Dear Sundog,Ģż

Last September, in Californiaā€™s Malibu Creek State Park, a mountain lion pounced on a five-year-old child. The father managed to save his kid by fighting off the cat, and soon after, officials euthanized the cougar. Isnā€™t this immoral and outrageous? The lion was behaving just as nature intended.Ģżā€” People against he Unethical Murder of Animals

Dear PUMA,

This is not the only recent alarming attack on humans by a cougar. In 2023, an eight-year-old boy was while camping with his family in Olympic National Park; his mom chased off the cat, and he escaped with minor injuries. Last April, two brothers were out in looking for shed antlers when they encountered a cougar. It attacked both young men, killing one.

As a professional arbiter of ethics, my job is to see at least two sides of any given issue. However, as the father of a five-year-old who I regularly take to the woods and canyons, I am unable to access the other side here, to find what John Keats might have called the ā€œnegative capabilityā€ to tolerate the mystery that falls outside of reason. My take is strictly Old Testament: I say smite the beast. If an animal tried to drag off my child, my notions of animal rights and equality among the species would go straight out the window. I would try to kill it even if it escaped, assuming that, if left to live, it would try the same thing again.

I seem to be in line among people in positions of responsibilityā€”at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, as well as wildlife advocacy groups. ā€œWe donā€™t have a mountain lion jail,ā€ Beth Pratt, the California state director of the National Wildlife Federation, told the after the Malibu Creek incident. ā€œAs much as it pains me, I think the officials made the right decision here.ā€

The conundrum is not new. But we might say weā€™ve had a respite. After a cougar killed a human in California in 1909, the state went more than 80 years without another fatality. In 1990, fearing the lion was going extinct, voters passed a ballot initiative to protect the animal. The past four decades have seen mountain lions acting more aggressively. Even so, itā€™s still a small number. According to the , there have been 26 verified cougar attacks on humans since 1986, four of them fatal.

These ethical dilemmas about what an animal is ā€œallowedā€ to do pre-date the United States, of course. During the Middle Ages, animals were put on trial for crimes ranging from caterpillars stealing fruit to pigs who committed murder. ā€œHere were bears formally excommunicated from the Church,ā€ writes Mary Roach in her book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. ā€œSlugs given three warnings to stop nettling farmers, under penalty of smiting.ā€

And yet, buried in my psyche, was the belief that killing a cougar for being a cougar was just . . . wrong? I turned to an expert in the field to see what I was missing. Christopher Preston is a professor of environmental ethics at the University of Montana and author of the book . Because mountain lion attacks are still so rare, Preston thought there wasnā€™t much official protocol. Bears, however, attack more frequently. When a bear kills or eats a human, it will be euthanized. But if a bear attacks a person while demonstrating what authorities consider natural behavior, it will be spared. ā€œIf you surprise a bear with cubs or on a kill, and it attacks you, then the bear can be let off,ā€ Preston told me. ā€œItā€™s not a pattern of behavior that demonstrates unnatural instincts.ā€

Itā€™s unclear if the behavior of the Malibu Creek cougar was natural.Ģż The event that you refer to, PUMA, involved a young lion approaching a group of humans in a picnic area and dragging off a child, a particularly brazen act. Yes, itā€™s perfectly natural for a mountain lion to haul off a smaller creature in hopes of dining on it. But, said Preston, this cougar had left its natural environment and entered a human environment: a picnic area in a state park. ā€œWhere do you draw the line when natural behavior starts to impact us pretty severely?ā€ he asked. We have no problem cracking down, he adds, when forms of life like bacteria and viruses exhibit their natural behavior of infecting our bodies.

Preston made another point: humans are constantly expressing their dominance over the natural world, and if we just kill anything that makes a problem with us, then weā€™re not learning anything. But in his opinion, even this line of reasoning doesnā€™t merit a puma pardon. ā€œSomeone can feel sympathy for the lion for doing what lions do, but that probably wonā€™t get you a non-shoot order.ā€

ā€œWe need to dial back our dominance, but this case brings it into sharp contrast,ā€ said Preston. ā€œI donā€™t know how many environmental ethicists would say, ā€˜Yes, letā€™s just let lions keep dragging kids out of picnic areas.ā€™ā€

Preston and I decided to find out. He sent out a note to a handful of colleagues. The first to respond was Philip Cafaro, a professor of philosophy at Colorado State University:

The way I see it, mountain lions and people have a right to live in California (and elsewhere). But there are way too many people in CA (~ 40 million) and way too few mountain lions (probably less than 5,000). Itā€™s way out of balance, way unjustly tilted toward us hogging most of the habitat and resources. So, speaking strictly to the justice of the situation, mountain lions that attack and even kill people should be left alone. We can spare a few people from our teeming hordes, while there are precious few pumas left.

