of green space reclaimed into community gardens, urban farms, and school gardens since 2011