The American lawn — a grass carpet, manicured to uniform height and ideally Kelly Green. The front and back and side of nearly every residential lot in American suburbs and neighborhood. We flatten the terrain, seed the lawn and dump huge amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers to boost the nitrogen in the soil before watering and watering and watering. The grass grows. And then? We fuel up lawnmowers with gasoline and cut it.
And then the lawn grows.
And we cut it.
And we fuel up our blowers and make the grass clippings go away for another week by sweeping them to the curb for the garbage collectors or to end up carried through gutters to the nearest waterway.
And we add water.
And fertilizer.
And the lawn grows.
And we cut it.
Americans invested $25 billion last year to grow something so we can cut it to a few inches. We spend our time in this vicious cycle of water-grow-cut-dispose-water-grow-cut-dispose and then? If anything NOT grass grows in the lawn, we poison it.
So why are lawns a good idea?
Enviro-Girl likes playing in the back yard as much as the next girl, baseball, tag and golf are all best played on grass. But how much lawn is necessary for these things? And how much lawn is needed for decorative purposes?
Let’s examine some of the other reasons why lawns are for fools:
* Mowing uses gasoline (about 580,000,000 gallons a year) and leaves behind air and noise pollution.
* Lawns require a LOT of fertilizer — and most fertilizers are petroleum based. Americans spend over $5 million on fossil fuel-derived fertilizers for lawns.
* Perfect lawns require pesticides and herbicides which poison our water, soil and destroy diversity in the process. Pesticides and herbicides are bad for pets, children and other plant life, too.
* Lawn clippings end up in landfills, hauled away at the expense of local governments.
* Lawns require watering — 30-60% of urban fresh water is used for watering lawns.
(Statistics from Redesigning the American Lawn by Bormann, Balori & Geballe, Yale University Press, 1993)
Enviro-Girl thinks we should wise up and consider what to plant instead. Tune in next week for some alternatives.
This was a great post!! I eagerly await the alternatives!!!
We do not fertilize or water. And, after we move, we will have far less grass.
I sent your post to my husband we constintly battle over the “greenness” of our lawn.
He does use a manual mower (we do not have that much) we do not use fertilizer or pesticides – so he spends hours of his time hand pulling out the weeds. And bother does he ever water it. He freaks out when we park the bikes or stroller on the lawn – we are flattening it
Our last battle ended up with him saying this:
“Well, if you think I spend too much time on the lawn – then you take care of it and lets see what happens.”
I can hardly wait. It will be: let the weeds grow were they will – water – well if it does not rain for a month – perhaps I will. Cut it – well if I don’t water it it will not grow so quickly – now will it. Will it be pretty – Yes it will be natural and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I am the beholder.
We water way too much… but my hubby uses a push mower for our relatively big yard. We don’t do fertilizer except the occaisonal “worm poop” (which you can find at Target) and we use the clippings for our compost. I’d like to eventually have gardens in place of our grass ~ preferably ones that require very little water!