But even he shied away from cougar clemency:

Pragmatically speaking, people are too selfish and cowardly to act ethically in such cases. So, the next best thing is let them kill some mountain lions in the hope that they will leave the rest alone.

A second Colorado State professor of philosophy, Katie McShane, raised other important questions, which perhaps explain why we no longer drag beasts before a judge and jury:

Iā€™m not sure we blame animals very much at all; but in any case, killing the mountain lion isnā€™t conceived of as punishment, but rather, keeping people safe.

Maybe thereā€™s an animal ethics question about whether killing the lion is the best way to protect people? Given mountain lion behavior, I canā€™t imagine that confinement would go well. Are there sanctuaries? I donā€™t know; theyā€™d need to be huge. Anyway, my guess is that killing the mountain lion is the most humane option as well.

The short answer to that is, mountain lions require too much terrain to be placed in sanctuaries. And relocating an animal thatā€™s attacked a human doesnā€™t mean it wonā€™t attack again. I find myself agreeing that killing is the best option in this difficult situation.

Before Preston signed off, he also speculated that there might be something in the human psyche that calls for harsher punishments for pumas than for other predatorsā€”bears, for example. ā€œThere is something singular about the lion,ā€ he said. ā€œYou get stalked. You donā€™t know itā€™s coming. Bears kind of look like people when they stand up on two legs, so we know what they are about. The lion occupies a different place in our cultural imagination: the stealthy undesirable ghost in the forest that we donā€™t want to empathize with.ā€

Mark Sundeen lives in a canyon in Montana where cougar sightings are frequent, yet in his four decades of exploring and guiding in the West, heā€™s never seen one in the wild. Sundeen’s new book, Ģżcomes out February 18.

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Colorado elk are renowned for their deafening bugle and pointy antlersā€”but alas, not for their belaying skills.

On January 3, Ben Hake, the head of recreation in Lake City, Colorado received a call from two climbers atĢżthe . A bull elk, they said, had become ensnared in a climbing rope and was stuck on a steep hillside.

“I couldn’t believe what they were telling me,” Hake said. “We’ve never seen elk on that trail. It’s an old deer trail but we didn’t seen seeĢżtoo many animals use it once the ice climbers started using it.”

But sure enough, when Hake arrived at the scene a short time later, he saw the massive elk tangled in an orange rope on an access trail to a pair ofĢżice climbing walls called Beer Garden and Dynamite Shack. Climbers run a rope along the steep and slippery pathway and use the hand line when ascending or descending, Hake said.

A local official with the Colorado Department of Parks and Wildlife had called the regional office in Gunnison, which sent along wildlife biologists. Alyssa Meier, one of the biologists who arrived on the scene, said she was not surprised to receive a call about a stuck elk. But the details of the elk’s entanglement were strange.

“Hammocks, Christmas lights, patio furnitureā€”it’s pretty common for males to get stuck,” she toldĢżŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų.Ģż“A climbing rope was a new one.”

Meier drove to Lake City alongside another biologist, Anna Markey, and seasonal technician Paul Rivera. A crowd of climbers and town officials had congregated below the elk by the time they arrived an hour or so later.

Meier tranquilized the elk “so they could approach the stressed animal.” They placed a balaclava over the elk’s face to protect its eyes from the sun and to calm it, and then the three cut the rope to free the elk.

But that’s when a new challenge aroseā€”the crew had to stabilize the sedated elk, or else it would slip down the trail and tumble off of a 15-foot ledge.

“If he would have slid off the ledge, this wouldn’t be a happy story,” Markey toldĢżŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų.Ģż

Local climbers tied their own ropes to the elk, ran the rigging over a tree, and created a hauling system. Then Hake and six others pulled on the rope to raise the elk a few inches, so that they could then attach another rope to lower it down.

“It was so heavyā€”there were seven of us and we were giving it everything we could just to get tension onto the elk,” he said. “I don’t know what he weighed, but he was big.”

