2024 Challenge Complete!
Watch our 2024 Campaign Highlights Video
The Free Challenge ran August through September 2024
An 8 Week Guided Challenge to Unleash the Potential of your Lawn.
Neighbors and community members joined in an engaging eight week challenge to bring back habitat and improve our ecological practices one yard at a time, one community at a time.
Leading ecological experts and pioneers in the rewilding movement led a series of free webinars and weekly micro-challenges to guide participants on how to unleash the potential of your piece of earth.
So many benefits for people and planet:
Let’s bring back nature, one yard at a time.
Meet our Speakers!
Leading ecological experts and pioneers in the rewilding movement are supporting the challenge and will be leading a series of webinars to guide you on how to participate in this fun and high impact challenge!
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Edwina von Gal
Landscape Designer
Founder of the Perfect Earth Project
Edwina is a visionary in sustainable gardening and landscape design. In addition to founding the Perfect Earth Project, she has received numerous accolades, including the LongHouse Visionary Award, for her influential work in creating nature-based, toxic-free landscapes globally.
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Rebecca McMackin
Ecological Horticulturalist
From the TED Talk "Let your Garden Grow Wild"
Rebecca McMackin is a trailblazer in ecological horticulture, known for her innovative approaches to sustainable urban gardening. As the Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, she transformed this post industrial space into thriving ecosystems. Rebecca's work has garnered widespread recognition, including the prestigious National Garden Club Award, for her commitment to biodiversity and urban habitat restoration.
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Becca Rodomsky-Bish
Project Lead
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Becca is a prominent figure in bird conservation. Through innovative research and community science initiatives, she has advanced the bird conservation movement. She has been involved in several projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in an effort to inspire more people to protect bird populations by adding native habitat to their landscapes.
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Dina Brewster
Founder of the Ecotype Project
Founder of The Hickories Farm
Dina is a leader in the regional native plant supply chain, pioneering efforts to involve local farmers in ecological restoration. She also serves on the steering committee of Local 59, a network of organizations that is focused on increasing the supply chain of native plants.
Why does it matter?
We are participating in the first man-made warming of the climate and extinction crisis. Between 200 and 2,000 species go extinct each year. But we can address this global ecological crisis by converting some portion of our yards from an environmental liability (with chemicals, mowing, blowing and very limited number of species), to an environmental asset that sequesters carbon, retains water and provides habitat for literally thousands of species.
The variety of life on the planet is called biodiversity – there are millions of species of animals, plants, fungi, and other types of living organisms. Without variety, nature is less stable and less functional in supporting the processes that support life on earth, including us humans. It’s time we use our piece of earth - our yards - to restore the planet.
Organizers
This challenge is a collaboration across multiple organizations with a shared mission, to help unleash the power of the American lawn in combatting our climate and biodiversity crisis. Plan it Wild and Bedford 2030 are co-hosting, organizing and leading the challenge with support and amplification from so many wonderful partners.
Partners
Thank you to all our wonderful partners! Interested in learning more or becoming a partner? Contact us at info@planitwild.com
Rewilding Testimonial
Four years ago, after reading Douglas Tallamy’s “Bringing Nature Home” and E.O. Wilson’s “Half Earth”, I decided to turn 50% of our yard in Bedford into habitat for wildlife. We put in a wildflower meadow and planted hundreds of small native trees, and shrubs. But mostly what we have done is stopped mowing half our yard.
To measure what improvements we would find over time, I spent 30 minutes a day documenting the new species I would find in our yard on iNaturalist.
The result? A catalog of a backyard haven of an estimated 2,000 species (1,200 confirmed). The Less Lawn: More Life Campaign is our attempt to help others find the same joy in discovering nature in their backyards, and to offer help for those who need it.”
- Murray Fisher, Plan it Wild
