I was a bit discouraged to hear that the CO2 the plants remove is ultimately rereleased into the atmosphere when the plant decomposes. So I’m wondering what positive impacts I’m making with my backyard garden, if any.
Also, with millions of gardens, would they really be totally useless for CO2 removal? Or is there some small amount that gets captured by the plant and then *not* rereleased into the atmosphere, in other words, permanently removed from the air?
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The environment is affected by many things. CO2 is a big issue, but it’s far from the only one. Of the top of my head I can think of two real tangible benefits:
**Temperature regulation:**
Plants make the area around cooler. They do that by shading, and by evaporating water. A garden can be several degrees cooler than the parking lot next to it. This reduces the need for air conditioning which uses up lots of energy and creates pollution.
**Biodiversity:**
A healthy environment has many different kinds of creatures living in it. The more different types of things live in an eco-system, the more stable and resilient the system will be. If a dieses kills one kind of pollinator, there are others. If weather destroys 90% of some plant, animals have other stuff to eat – so the whole thing can bounce back from incidents like that.Unfortunately, humans had a fashion of planting just grass on big areas, or make rows and rows of the same type of tree and so on. This weakens the local eco-system, making it more and more difficult for other thing to survive and creating a chain reaction – cause everything is holding everything up like those annoying trust exercises where everyone leans on each other in a circle and nobody falls.When you plant a garden in your back yard – and you do it right! with local plant species and a bug hotel and no poison pesticides – you help the whole system recover. You’ll get lizards, bees, grasshoppers, birds, beetles, possibly frogs and so on. Now those creatures have a place to start recovering their population and make the whole area thrive.
**Extra small benefits:**
– Any food you grow in your back yard wasn’t packed in plastic and shipped in a truck
– Some types of plants can be used to purify water and air from various pollutants
-People roll their eyes at “awareness” as not really doing anything, but it’s the first step. If it made you ask the question and think of real climate benefits, it made other people think about that too.
(edited for formatting)
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