I have climate anxiety.
I think many folks in my generation – what I call the ‘Captain Planet Generation’ – do. I spent all of my school years being told to save the rainforest, save the everglades, save the oceans by recycling and cutting up the plastic rings from pop cans so they don’t strangle sea turtles.
Back then, we still had a chance to save those places by doing those things. But thirty years later, we’re in a worse predicament. Even Dr. Jane Goodall, my childhood idol who left her field work with chimpanzees 37 years ago to try to help the cause, can’t inspire much hope for me. It’s incredibly overwhelming. I still want to help the environment, but if my efforts are at the front of my mind every single day, I risk drowning in a sea of climate grief.
My solution? Make a positive difference by doing high-impact, low-mental-energy things. I call it ‘lazy environmentalism.’
Though the word ‘lazy’ typically has a pejorative meaning, I am reclaiming it in this context. Lazy environmentalism doesn’t mean I don’t care enough to do anything. Rather, it means that I care a great deal, but don’t have the mental bandwidth to make the kind of changes that require a lot of time and energy, such as going vegan or riding a bicycle for daily transportation.
For me, lazy environmentalism means I only have to think about a given effort once or twice a year.
Don’t blow, barely rake
The ultimate lazy environmentalist move? You’ve probably heard of it: ‘Leaving the leaves.’ It turns out that not doing yard chores is a great way to help the environment.
This is the time of year when I’m driven crazy by leaf blowers running at all times of the day. I embrace the silence and simplicity of not raking my leaves at all, except for maybe along walking pathways.
Perhaps, like me, you’d never given much thought to what happens to bugs in the winter. They just seem to suddenly disappear in the fall and magically reappear in the spring. Well, what really happens is they burrow under those fallen leaves where it’s nice and warm from the slow decomposition process that occurs between winter and spring.
Maeve Rafferty, Tree Pittsburgh’s education coordinator, says, “I love to watch robins come to my yard in the spring and flip over the leaves with their beaks to find insects. So you’re really providing benefits to all sorts of species by leaving the leaves.”
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Housing for bugs
Another thing I don’t do is clean up my garden beds until early spring. I leave all the hollow stems up, again to provide shelter for overwintering insects, which are facing population collapse that could endanger the entire food chain. Rafferty says I could also cut the stems back to about six inches, since in the wild said stems would be naturally broken by animals wandering through the landscape, and the hollows are what the insects need more than the intact stems. “It’s just giving them a bit of help in a more managed landscape situation,” she says.
To supplement my stems, I also keep a small insect house on my front porch. I bought mine at a local dollar store, and it looks like an open birdhouse with straws inside. This mimics those natural hollow stems and offers a place for insects to burrow, lay eggs or hibernate.
“I love them,” Rachel Handel, communications director for Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania, says of insect houses. “Though they actually require maintenance that a lot of people don’t do on them. If you don’t maintain them, it’s not doing all the good it could do.”
To maintain your insect house, check it at the end of summer and clean out unoccupied cells. You may want to move an occupied insect house into a garden shed or unheated garage for the winter to protect it from wind and snow. You’ll also want to replace the parts every few years to avoid attracting mold or parasites.
If the idea of cleaning an insect house doesn’t appeal, then you can still provide shelter for native insects by – yet again – not doing a yard chore, this time mulching. “You can leave bare patches of soil that aren’t covered in mulch, especially in the sunlight, as a place for bees to nest in the ground,” Rafferty says. “These are native bees that don’t sting or make hives. They make individual nests in the ground.”
Let it grow before you mow
Once spring arrives, there’s more good news on the yard chore front: Delay that first mowing as long as you can.
“There’s a new movement called No-Mow May,” Handel says. “People wait as long as they can to mow their lawn for the first time each spring.”
Delaying that mow, or simply mowing less often (“Low-Mow Spring”) allows dandelions and clover to bloom in your yard. “It gives you an opportunity to support wildlife while the rest of the world is catching up,” Handel says. “The trees aren’t in bloom in early spring; there aren’t a lot of flowers yet. You’re creating a little environment right within your lawn so that if you don’t cut it, you’re providing food for pollinators ahead of other plants.”
Of course, your neighbors or local code enforcement officials might not be as enthused about No-Mow May. To help with that, the Audubon Society sells signs in its gift shops that say, “My yard isn’t mowed on purpose: I’m helping pollinators!”
To avoid the need for mowing outright, Phoebe Shackeroff, a leader of Climate Reality Pittsburgh and Southwest Pennsylvania, suggests planting more densely. “Some people call it meadowscaping,” she says. “Groundcover-style plants can fill in the spaces between larger plants and shrubs, keeping grass from growing.”
Plant local
Once the warmer weather starts and you begin thinking about plants for your garden, all of the folks I spoke to for this article said the same thing: Go native. “It doesn’t get a lot easier than native plants,” Handel says. “They’re uniquely designed to thrive here, and they’re perennials.”