Meier estimated the elk weighed between 650 and 800 pounds, and it had scratches on its snout and face, likely from antler jabs during the rutting season. “He wasn’t the biggest elk I’ve seen, but he was doing well,” she said.

The haul system worked, and the crew was able to safely lower the sedated elk to flat ground. Meier said she administered an antidote for the tranquilizer, and after ten minutes or so, the elk stood up and ran away.

John Livingston, a spokesman for the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department, praised the two ice climbers who initially found the elk. Rather than try and free the animal themselves, he said, they phoned several agencies until they were put in contact with Parks and Wildlife. “You’re talking about a stressed animal with sharp hooves and antlersā€”I appreciate them calling the proper folks to handle this,” he said.

Meier has conducted multiple rescues of elk and deer this year. What stands out about the Lake City elk, she said, was how the community worked together to save the animal. Had it fallen off the ledge, or become too stressed, it could have died.

“The community rallied around this bull elk that they wanted to set free,” she said. “It was such a nice moment when he popped up and ran off.”

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In the summer of 1991, Mical Garcia was 19 years old, taking classes at a cosmetology school in the farm town of Manteca, California, when she got an alarming call from her stepdad in Las Vegas. Her mother had run off. He came home from work to find her possessions gone, and a note explaining that sheā€™d been leading a double life and did not want to be contacted.

Mical, who helps people pronounce her name by saying ā€œlike ā€˜me call you,ā€™ā€ was surprised but not overly concerned at the time. Her mother, Linda Sue Anderson, was carefree and a bit wild. ā€œWeā€™d play that song ā€˜Delta Dawnā€™ really loud, sing at the top of our lungs even though we didnā€™t have great voices, and dance,ā€ Mical told me recently. Her mom once took her to see the Vegas crooner Engelbert Humperdinck in concert. Linda was beautiful, always had her long blond hair done, her nails and makeup just so. ā€œShe was never a Betty Crocker stay-at-home mom.ā€

The flip side was mood swings, which Mical, who is now a nurse, thinks could have been diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Linda would lock herself in her room, leaving Mical to babysit her sister, Dulcenea, and her brother, Ethan, who everyone called Petey. ā€œI was in first or second grade, and I was cooking for them. My dad was traveling. She wouldnā€™t open the door.ā€ Other times Linda, who worked as a travel agent, would disappear for days.

The family moved around a lot. When their parents divorced, they were living near Lake Tahoe. Their father won full custody and took the family to Manteca. Linda remarried and settled in Nevada. Her new husband was a pit boss at Caesars Palace with a degree from Stanford University. ā€œHe worshipped the ground she walked on,ā€ Mical said. ā€œI never heard they were having problems.ā€

So when Linda ran off, the Garcia children figured sheā€™d come back eventuallyā€”just like she always had.

The post They Were Looking for Endangered Tortoises. They Found Human Bones Instead. appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

It was the trip of a lifetime. Several months paddling the Amazon, trying to eat without being eaten. It almost all went to plan.ĢżBut when Bruce Frey and Ed Welch found themselves being trailed through the jungle by a jaguar at sunset, their only choice was to take refuge in a tree and hope they could survive the night.

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JJ Harrison is the only person at a rodeo who is supposed to get hit by the bulls. As the clown, heā€™s responsible for everyoneā€™s safety. The crowd loves him. Itā€™s a good lifeā€”even if it hurts a little. Then over the summer, with JJ in the ring, a bull named Party Bus jumped the fence at the rodeo in Sisters, Oregon. Five people were injured, and it seemed like the kind of thing that might end the small-town event. Alex Ward reports on the ups and downs of the modern clown.

The post A Bull Named Party Bus and the Rodeo Clown Showdown appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

More than 40 years ago, the then park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey to Alaskaā€™s Noatak River. Captivated by the profusion of wildlife, the rich habitat, and the unfamiliar landscape, he spent years kayaking, packrafting, skiing, dogsledding, and backpacking in Arctic North Americaā€”often alone for weeks at a time. After three decades away from the Noatak, he returned with his 15-year-old son, Alistair, in 2021 to find a flooded river and a scarcity of the once abundant caribou. The Arctic had warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.

The next year, 2022, Waterman took a last journey to document the changes. The following is excerpted and adapted from his prologue in Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (Patagonia Books, November 12).

A former ranger in Rocky MountainĢżand Denali national parks, Waterman is the author of 17 books, including (National Geographic Books), In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, Running Dry, and Arctic Crossing. He has made five films about adventure and wild places.

