Posted on 09/30/2015 8:49:25 AM PDT by Arec Barrwin
THE AMERICAN LAWN NEEDS TO DIE
BY ERIC NICHOLSONWEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2015
My first inkling that America's lawn obsession might not be terribly healthy came around 1995. We'd just moved into a new house in Far North Dallas, and 10- or 11-year-old me decided that the next-door neighbor's lawn — green and smooth as flawless as a golf-course fairway with manicured grass to cushion falls — was the perfect spot for football. The neighbor, a hard-nosed high school track coach, promptly ran us off and upbraided my father for letting me trespass. This struck me as backward. What good was such cushiony grass if not for play?
At the time, I chalked this up to my neighbor being an uptight jerk, an assessment I stand by. But that explanation is incomplete in that it overlooks the bigger picture: Lawns are awful.
This conclusion is admittedly self-serving. Two years ago, in one of those compromises a married person with two small children and two large dogs sometimes has to make, I agreed to swap our cramped apartment just south of White Rock Lake for a three-bedroom house in Richardson, but I was decidedly unenthusiastic about once again having a yard. Since then, I've waged a half-intentional campaign of aggressive neglect. We haven't watered since we've been there. I own a lawnmower, but it's one of those human-powered reel contraptions and it's no match for the shin-high bluestem that seems to spring up overnight. Sometimes I borrow a gas mower from my fall-prone, 70-something-year-old neighbor, but between work and kids, this can be infrequent. The other day, I peeked outside the window and found that 70-something neighbor had taken it upon himself to mow our front yard. It's not something I'm proud of, but my wife and I figured it'd be best to retreat quietly from the windows. We wouldn't want to startle him and make him fall.
But the awfulness of lawns is something close to an objective fact. Maintaining them is time-consuming and expensive. They suck up ungodly amounts of water. When it rains, their fertilizer-heavy runoff pollutes waterways. They pit neighbor against neighbor's kids. They are decadent and unsustainable totems of middle-class prosperity.
RELATED STORIES Long Live Expensive Water In Far North Dallas, Big Fences Make Mad Neighbors and a 9-year Court Battle Think Your Water Bill Is Too High? Blame the Rain. For several centuries, lawns were the exclusive purview of very rich Europeans, people who were wealthy enough to keep large swaths of land out of productive cultivation and afford the labor required to keep the grass neatly scythed. European-style lawns began to take root in America in the mid-1800s after Andrew Jackson Downing recommended expanses of "grass mown into a softness like velvet" as part of a popular gardening treatise he published in 1841. His ideas were later incorporated into the broad lawns of New York's Central Park and lush, pre-automobile suburbs like Riverside, Illinois, which were aped in subsequent decades by the developers of less exclusive suburbs. “No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes as much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and the locality as well-kept lawns,” declared Abraham Levitt, whose name would become synonymous with the post-war explosion of inexpensive, mass-produced suburbs. In post-war America, lawns became a standard feature of the single-family home.
The cumulative size of lawns is vast. By acreage, tur grass is the largest irrigated crop in America, according to a decade-old NASA estimate, covering three times the area devoted to corn. Clumped together, it would more than cover the state of Mississippi.
Lawns are clustered in cities and suburbs. Lawns are clustered in cities and suburbs. NASA Since the non-native grasses that compose most lawns can't be kept green with rainfall alone, and because water and sunlight make the plant grow, lawns require intensive intervention, sucking up a total of about 9 billion gallons of water per day in aggregate and costing the average homeowners about 70 hours of labor per year. Lawns tend to be punishing for the environment as well. In addition to the ecological effects of runoff, which can overwhelm water bodies with excess levels of nitrogen and phosphorous, there's the act of lawn-mowing itself. According to National Geographic, one hour running a gas mower can pollute as much as driving a car for four hours.
Lawns are particularly troublesome in arid cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, where it's a challenge to find enough water for people to drink, much less keep a bunch of ornamental grass verdant. The water crunch in a place like Dallas is less acute, but the principles at play are the same. There isn't nearly enough available water to sustain the population long-term without intensive conservation efforts or massive infrastructure investment. North Texans remain attached to their lawns, though recent price hikes for water may spur many to reassess the value of a green yard.
There really aren't that many good reasons for lawns. Responding to a Wonkblog piece describing lawns (accurately) as a "soul-crushing time suck," Turf magazine editor Ron Hall critiques the author for failing to mention "the economic value that nicely maintained lawns add to properties. It doesn’t hint at the good will and sense of civility lawns engender in our neighborhoods. But, the biggest omission in the piece is piece is its failure to mention the well-documented environmental pluses lawns contribute to our communities — capturing dust, their cooling effect, reducing runoff, etc."
But nicely maintained lawns only boost property values and engender civility because that's what decades of increasing suburbanization has led people to expect, not because of some virtue inherent to a well-tended piece of grass. On the latter point, whatever environmental pluses are associated with the typical American lawn would be matched by yards of native plants and grasses without most of the damaging effects.
