All sustainable landscape management should be based upon goals and ideals, as this informs both decisions and outcomes. The structure and management of Rewilding is based upon the following four goals:
Carbon Avoidance and Sequestration
Middlebury’s Energy 2028 goal is to reduce energy consumption on our core campus by 25%. While landscape maintenance is a small fraction of total energy use, it is nonetheless still relevant, and speaks directly to our mission as an institution.
Using grasshoppermower.com’s fuel calculator , and using the national average for the cost of Diesel, (all of Middlebury’s lawn mowers are diesel, excpet one electric mower was purchased in 2022), the annual fuel expense of 1920 hours mowing a year is $10,696. It is also important to recognize that this cost will inevitably increase over time as diesel prices increase as fossil fuel availability decreases. Using the same calculator, the emissions of these diesel lawn mowers running for 1920 hours every year are nearly 20 tons of Carbon, 320 pounds of Hydrocarbons and Nitrous Oxides, and 114 pounds of Carbon Monoxide.
Turfgrass does sequester carbon, mainly in it’s root system. The maintenance of the lawn, however, consumes far more carbon than what is stored. To offset one year of carbon emissions and utilization by our lawnmowers would require planting 500 trees/year. By changing our maintenance and landscaper cover types we can align our landscape towards carbon sequestration, rather than consumption.
Diversity of Species: Creating habitats for pollinators and other species who share this land
A campus of lawn and mature canopy trees does support wildlife. However, the base layer of non-native grass species supports very, very few desirable native insects and other wildlife. In ecosystems, diversity breeds diversity. A strong and varied layer of plants supports and feeds various insects, amphibians, et. al, which in an ordinary complex food web will then support larger wildlife, particularly birds.
And in this diversity is resilience. Monocultures of anything is problematic, seen most often in our tree population: Dutch Elm Disease, Chestnut Blight, and Emerald Ash borer to name but a few. Global trade and climate change are bringing more and more challenges to our landscapes, and making modern maintained landscapes more diverse is key to keeping them, and us, healthy.
We are cultivating biodiversity-not happening as much in native fescue zones, but better than turfgrass, and overall greater plant fauna will increase fungi, bacteria, and insect/animal relations. By increasing our habitat, long term, we are also assisting with climate change, as it disrupts ecosystems and forces mammals, birds and amphibians to move and relocate to more hospitable climates. Our campus sits in the Champlain Valley in Vermont, and has been identified as a major route along the East Coast as populations move northward.
Building Community: Allowing the beauty of Vermont to show through our landscaping practices for all community members to share in, engage with, and learn from.
Landscape is more than space between buildings. Properly designed and maintained outdoor spaces give experience, a sense of transition between destinations. “…exposure to nature has been linked to a host of benefits, including improved attention, lower stress, better mood, reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and even upticks in empathy and cooperation.”
Arguably, our outdoor spaces on campus at present, featuring wide open lawns, do not speak to our student experience at Middlebury. The history of lawns explain this well-lawns were originally surrounding large country estates, and speak to wealth and power. This is not the welcoming, inclusive, and diverse community we are growing at Middlebury.
Canadian indigenous peoples are giving thought to this. -“Where the lawns come from is from the property ownership mentality, that we can own property,” says Jayce Chiblow, community engagement lead with Indigenous Climate Action and a member of the Garden River First Nation. Speaking of plants she adds, “Our teaching is that those are our relatives and that we belong to the land. It’s an entirely different concept.”
Sustainability: Creating an intentionally managed landscape that reflects college ideals in environmental stewardship
Our existing lawn spaces on campus (excluding athletic surfaces) are quite low input, not utilizing fertilizers or herbicides. This is a function of our clay soils-they are relatively fertile, and don’t need strong water inputs to stay green. Even in drought years our cool season grasses go dormant, but quickly green up again in fall weather. This is not the case further south and west, even in Vermont in non-clay soils, and turf has a well deserved reputation of requiring water and fertilizer, hard to do sustainably.
Our focus on sustainability for lawns, however, is in the maintenance. Not only do lawns require weekly mowing with petrochemicals, but it is a large amount of labor required to mow. This is not only the actual mowing time, but the maintenance of the machines, the capital required to purchase, and the string trimming. This string trimming in particular is tough on landscapers, not only for the noise, but the ergo dynamics of the operation. Lawn maintenance requires a lot of labor, and is financially unsustainable for areas that see little to no use.
Middlebury College prides itself on being a guiding force in higher education towards sustainability and accountability. To mow less and to be intentionally kinder to the landscape that the college resides within through more intentional management of beautiful and natural habitats would not only serve this campus and education within it, but would also create a regenerative ecological model for the greater Middlebury and Vermont communities, as well as higher education as a whole.