If you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. This supports our mission to get more people active and outside. Learn more.

The below is adapted from Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis.

A Certain Type of Fun, July 10-12, 2022

My hands, thighs, and calves have repeatedly locked up in painful dehydration cramps, undoubtedly caused by our toil with leaden packs in eighty-degree heat up the steep streambed or its slippery, egg-shaped boulders. After my water bottle slid out of an outside pack pocket and disappeared amid one of several waist-deep stream fords or in thick alders yesterday, I carefully slide the bear spray can (looped in a sling around my shoulders) to the side so it doesnā€™t get knocked out of its pouch, an action I will come to regret. Now, to slake my thirst, I submerge my head in Kalulutok Creek like a water dog.

Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, itā€™s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that weā€™re bound for. But in my mindā€”after we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least 30 times yesterdayā€”Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river.

It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or ā€œfingers of the outstretched handā€ in IƱupiaq.

As the continentā€™s most northerly mountains, the sea-fossil-filled Brooks Rangeā€”with more than a half-dozen time-worn peaks over 8,000 feet highā€”is seen on a map as the last curl of the Rocky Mountains before they stairstep into foothills and coastal plains along the Arctic Ocean. The Brooks Range stretches 200 miles south to north and 700 miles to the east, where it jabs into Canada. Although there are more than 400 named peaks, since the Brooks Range is remote and relatively untraveled, itā€™s rare that anyone bothers to climb these mountains. My river-slogger companion, Chris, and I will be exceptions.

We carry a water filter, but it would be silly to use it. Weā€™re higher and farther north than giardiasis-infected beavers and there is no sign of caribou. The creek is fed from the pure ice of shrunken glaciers above and ancient permafrost in the ground below. In what seems like prodigious heat for the Arctic, the taps here are all wide-open.

Thirty-nine years ago, I decided to learn all I could about life above the Arctic Circle. As a climber, I traded my worship of high mountains for the High Arctic. I felt that unlike the study of crevasse extrication and avalanche avoidanceā€”you couldnā€™t just read about the Arctic or sign up for courses. You have to go on immersive journeys and figure out how the interlocked parts of the natural world fit together. Along this path, acts of curiosity out on the land and the water can open an earned universe of wonders. But you must spend time in the villages, too, with the kindhearted people of the North to make sure you get it right. And you canā€™t call the Arctic ā€œthe Far Northā€ā€”it is ā€œhomeā€ rather than ā€œfarā€ to the many people who live there.

So, after twoscore of Arctic journeys, in the summer of 2022, Iā€™m on one more trip. I could not be on such an ambitious trip without all the previous experiences. (The more I learn, it sometimes feels like the less I know about the Arctic.)

But this time the agenda is different. I hope to understand the climate crisis better.

Chris Korbulic and I are here to document it however we can. Since my first trip above the Arctic Circle in 1983, I have seen extraordinary changes in the landscape. Only three days underway and weā€™ve already flown over a wildfire to access our Walker Lake drop-off point. And yesterday we trudged underneath several bizarre, tear-drop-shaped landslide thaw slumpsā€”a.k.a. thermokarstsā€”caused by the permafrost thaw.

In much of Alaska, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) says that permafrost thaw from 2005 to 2010 has caused the ground to sink more than four inches, and in places to the north of us, twice that. The land collapses as the permafrost below it thaws, like logs pulled out from beneath a woodpile. AMAP believes this will amount to a ā€œlarge-scale degradation of near-surface permafrost by the end of the twenty-first century.ā€ Roads and buildings and pipelinesā€”along with hillsides, IƱupiat homes, forests, and even lakesā€”will fall crazily aslant, or get sucked into the ground as if taken by an earthquake.

On this remote wilderness trip, we donā€™t expect a picnicā€”known as Type 1 Fun to modern-day adventurers. A journey across the thaw on foot and by packraft for 500-plus miles wonā€™t resemble a backcountry ski trip or a long weekend backpack on Lower 48 trails. We have planned for Type 2 Fun: an ambitious expedition that will make us suffer and give us the potential to extend ourselves just enough that there will be hours, or even days, that wonā€™t seem like fun until much later when weā€™re back home. Then our short-circuited memories will allow us to plan the next trip as if nothing went wrong on this one. An important part of wilderness mastery is to avoid Type 3 Fun: a wreckage of accidents, injuries, near-starvation, or rescue. Weā€™ve both been on Type 3 Fun trips that weā€™d rather forget.

