Bringing Wild Alberta Back Home: How Small-Scale Restoration Is Both A Protest And A Revolution, And Why Preservation Must Ultimately Take Precedence Over Restoration

June 29, 2026

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Wildlands Advocate article by Sara Heerema, AWA Conservation Outreach Specialist

Read the PDF version here.

 

The year 2020 was a unique time for the world, with people searching for new ways to live despite the shutdowns and fear permeating the social landscape. For many of us, that meant taking up a new hobby like juggling or baking sourdough bread. It also meant getting more connected to the outdoors, a safe haven within a rapidly changing world. At the same time, justice movements were becoming more prominent on the international stage, with people’s attention gravitating towards broad-scale issues now that we had more time and energy to confront them. Movements like Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd, climate-focused Fridays for Future, and Wetʼsuwetʼen blockades of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline, experienced dramatic restructuring and creative forms of engagement, even as restrictions on in-person gatherings remained in place. Some scholars have argued that the pandemic created a space where the dominant ideologies of settler colonialism were challenged, and where new incorporations of mutual aid and solidarity informed both existing and newly developed movements.

Like many others during this time, my family and I tried to put our energy into something we were already working towards: environmental and social justice, locally-based economies, and safety and resilience for those living in our world, human or otherwise. With this goal in mind, we set ourselves what would become a daunting task: digging up grass and re-wilding our lawn. Although it may seem like this has little to do with social movements and the art of protest, these ideas are intrinsically tied together.

People across our world have been tirelessly fighting to make issues of injustice more visible and to develop strategies for dismantling systems of oppression. One way to do this, although it may seem small in the grand scheme of things, is to replace your lawn. Lawns have a long history embedded within the dominant structures of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism that have led to the marginalization and injustices we see today.

The history of lawns as biodiversity deserts

In the 16^th century, the wealthy kept lawns in England and France, although they were often planted with groundcovers such as chamomile rather than the grass mix we recognize today. Continuing into the 17^th and 18^th centuries, manicured lawns were features on the properties of the elite, showcasing their capacity to swallow labour costs for maintenance and hold land that did not need to be used for crops or livestock. The American elite eventually adopted this tradition as well, with Thomas Jefferson transforming the open meadow behind the White House into an expansive green lawn. Following World War II, the rise of suburban lifestyles quietly pushed the trend further.

Lawns quickly became symbols of the “American dream,” boasting a wealthy, colonial, and predominantly white narrative. Today, around 80 percent of American homes have a lawn. Canada has followed a similar trend, with over two-thirds of Canadian homeowners reporting that they had a lawn in 2021.

There is an inherent social stigma around having an unkempt or imperfect lawn. Our laws, too, reinforce this desire to maintain upper-class symbols. As an example, an un-mowed native grass lawn can be considered a bylaw infraction in many urban areas. In Calgary, the Community Standards Bylaw requires property owners to keep grasses and other herbaceous plants under 15 cm.

This status quo has created a multitude of issues. In cities across North America and beyond, the prevalence of lawns has created a biodiversity desert. Native plants simply can’t compete with the ever-expanding concrete jungles interspersed with unproductive lawns. Other species suffer as a result, as their habitat and food sources are eliminated.

Most of our lawns in Alberta consist of species like Kentucky Bluegrass, Perennial Rye Grass, and Creeping Red Fescue. Kentucky bluegrass in particular was selected for its tenacity and ability to spread, meaning it outcompetes native plants. It requires more water and nutrient inputs than native grassland species. It’s also wind-pollinated, meaning that it does not provide a source of food for pollinators. Mowing, fertilizing, and adding pesticides to lawns is harmful to pollinators and requires the input of even more resources, like fossil fuels, to operate the machinery and produce the needed agrochemicals. In our rapidly warming world, lawns are also less efficient at reducing the urban heat island effect compared tor native cover.

Native pollinators visiting the garden. Photos © S. Heerema

What’s the alternative?

As awareness of these issues increases, demand for alternatives to replace our lawns is also increasing. Some of the best options include growing native plant cover or using the space to grow food. These can both contribute to a more localized and resilient community, as people gain more food sovereignty, trade seeds, plants, or crops with each other, build drought resilience, and create habitat for other species.

Replacing lawns with native or pollinator-friendly species helps improve biodiversity, counters heat buildup in cities, and reduces the need for chemical inputs. If you choose drought-resistant species and native options, you will be rewarded with a meadow of flowers and grasses that you will eventually need to water less frequently than a grass lawn as the soil regenerates. Over time, you’ll be delighted to see the return of native bees, beetles, butterflies, and birds.

Growing edible plants contributes to local food resilience at a time when our global food systems are pushed to the breaking point. Rather than working with the land, we seek to control and exploit it, often also exploiting workers in the process. Large companies hold monopolies on many of the food crops available to us and make local and more sustainable options financially unattainable. Food waste has become rampant as stores purposefully overstock for marketing reasons, throw out less-than-perfect food, and promote the lowest cost above all else. These are deliberate choices to uphold unsustainable systems rooted in colonial control and dominance, ensuring that profit for a few is prioritized over human wellbeing in a world where one in eleven people go hungry.

The United Nations Environment Program considers the global food system to be the single largest driver of biodiversity loss on the planet. As more and more native land is converted into cropland, biodiverse areas are fragmented and lost. With the push to grow more crops cheaper, faster, and bigger comes an increasing need for agricultural inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, and water. Crops are grown where they’re ill-suited, and monocultures are prioritized over diversified systems, leading to increased emissions, poorer soil health and biodiversity, and greater disease and pest susceptibility. Edible food diversity has also been decreasing since the Industrial Revolution, with a small number of engineered and patented food crops pushed as staples at the expense of native strains and variability. Food grown in these unsustainable systems is shipped across the world, and the end result is lower-nutrient foods that are often not locally grown or seasonally appropriate, with prices defined by a commodity market, that will experience more and more issues stemming from factors like disease, climate change, and soil degradation.

