By: Leslie Gunnett, Advisory Board Member
One of the trendy slogans that gets tossed around this time of year is “Leave the Leaves”. The goal of this campaign is to support local rewilding and biodiversity by stalling or skipping yard clean-up in the fall and spring. This environmental campaign is meant to inspire direct action for the betterment of local ecology but it also represents the cultural and social constructs that we place around our relationship with nature- what is “acceptable” to us, how we value nature, and how we directly interact with it.
In NJ, trees drop their leaves and they spread all over our yards and into our garden beds. When these leaves drop, they provide a layer of protection for little critters like insects, salamanders, snakes, and even NJ’s endangered bog turtles. Many pollinating insects will hibernate underneath leaf layers, so when we rake and bag these up to be discarded, we are removing necessary life from our local ecosystems. In the Spring, waiting an extra week or two to clean fallen leaves out of garden beds can allow for these guys to wake up and leave before we inadvertently remove them. Just ask my neighbors- I was always the last house on the block to clean up my beds…partially because of laziness but you can’t argue with trying to support sleepy bees!
Leaving the leaves also helps enrich our soil. They will eventually break down; I left mine completely alone a few years in a row and over the winter they composted themselves into the soil on my property. This reintroduces nutrients back into the soil, and they can act as natural mulch as well.
Another benefit of leaving the leaves behind is a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Putting leaves in giant plastic bags and sending them to landfills means they will break down without oxygen, releasing methane, which is a greenhouse gas with about 10-12 times more warming than carbon dioxide.
Leaving the leaves to decompose naturally on our properties is a great way to support our local biodiversity, which is a great step towards rewilding our area. It helps support many of the ecosystem services we are granted by our environment like pollination, food security, and nutrient cycling.
It is also a lot less work- just let nature do its thing and do something fun instead of spending your day raking up leaves!
If we Rewild, we will never have to worry about the action of “Leaving the Leaves” again- it will just be born of honoring natural life ways.
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