Your lawn can ght climate change

In Climate Ready Oak Park, the village’s community climate action plan approved by the village board last year, we committed to a 60% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030. To reach this critically important goal; we must not only reduce our emissions through more stringent building codes; electrifying transportation; expanding composting; retrofitting our homes with electric heating, cooling and cooking; and switching to rooftop or community solar; but also sequester or otherwise reduce carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere.

In other words, we need to reduce emissions going up into the atmosphere while at the same time increasing the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere. We cannot reach our goal without doing both. Trees, grasses, and other plants in gardens, farms, and wetlands are essential to fighting climate change because they absorb atmospheric CO2.

In Oak Park, we can expand our green spaces; plant and nur ture more trees, native grasses and flowers; and improve the quality of our soil by not tilling our gardens. Our lawns can help, too: they’ll sequester more carbon dioxide and reduce flooding if we let them grow higher. This allows more CO2 to be ke pt in the soil and more insects and birds to find the food they need in longer grasses and native plants. Nectarproducing wildflowers, such as violets and white clover, are important for pollinators.

So set your mower high to spare the flowers when you mow, and have a “slow-mow summer” rather than a “no-mow May,” which stresses grass when it gets cut short after growing unimpeded for a full month.

Currently, Oak Park requires that the grass in our lawns be ke pt no more than 8 inches high, but we need to change that rule before next spring. Our lawns don’t need to look like manicured golf courses!

We also need to “leave the leaves” in the fall. Covered soil retains more CO2, plus leaves provide essential food and shelter for those insects and birds over the winter. Far mers do the same thing when they plant cover crops to protect soil in the of f season, part of the practice of what’s known as re generative ag riculture.

Let’s help to re generate and re-g reen Oak Park this summer and in years to come.

Pamela Tate Oak Park Climate Action Network

strongly enough that they stop.

Voter approval of Project 2 or Project 2 plus, a package accelerating other building improvements, would have gone a long way to remedying these sins of the past and simplified its financial structure. Instead, OPRF and the board committed more sins

I don’t think anyone — even the most ardent pool supporters — would disag ree that debt certificates were never about reserves or future fiscal discipline or urgency. OPRF was not confident it could convince 50% + 1 voters to approve Project 2, so it used every legal means necessary to move forward. Were the tax sur pluses over the past decade another facility funding scheme to bypass voters?

OPRF has three new board members, and from our campaign interactions, I’m confident all three are good people. I hope they will be strong advocates for greater transparency, honesty, keeping promises, actual fiscal responsibility and a greater respect for the community Good luck to them.

Brian Souders is an Oak Park resident reading the needle on restaurant row

VENITA

Eating or walking, what are sidewalks for?

I enjoy and appreciate outdoor dining. Howeve r the village has forgotten what sidewalks are for — pedestrians.

Venita Philbrick Oak Park