Today, to get Chris, a caffeine connoisseur, to stop, I simply utter, ā€œCoffee?ā€ His face lights up as he throws off his pack and pulls out the stove. I pull out the fuel bottle. Since Chris isnā€™t a conversational bon vivant, Iā€™ve learned not to ask too many questions, but a cup of coffee might stimulate a considerate comment or two about the weather. As I fire up the trusty MSR stove with a lighter, we crowd around and toast our hands over the hot windscreen as if itā€™s our humble campfire. Weā€™re cold and wet with sweat and we shiver in the wind. But at least weā€™re out of the forest-fire smokeā€”this summer more than two million acres have burned in dried-out Alaska.

Today, with the all-day uphill climb and inevitable back-and-forth route decisions through the gorge ahead, weā€™ll be lucky to trudge even five miles to the lake below the pass. Why, I ask myself, as Chris puts on his pack and shifts into high gear, could we not have simply flown into the headwaters of the Noatak River instead of crossing the Brooks Range to get here? I heave on my pack and wonder how Iā€™ll catch Chris, already far ahead.

Shards of caribou bones and antlers lie on the tundra as ghostly business cards of a bygone migration, greened with mold, and minutely chiseled and mined for calcium by tiny vole teeth. We kick steps across a snowfield, then work our way down a steep, multicolored boulderfield, whorled red and peppered with white quartz unlike any rocks Iā€™ve seen before. As rain shakes out of the sky like Parmesan cheese from a can, we weave in and out of leafy alder thickets while I examine yet another fresh pile of grizzly feces. I stop to pick apart the scat and thumb through stems and leaves and root pieces. This griz appears to be on a vegetarian diet.

ā€œHey, bear!ā€ We yell the old cautionary refrain again and again until weā€™re hoarse. I hold tight to the pepper spray looped over my shoulder to keep it from grabby alder branches.

A half mile farther the route dead-ends so weā€™re forced to descend into the gorge again. With Chris 20 yards behind, I plunge step down through a near-vertical slope of alders and play Tarzan for my descent as I hang onto a flexible yet stout branch, and swing down a short cliff into another alder thicket. A branch whacks me in the chest and knocks off the pepper-spray safety plug. When I swing onto the ground, I get caught on another branch that depresses the trigger in an abrupt explosion that shoots straight out from my chest in a surreal orange cloud. Instinctively I hold my breath and close my eyes and continue to shimmy downward, but I know Iā€™m covered in red-hot pepper spray.

When I run out of breath, I squint, keep my mouth closed, breathe carefully through my nose, and scurry out of the orange capsaicin cloud. Down in a boulderfield that pulses with a stream, I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and yell to Chris that Iā€™m O.K. as I strip off my shirt and try to wring it out in the stream. I tie the contaminated shirt on the outside of my pack and put on a sweater. My hands prickle with pepper.

Then weā€™re off again. As we clamber up steep scree to exit the gorge, my lips, nasal passages, forehead, and thighs burn from the pepper. The pepper spray spreads from my thighs to my crotch like a troop of red ants, but I can hardly remove my pants amid the incoming storm clouds and wind. With the last of the alders below us, we enter the alpine world above the tree line. By the time we reach the lake, the drizzle has become a steady rain. Iā€™m nauseous and overheated underneath my rain jacket with the red pepper spray that I wish I had saved for an aggressive bear instead of a self-douche. Atop wet tundra that feels like a sponge underfoot, we pitch the Megamid tent with a paddle lashed to a ski pole and guy out the corners with four of the several million surrounding boulders left by the reduction of tectonic litter.

I fire up the stove and boil the water, and we inhale four portions of freeze-dried pasta inside the tent. We depart from wilderness bear decorum to cook outside and away from the tent because itā€™s cold and weā€™re tired. Chris immediately heads out with his camera. His eyes are watery from just being within several feet of me.

Iā€™ve been reduced like this beforeā€”wounded and exhausted and temporarily knocked off my game. So, I tell myself that this too will pass, that Iā€™ll get in gear and regain my mojo. That maybe, I can eventually get my shy partner to loosen up and talk. That we will discover an extraordinary new worldā€”the headwaters of the Noatak Riverā€”from up on the pass in the morning. And that I will find a way to withstand my transformation into a spicy human burrito.

Snow feels likely tonight. It’s mid-July, yet winter has slid in like a glacier over the Kalulutok Valley.