I planted native common milkweed in my yard years ago, and have had the pleasure of hosting many monarch butterflies and other pollinators within it. It’s one of the few plants that doesn’t get zapped by the full afternoon sun in front of my house, so I’m even happier to have it.
Helpfully, the Audubon Society holds a native plant sale at Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve starting in May each year featuring flowers, shrubs and trees for a variety of environments. Whether your yard is sunny or shady, wet or dry, you can find low-maintenance plants there that will help create an oasis for native wildlife.
You can even get native trees for free. “If you don’t have trees but you’d like one, Tree Pittsburgh has a tree adoption event every spring and fall and people can register for up to three trees,” Rafferty says.
Both Rafferty and Shackeroff pointed out that native plants absorb far more stormwater than grass does, keeping it out of your basement. Even planting native plants in pots along a patio can help with this, Shackeroff says.
Constrain the cat
This one might not even sound like environmentalism: I keep my cats indoors.
Outdoor cats can be incredibly destructive to native wildlife. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes domestic cats on its World’s Worst Invasive Species list, and a 2016 study by Australian researchers cited cats as having contributed to the extinction of 63 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, and placing further species at significant risk.
Seeing as bird populations have plummeted by 29% since 1970, according to a 2019 study led by Cornell University – that’s nearly 3 billion missing birds – they need all the help they can get. Your cat will thank you, too: even well-cared-for cats face significant health risks by going outside, from parasites and disease to physical dangers.
Buy thoughtfully
At the consumer level, Shackeroff suggests buying more products packaged in cardboard than in plastic, such as powdered laundry detergent, deodorant and lip balm. Bar soap can also cut down on single-use plastics, though you’ll want to find a variety that uses sustainable palm oil.
Another of my tricks is to bulk-buy coffee from Grounds for Change, a family-owned, certified organic processing company that is also carbon-free certified. I buy their Rainforest Trust blend, through which they make a donation to that organization. We also prepare it using an electric percolator, which is far more energy-efficient than the gas stove for heating water.
Low-effort energy changes
The best lazy environmentalism is the kind that is completely out of sight, out of mind. Several years ago, my family took advantage of Phipps Conservatory’s ongoing Green Power Drive to switch to a green energy provider. You can visit daily from noon to 5 p.m. and find representatives – typically in the Tropical Forest Room – to help you make the switch. The best part is that if you change providers on the spot, you get a free 12-month Phipps membership, or a free 6-month renewal if you’re already a member.
Since I set up the new plan, I simply call once per year to lock in a steady rate, though if you don’t mind a variable rate, you can be even lazier and forgo the call altogether.
Because you’re still drawing power from the local grid, you may not be using the actual green energy generated by the company you’ve chosen. But Dr. Joseph Conklin, senior extension educator for the Penn State Cooperative Extension, explains that “when you switch to a green energy provider, you’re essentially offsetting the impact of your energy use.”
How you can get involved in science from your own Pennsylvania backyard
The biggest thing you can do to help the environment around your house?
“Awareness,” Conklin says. “Look at your electric bill. It should give you a number there to compare your energy use to your neighbors’. It’ll tell you if you’re energy efficient or not.”
Conklin recommends checking with your energy company to see if you can get a free energy audit of your home. If you can’t get a free audit, you can get a reduced price – 30% of the normal cost – through the Inflation Reduction Act.
Turn down the heat bill
One easy thing to do is to use an attic bag. “This is an insulated bag that costs about $35 on Amazon that you put around the attic hole to your crawlspace,” Conklin says. It can reduce a major source of energy leaks in your home and cut down on heating costs.
Conklin also recommends installing a smart thermostat. “That’s huge,” he says. “The average homeowner, with the help of a YouTube video, can install one in an hour or two.” Once installed and programmed correctly, you can see how environmentally friendly your heating and cooling habits are. “If you like your house to be 72 degrees, how about trying 71?” Making this small change can have big environmental benefits.
Appliance science
In terms of household appliances, Shackeroff recommends replacing gas appliances with electric ones as they reach the end of their usefulness. Both she and Conklin recommend installing a heat pump in place of a HVAC unit. “A heat pump is three times more efficient than an air conditioner,” Conklin says. He also suggests heat pump dryers and water heaters.
There’s a lot of government funding available for homeowners to make energy-efficient improvements to their homes. The Penn State Cooperative Extension is keeping up with all the latest information for these programs and hosts regular webinars to educate homeowners.
I was happy to pick up some new tips from the professionals I interviewed for this article; I’m hoping to add some of them to my ‘lazy’ repertoire. If this list seems like too much for you, start small and add in steps as you can. It’s better to do one small thing than to do nothing.
Your climate anxiety will thank me.
Melanie Linn Gutowski is a freelance writer and museum educator and can be reached at melanielinngutowski@gmail.com.