Lawns aren't going to disappear anytime soon. They are effectively part of North Texas' infrastructure, there for however long the house it surrounds stands. But at the very least people can water a little less, rely on native plants a little bit more. If one simply must have the perfect golf-course lawn, at least let some kids play on it. Finally, if you see a lawn that's a bit overgrown or rough around the edges, don't call code enforcement; congratulate the neighbor on taking a principled stand with their forward-thinking mowing and irrigation policies.
Yep, they are nasty and persistent buggers. I wound up putting clear nail polish on my shins to suffocate them. Then I had reddish discolored patches on my shins for quite a while afterward.
I do the yardwork at my home and since we married 18 years ago I’ve turned a dusty barren yard into a beautiful green lawn and my husband has gone from being a person who never gave it a second thought to a person who takes a lot of pride in the appearance of our home and yard. It keeps the area much cooler. I went over to an elderly next-door neighbors home the other day and was shocked at how much hotter her back yard was. We do have a private well, however, or it would be too costly to water. We haven’t had a vacation in over 5 years and we both work 50 - 70 hours a week, so this is my (not) guilty pleasure.
Point my ass
The whole developed world has lawns as do rich folks in the developing world
Does this guy travel beyond Dallas and Tarrant counties
Okay, I’ve finished mowing, trimming, and weed-eating for today, even around my stink tree.
What is it I supposed to do now? Oh yeah: read the article.
Consider your source (CNN)...
There are lots of factors in Bee decline...pesticides, removal of natural food sources, removal of habitat, GMO crops, etc.
When our neighbors have their lawn treated, we have to shut up the hive for several days to keep the bees from the chemicals. Not only are the chemicals harmful, but the loss of natural bee food sources like dandelions and clover (which people hate in their “perfect” yards, but Bees love) are destroyed.
My pack of 8 dogs ensures that plenty of holes are available to break an ankle or capture the lawn mower. It's so much better when covered with snow. The big 80 lb chocolate lab puts her head down in the snow and shoots a rooster tail of snow like a big snow plow. Fun to watch and she enjoys it.
bwahahahaha!
In the time it probably took him to conceive and write this article, he probably could have cut his lawn...twice.
That’s just unnatural...
Then make many municipalities change their laws prohibiting a front yard from being as much of a food garden as the back yard.
Change the rules in many jurisdictions that say you can’t have astroturf or a rock garden in front of the house.
>>.S. “Wasting water” is a stupid liberal concept that somehow water is “wasted”. Water goes nowhere. It is all still on the planet.
Where does your water come from? I work in the water utility industry. If your drinking water comes from wells, then it is not replenished instantly by rainfall. We get a lot of rain here and our public wells get dangerously low in the summer. When the water level drops, seawater encroaches. When seawater moves in, it does not get pushed back out later.
Of course it stays on the planet, just like it stays in your house if you drink a glass and fill it back up with urine. Do you drink pee?
>>Liberals believe in “purpose” for the greater good. Welcome to liberalism.
No. I understand the water cycle. It has nothing to do with the greater good or liberalism.
I am very much a “Zero Carbon Footprint Lawn” aficionado ...
How much more attractive his front garden, with a bounty of vegetables, then the neighbors’ waste land. He certainly made attractive raised beds. Good on that family.
I agree. I love my lawn. As does my neighbor on one side, his is well-manicured. As a matter of fact, he mows mine as well as his (always beats me to it, and says he's using the mower anyway on his). On the other side is a slovenly liberal who has a weed and gopher infested front yard. Most of the neighbors on the block keep up their homes. Not so with the liberal jerk. If he sees flowers growing on our border, he snips them and leaves the stems. His back yard is worse, a barren hole-infested wasteland. Nice lawns are good for the kids, and good for drawing smiles. Something lost on liberals, who are usually ugly with a temperament to match.
Curious...can you provide more info about this pic? who? what? where? when?
I have a small patch of "lawn" ( about 60 x 40' ), that I am running an experiment on. After purchasing an extra 1/2 acre parcel of land right behind my house, I spent much labor tearing out the brush that was there, left the trees, mulched most of it, and in that 60x40 space, I was going to plant my Perfect Lawn. I researched the different kinds of grasses, I graded out the land, added some ammendments. Spent hours and hours of hard labor doing that. So while deciding what kind of grass to use, Nature had other ideas. Crab grass and other ground cover sprouted and started spreading. At first, I did my best to dig that out, but then, I decided to let Nature show me what grew there best.
Sure enough, I have a beautiful "ground cover" lawn in that spot, that is nicer than the crappy Bahia lawn on the rest of my property. Its a mix of crab grasses and various clovers. I mow it fairly short, and it looks damn good considering the price. I dont water it, I do occasionally remove whatever looks like a "weed". Fairly slow growing as well, again compared to the awful Bahia.
The grass around that rock would have to go!
The anti-lawn zealotry is in full cry here in southern California due to the drought. Brown, weedy, and dry is what the natural vegetation in SoCal looks like. It isn’t a good look.
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