I am too brain-dead to write in my journal, too physically wiped out and overheated in the wrong places to even think of a simple jaunt through the flowers to see the view that awaits us. I pull down my orange-stained pants and red underwear, grab a cup filled with ice water. I try not to moan as I put in my extra-hot penis and let it go numb.

Type 2 Fun for sure.

Jon Waterman lives in Carbondale, Colorado. An all-round adventurer, he has climbed the famous Cassin Ridge on Denali in winter; soloed the Northwest Passage; sailed to Hawaii picking up microplastics; dogsledded into and up Canadaā€™s Mount Logan; and run the Colorado River 1,450 miles from source to sea. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and three grants from the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council. Into the Thaw is available to purchase from Patagonia Books and for pre-order on Amazon for November 19.

For more by this author:

A Former National Park Ranger Reveals His Favorite Wild Places in the U.S.

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The border wall had an all star cast of political operatives trying to get it built. The butterflies had Marianna Trevino Wright. With the spotlight on The National Butterfly Center, Marianna finds herself absorbing the full weight of an online campaign to discredit her. Then people start showing up in person.

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How did a US congressional candidate and the director of the National Butterfly Center end up in a physical altercation on the US border with Mexico? When contractors showed up in Mission, Texas to break ground on President Trumpā€™s border wall, they didnā€™t think there would be much resistance. But when people found out the wall would go straight through critical butterfly habitat, everything changed.

The post Butterflies on the Wallā€”Part 1 appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

The leaves are starting to fall here in New England and that perennial urge to bust out the rake and leaf blower is nagging at me. But for the first time in, well, forever, I will resist that urge. Because it turns out, raking up and bagging or burning those leaves is not only bad for soil health. It also takes away habitat for important wildlife like bugs and birds, who are critical pollinators.

I know what youā€™re thinking. What will my neighbors think if I ignore my yard work? Weā€™ve been taughtā€”by society, by our homeownerā€™s associations, by our parents, and by our landscapersā€”to keep our yards clean and tidy. To remove leaves and branches as they fall. To whack back our shrubs and perennials after they bloom. And to invest in big fall and spring clean-ups that scour our flower beds free of debris. Your neighbors might think the alternativeā€”a yard with fallen leaves, long grass, and flowers gone to seedā€”is untidy, or even a threat to property values and health (by attracting bugs and animals).

But ecologists say we need to rethink our preconceived notions of beautiful, well-maintained yards. Lawns comprise 44 million acres in the U.S. alone, more than double the acreage of all our national parks combined. And as satisfying as a perfect green lawn may be, itā€™s an ecological dead zone that doesn’t support any of the essentialĢżfunctionsā€”like pollination, carbon sequestration, and nutrient recyclingā€”that sustain our ability to live on this planet.

According to a by NatureServe, a nonprofit specializing in biodiversity data, more than one third of species and ecosystems in the U.S. are at risk of disappearing. This kind of biodiversity loss would be catastrophic for humans, ecologist and entomologist Doug Tallamy told me in an interview for a story I wrote about rewilding.

Thankfully, natural landscaping is trending. According to House Beautiful, the practiceā€”which includes native perennials, wildflower and pollinator gardens, xeriscaping, and lawn reductionā€”is one of . Thatā€™s good news for folks on a budget (and those who want to reclaim their fall weekends) because natural landscapes are way less cost- and time-intensive toĢżmaintain. Itā€™s also good news for all the bugs, birds, and bees, which are so critical for biodiversity.

But back to raking. As I write these words, I can hear the buzz of leaf blowers in my neighborhood. I can see a big truck piled high with collected leaves, about to be carted off to who knows where. Meanwhile, in my yard, Iā€™m watching them fall and wondering how to harness their glory.

Why Experts Say Donā€™t Rake

ā€œLeaves are not litter,ā€ says Matthew Shepherd, the director of outreach and education at Xerces is a nonprofit focused on protecting and conserving insects and other invertebrates. ā€œThey provide critical food and shelter for butterflies, beetles, bees, moths, and other invertebrates. And we need to stop thinking of these tiny creatures as pests, but rather as heroes. Instead of banishing them from our spaces, we need to roll out the welcome mat.ā€

Insects are critical to humans because they transfer pollen from plant to plant, which helps plants and crops reproduce. ā€œWithout these pollinators, and ample habitat for them, our global food supply would be drastically diminished,ā€ says Shepherd. Insects are also a valuable food source for birds, reptiles, and other insects, and they help aerate soil and decompose organic matter.

