Ah, spring, when we wake from sweet sleep to the mellifluous song of the gas-powered leaf blower. Citizens! Neighbors! Would you like to fight the power, stick it to the oligarchs, and save time, money, and the planet, simply by doing less? It’s easy: just stop working so much on the damned lawn.

Trained like Pavlov’s dogs by ads or our misguided forbears, each fall we remove the leaves from our turf. But leaves are nature’s fertilizer, Gaia’s mulch. Then in the spring we spread new, expensive fertilizers, along with bug killers and plant killers, much of it banned in better-regulated countries because it is linked to such unpleasantries as lymphoma. Half of it runs off the yard and into our streams, where it helps to harm the things we love. Then we buy mulch made of who knows what, sprayed with more mysteries to give it that nice brick color. And then we mow.

The perfectly manicured lawn, it turns out, is not only arguably the most expensive and labor-intensive groundcover possible, but according to the eminent entomologist Doug Tallamy, a “biological wasteland.” It produces less oxygen, cleanses less water, sequesters less carbon, provides less habitat. Those weeds we kill with our big-box bags are actually food for the bugs and bees which support 87 percent of the plants on earth. The decline of pollinators in Australia, for instance, has forced tomato growers there to purchase $10,000 robot bees. As the biologist E.O. Wilson once said, “If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

And those insects are disappearing at such an alarming rate we are now living in what’s been called the “sixth extinction,” mostly because of human development, which usually means native plants being replaced with the high-maintenance astroturf we call lawn. In the U.S. today, lawn covers 40 million acres, more than our national parks, and is growing by 500 square miles yearly.

Less yardwork is easy, and doesn’t have to make our homes look abandoned. If we can dig a hole (and if you can’t, my kids just introduced me to a cool new thing called YouTube), we can shrink our lawns to the part we actually use by planting the rest with native plants, which flower and bloom and smell nice and feed the birds and are readily available down the street at Nasami Farms. The most beautiful garden in my neighborhood is a slope left to meadow, wafting with native flowers.

Want to make America green again? Stop watering the lawn. In our climate, grass goes dormant in summer and returns in the fall, regardless of who’s president. Let’s negotiate a permanent ceasefire with the “weeds,” many of which are beautiful. The war on beneficial insects caused by pesticides is one you can end. Want a tax cut? Stop buying synthetic fertilizers, which native plants don’t need. Love thy leaves, for they are food, mulch, and free. Instead of hauling them to ecological Gitmo, put them around those native trees and shrubs you just planted.

When we de-herbicide, de-pesticide, de-fertilize, de-irrigate, and de-lawn, we are protecting our water, cooling and cleaning our air, reducing extreme weather, sequestering carbon — everything our political enemies hate. We end up with smaller bills, more butterflies, and more free time to enjoy nature without having to drive to it. And isn’t that the whole point of a yard?

Nathaniel Reade lives in Florence.