In a warming world, our home landscapes face significant new challenges. We’re asking more of them: we need them to shade and cool us, absorb extreme yet intermittent rain, and resist disruptive, invasive species. Nature has an answer for every one of these demands.
By drawing on science, traditional knowledge, and Indigenous knowledge, we can select the right species, create the right community constellations, and efficiently utilize water features to keep our landscapes cooler, more resilient to extremes, and more supportive of life. Doing so not only benefits our own households — it supports a community-wide ecosystem.
Safer for family, neighbors, and pollinators.
Using chemicals to control unwanted species puts your household and our larger community at risk. Taking a natural approach that reduces or eliminates chemicals creates a healthier, safer, and more biodiverse landscape.
The City of Boulder is a world leader in developing non-chemical weed and pest management strategies — and is one of the few municipalities in the country that does not use herbicides or pesticides in its parklands. The city also provides support, training, and guidance to help local community members find ways to reduce or replace chemicals in their own home landscapes.
Our city is an ecosystem.
The health, productivity, and resilience of our living world requires partnership with nature.
We’re living through one of the most accelerated periods of climatic change in history. We can support our local ecosystem through these changes—guiding our living world toward a healthy and manageable future—if we work closely with nature as an ally.
This moment asks us to see and care for the landscapes around us as connected, larger systems. Our home landscapes connect to our parks, which connect to our open spaces. Our urban forests shelter our biodiverse, pollinator-enhancing gardens. Our gardens are gatherers of rainwater that flows to our greenways and riparian zones.
By growing these connections from neighbor to neighbor, neighborhood to neighborhood, city government to local businesses to institutions and beyond, we can work with nature and with each other to steward living systems that will shelter, protect, and enrich our whole Boulder community.