Additionally, leaf debris helps build healthy soil that holds moisture. Leaves are nature’s fertilizer: free, nutrient-dense organic matter that breaks down and feeds the soil. It’s pretty ironic that we sweep our yards clear of them and then run to the garden center to buy chemical fertilizers (which, according to The Freedonia Group, a market research firm, is a $4 billion market).

Hereā€™s How to Get the Most Out of Your Leaves

As I watched the leaves pile up on my lawn, I started to wonder whether there were any downsides to letting them be. Is there such a thing as too much leaf litter? What if they dried outā€”could they be a fire hazard? I reached out to Jamie ā€œDekesā€ Dedekian, an organic lawn expert I’ve come to trust at my local garden center, Country Garden, in Hyannis, Massachusetts, to get some basic best practices.

ā€œIf you let leaves build up on your lawn over time, and just let them sit, the answer is yes, they will smother and could kill it,ā€ Dedekian told me. But the answer is not to do a big fall clean up. Instead, he recommended a few easy “clean-in” techniques that will harness all the goodness in those leaves and distribute them in a beneficial way across your yard.

As they start to fall, blow whole leaves into your flower beds, where theyā€™ll create wildlife habitat and eventually decompose and feed the soil and plants. Once you’ve created a blanket in the beds thatā€™s a few inches thick, then it’s time to feed the lawn some leaves. ā€œRemove the bag on your mower and mulch them up into small pieces,ā€ he says. ā€œItā€™s essentially a free compost application. As those small bits of leaves decompose they will actually help your lawn, not hurt it.ā€

If you live in a wildfire-prone area, you will also benefit from some leaf redistribution, because dry leaf litterĢżcan pose a fire hazard in hot, dry, windy conditions. Shepherd suggests raking them into a pile a safe distance away from structuresā€”the U.S. Department of Agriculture at least 30 feet from the homeā€”and letting them decompose naturally there.

ā€œEven a small pile of leaves can make a positive impact,ā€ Shepherd says. ā€œJust find a corner of your yard, make a pile, and let it be. The animals will find it, and theyā€™ll appreciate it.ā€

5 Pro Fall Tips for the Eco-Conscious Gardener

As I wrapped up my conversation with Shepherd, I asked him what yard tasks I can be doing to improve the health and beauty of my space this fall. After all, I love gardening and yard work, and with less raking to do, Iā€™d have lots of time on my hands. Here are his ideas.

1. Relax and watch. ā€œJust sit and enjoy your morning coffee while watching the finches feed on your seed heads and the bees buzz around the last of your lavender,ā€ says Shepherd. ā€œSometimes protecting and promoting habitat means doing less. Part of gardening should be just sitting back and enjoying it. Actually taking time to notice and watch and appreciate the wildlife that you’re bringing in.ā€ Itā€™s also a good time to make notes about plants that thrived and those that didnā€™t, and make a list of new plants you want to try next year. Think about your bloom period through the year. ā€œDid you have periods when you didn’t have a lot of bloom? Are there native plants you could introduce to fill those gaps?ā€ he says.

2. Collect seeds. Are there plants you love and want more of? For me this year it was cardinal flowers, which drew hummingbirds into my yard every day. Iā€™m leaving many of the seed heads intact for the birds to feed on, but Iā€™m collecting some to plant.

3. Make a brush pile, also known as habitat pile. Find a lonely corner of your yard and start building a pile of sticks and branches for animals to. Start with the largest logs and branches on the bottom, and keep adding as time goes on. Be sure to leave gaps for airflow and wildlife access.

4. Save the stems. Some bees nest in the stems of shrubs and perennials, so resist the urge to chop them down to nubs.

5. Split native perennials. Fall is a great time to divide many plants. Dividing entails digging plants up and splitting the root ball into smaller sections to replant in different spaces. This practice promotes growth and is a great way to fill in gaps in your garden. Iā€™ve got tons of splitting to do this fall: black-eyed Susans, daisies, catmint, sedum, and lavender to name a few.

Kristin Hostetter is ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶųā€™s sustainability columnist. On most weekends when sheā€™s not out hiking, you can find her puttering in her garden or in the kitchen cooking up the fruits of her labor. Follow her journey to live more sustainably by for her twice-monthly newsletter.

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