One boomer was remarking about the rabbits and squirrels in their yard. The rabbits are there because we no longer have foxes because the boomers poison their yards. The squirrels are a food source for our at-risk birds of prey, while their ecological role spreading plant seeds adds to biodiversity and landscape regeneration in important ways. She called them "vile little creatures" and wished there was a way to kill them all.
The other's yard was 90% dedicated to Kentucky bluegrass. Purely ornamental, green concrete that's too poisonous for the rabbits to eat despite their effort. When I arrived she was pulling clover out of the only garden bed. When I left an hour later, she was still pulling cover out and asked if I could spray the bed with glyphosate to kill them. I said she might want to keep that species because it's important for pollinators and adds to the health of the soil for her other flowers. She opted for a $150 glyphosate treatment which makes the ground carcinogenic and takes two weeks to work.
I fucking hate these people. I hate their settler-colonialism toward nature, their sociopathic need for domination, and their utter tastelessness once they've achieved that domination at the expense of every other species that once lived in that yard. In this desert these deranged freaks will spend thousands of dollars per year to preserve their lawns. The violence behind their bullshit community fetish is only ignored because their neighbours are worse.
Okay so fuck all of this but also I grew up mowing a lawn and my parents’ neighbors always sprayed pesticides everywhere. I’d love to eventually just replace my grass entirely. So what is an approachable first project for this kind of eco-conscious gardening if I don’t know shit beyond “keep your grass short or your neighbors will judge you”?
It depends on how much you think you can get away with but a very easy first step is to aerate your lawn and overseed it with white clover, the clover will fix nitrogen making your grass greener and eliminate the need for fertilizer, flower to feed pollinators, and grows short so you can mow high without impacting it much and keeping the HOA busybodies happy
If you have a little more leeway reach out to your states department of natural resources, there are biologists on staff who are a public service to assist with recommendations, species selection, etc. I used to tell people to just let the lawn grow and let succession run it’s course but in practice I’ve found you end up just getting a shitload of invasives
Mother's comment is solid. In addition to that, I'd look into locality-specific xeri/zeroscaping laws. Here we have water restrictions so there's a state-level ban on HOAs interfering with xeriscaping. The same neighbourhoods with these plague lawns also have lovely mulch and flower ones. Start thinking about what role you'd like areas to serve and how you'd like to allocate that space between yourself and whatever else might benefit from the lawn. There's still space where you want something to walk on and plants like clover and thyme are fine for that (minus bees, but you're helping bees). If there's unused space, what could it support and how much of the native flora can you bring back? Something productive for you and good for the environment like beehives, something ornamental and good for the environment like a pollinator garden, maybe it's too shady for most plants but it could be a rest area for birds with food and water. If I'm not using an area of my lawn for myself I've seeded it with wildflowers/clover/alfalfa for the things that could use it. Whatever areas you don't want to cultivate for one reason or another, rocks and mulch are both walkable while looking more interesting than grass. Even tossing down native grasses and letting them go a little high is providing habitat for native insects that evolved to live there.
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The advice you've gotten from happybadger and Mother below is great. As a pollination biologist the best advice of what to plant in my experience is native flowering plants > ornamental analogues to native flowering plants > ornamental flowering plants > non flowering plants. For example if you can find a sage native to your area that's better to plant than a non-native sage, which is better than say a petunia, which is better than grass.