This system can’t be fixed by home gardens alone, but a shift towards locally appropriate and locally grown foods increases our resilience in a shifting climate, and gives us more control over the health of our land. Once you get the hang of your growing area (there will be some trial and error here), it also creates a space to produce lower-cost foods that aren’t subject to the fluctuating market. Edible crops do more to promote habitat and food for species like our pollinators, and contribute more to reducing the urban heat island effect, than a lawn. More than anything, they give us a chance to connect back to the land and our food systems in a meaningful way. Whether you’re supporting a local producer or converting your own land to grow food, these are small but meaningful acts of rebellion you can undertake against our unsustainable food systems.

Replacing non-native grass is a visual sign of transition. It shows that another future is possible and practical, as long as we are willing to put in the effort to make things better. It shows that there will be trial and error, but also that working together in the community can make the transition easier and create a more beneficial end result. But replacing your lawn is not just a symbol of the world you’d like to live in. It’s also an important step towards creating that world, and a change in mindset that can help inform other land-use decisions in the province. If we step back from the individual picture, lawns act as a representation of the transformations happening at much larger landscape scales across the world, but especially here in Alberta.

Removing lawns is not just an aesthetic choice; it is a political one.

Restoration isn’t the same as preservation

“The United Nations have declared 2021–2030 as the “UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration” in an effort to reflect the need to restore and rewild areas that have been degraded. But, as I learned from digging up each individual shovel of brown grass, once the native flora is gone, it’s extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get it back.

Occasionally, the answer to restoring ecosystems is simple: for minimally-affected ecosystems, it may be enough to reintroduce a keystone species, such as Eurasian beavers in the UK or Grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park. This strategy encompasses the main goals of rewilding on large scales: reintroducing keystone species,, allowing for ecosystem connectivity, and reducing human influence on ecosystem processes. These success stories give us hope for creating resilient and natural ecosystems once again, with few resources.

Unfortunately, the damage often goes beyond what a keystone species reintroduction can fix. Just like lawns, degraded landscapes from ever-expanding development and industrial activity are a reflection of the colonial need to dominate the landscape, shaped by companies monopolizing resources to keep wealth in the hands of the few. Productivity and profit are placed at the top of the priority chain, and ecological resilience (and the many often-discarded free ecosystem services these areas provide us) is stuck at the bottom.

In Alberta, this impacts ecosystems all across the province. More and more of our native grasslands are converted to cropland and tame pasture each year. Mature forests are being harvested for short-term profit and replanted with monocultures that cannot support the same complexity of life. Mining is causing changes to soil structure and composition and water quality in ways that make it unfeasible to restore them to their pre-disturbance state.

Reclamation standards also aren’t what you may think. Alberta doesn’t require a degraded landscape to be returned to its original state. Rather, regulations require a return to “equivalent land capability,” which means that the land can support various different uses and activities, but not necessarily with the same biological community or ecosystem function that existed there before.

Enforcing even these minimal restoration requirements often isn’t done. In our oil sands regions of the Alberta boreal, the number of sites still “under reclamation” is far larger than the number of sites that have been certified as reclaimed (only around 1 percent). We’re facing a crisis of abandoned oil and gas projects because it’s not economically viable for companies to meet their restoration goals if they want to continue raking in record profits. The Orphan Well Association holds more than 8,000 orphan wells, facilities, and pipeline sites that have yet to be properly reclaimed in the province. The Mature Asset Strategy (MAS) now seeks to push the financial burden of this cleanup onto taxpayers and off of companies.

Poorly planned and implemented restoration projects can also cause additional harm. Replanting efforts in disturbed areas often incorporate non-native species because they take root more quickly and are easier to grow. When native species are used, they may not survive because the soil composition or chemistry has been altered too much during the disturbance period. If soil and plant communities are different from what they once were, species higher up in the food chain will not have the conditions they need to survive either. Even on a small scale, rewilding an area such as a lawn can come with extreme challenges. Invasive species spread quickly from surrounding areas and seeds that remain in the soil. Years of change leave soils ill-equipped to host native grass and wildflower species, missing the vital communities of other plants, mycorrhizal fungi, and soil chemistry that native plants often require to establish themselves.

Protect what we have before it’s gone

Even if restoration is undertaken thoughtfully and becomes successful, the resources and time needed to transform a landscape are still epic. This is why it’s essential to protect what we still have, rather than allow it to be degraded with false promises of “full restoration” plans after industry and development have left their mark. Bioscience researchers Fleischman et. al. stress that “Preventing ecosystem destruction is the most cost-effective natural climate solution.” It’s also the best way to ensure that biodiversity is preserved in a changing world.

So, the solution is two-fold. We need to be shifting towards regenerating and restoring areas that we have degraded, including the most accessible of these, which are lawns. Even more importantly, we also must stop degrading these areas in the first place. This requires not only a policy shift towards reducing the amount of land that gets converted at all, but also a cultural rethinking of how we value landscapes and ourselves in relation to them.

However you decide to protest, we need to be aiming for a better world both with our words and with our actions. Write to your representatives and ask for more land to be preserved. Advocate for native plant species in local garden centres. Support local food producers and community gardens. Join an in-person protest. Shift your support to more ethical companies. And this summer, replace your lawn.