Should lawn care be banned?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Renob]
Since I get my water from a well and there are no resources used to clean it (aside from a filter I use to take nitrates out of my drinking water – a filter I pay for), I’d say that any argument about me taking care of my lawn hurting the environment is pretty much BS.
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Your well isn’t an inexhaustible resource. It likely depends on an aquifer, and depending on which one that is, there is a good chance it is being depleted faster than it is being replenished. Here is an article about the aquifer in Southern MD being depleted, for example.

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[QUOTE=treis]
Your well isn’t an inexhaustible resource. It likely depends on an aquifer, and depending on which one that is, there is a good chance it is being depleted faster than it is being replenished. Here is an article about the aquifer in Southern MD being depleted, for example.
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Of course I’m aware of this. The county south of us had problems with dry wells. And if our well goes dry then I will bear the cost to drill a new one. However, that will be an indication that my neighbors and I had been inefficiently using our resources, not the theoretical idea that somewhere someone doesn’t have clean drinking water. The true measure of scarcity is reflected in the price of something. If my well goes dry then I will have a pretty good signal that water is scarce.

23

[QUOTE=Renob]
Of course I’m aware of this. The county south of us had problems with dry wells. And if our well goes dry then I will bear the cost to drill a new one. However, that will be an indication that my neighbors and I had been inefficiently using our resources, not the theoretical idea that somewhere someone doesn’t have clean drinking water. The true measure of scarcity is reflected in the price of something. If my well goes dry then I will have a pretty good signal that water is scarce.
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Have you ever considered doing something before it’s too damn late?
Just a thought.

24

Does not the water used to water a lawn seep back into the ground (at least what’s not used by the grass and other plants). Does not the plant life contribute to our benefit in return?

However, I can see the benefit of alternate landscaping in arid regions.

As for kids in other parts of the world, it would be much more feasible to construct local water treatment/desalination plants than to transport endless loads of 12 oz plastic water bottles, which when empty would end up who knows where…

If you want to point out senseless wasting of water, why don’t you start with the casinos in Vegas.

25

[QUOTE=Renob]
Of course I’m aware of this. The county south of us had problems with dry wells. And if our well goes dry then I will bear the cost to drill a new one. However, that will be an indication that my neighbors and I had been inefficiently using our resources, not the theoretical idea that somewhere someone doesn’t have clean drinking water. The true measure of scarcity is reflected in the price of something. If my well goes dry then I will have a pretty good signal that water is scarce.
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This makes no sense. First off, you say your well doesn’t damage the environment when clearly it does. While Maryland’s is nowhere near crisis level, it is marginally less able to support life. Not a big deal for you personally, but if you lived in Kansas, for example, depleting the aquifer would have serious consequences.

Second, the price of water has little to do with the scarcity of water in the case of wells. As you noted, you pay nothing for the water except for the cost of electricity and filters. The cost to you is the essentially the same whether the aquifer is 10% or 80% full. The only time scarcity comes into play is if your well runs dry after 30 years, and you have to drill another. This puts little price pressure because of the length of time between expenditures, the relatively small cost, and the fact that personal conservation measures impact your bottom line little.

Third, waiting until your well runs dry before considering water scarce is stupid. The point is to conserve water before the aquifer runs out and you have to drill another well. Unless, of course, there isn’t another aquifer and you now simply have no water.

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[QUOTE=treis]
This makes no sense. First off, you say your well doesn’t damage the environment when clearly it does.
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How “clearly” does it? How do you know what type of things I put on my lawn? The only thing I’ve admitted I do it water it. You are saying that watering it “clearly” damages the environment?

Well, I don’t live in Kansas. I live in Maryland, about 20 feet above sea level. Water is incredibly plentiful around here. The only reason that the wells ran dry south of us was a very heavy industrial user straining the aquifer. Outside of this kind of use it is quite unlikely that our aquifer here will go dry. It is replenished by a variety of natural water sources.

You assume, of course, that the aquifer will go dry. I assume it will not. Since I’m the one who actually depends on it, I have much more at stake here than you do. So if it does go dry, then I will pay the cost. If it doesn’t, then no big deal. Either way it’s not your concern nor the concern of Two and a half inches.

How do you know what I’m doing to conserve water? Frankly, my lawn is far nearer to the natural state desired in the OP than most around here. But if I choose to water or I choose not to water then that really has no effect on the people in Africa, that’s for sure. And it has very little effect on the environment. In the end, if my neighbors and I deplete the aquifer we’re the ones who are screwed. We pay the price for our own stupidity.

27

[QUOTE=Renob]
How do you know what I’m doing to conserve water? Frankly, my lawn is far nearer to the natural state desired in the OP than most around here. But if I choose to water or I choose not to water then that really has no effect on the people in Africa, that’s for sure. And it has very little effect on the environment. In the end, if my neighbors and I deplete the aquifer we’re the ones who are screwed. We pay the price for our own stupidity.
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Baloney. Aquifers have little respect for property lines, and everything you do with your lawn affects it. How much of the water you put onto your lawn ends up recharging the aquifer? How fast does it percolate through the vadose zone? Is there an aquitard or aquiclude in the way? How far does the aquifer you’re pumping from extend? How many other people are tapped into it? Is it all residential, or are there industrial users as well? Where does the recharge water come from? Are there pollutant plumes up-gradient that might be mobilized by drawdown due to pumping? How deep is your well compared to your neighbors? Do you have salt-water intrusion (or brackish water, if you’re closer to the bay) in the lower portion? Where was the water level in your well when it was drilled? Where is it now?

There are a million questions that need to be answered before you can reliably say “the aquifer’s fine.” The idea that there’s nothing wrong with it just because you’ve got water at the tap is shortsighted at best, but saying that your use of water impacts nobody but you and your neighbors is utterly ridiculous.

28

[QUOTE=Renob]
How “clearly” does it? How do you know what type of things I put on my lawn? The only thing I’ve admitted I do it water it. You are saying that watering it “clearly” damages the environment?
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It damages the environment by making it more difficult to sustain human life.

[QUOTE=Renob]

Well, I don’t live in Kansas. I live in Maryland, about 20 feet above sea level. Water is incredibly plentiful around here. The only reason that the wells ran dry south of us was a very heavy industrial user straining the aquifer. Outside of this kind of use it is quite unlikely that our aquifer here will go dry. It is replenished by a variety of natural water sources.
You assume, of course, that the aquifer will go dry. I assume it will not. Since I’m the one who actually depends on it, I have much more at stake here than you do. So if it does go dry, then I will pay the cost. If it doesn’t, then no big deal. Either way it’s not your concern nor the concern of Two and a half inches.
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This thread isn’t about you specifically. Besides, I’m pretty sure that I’m aware that this issue isn’t a big deal for you personally because I just wrote that the issue is “not a big deal for you personally”. Thank you for reiterating the point though.

[QUOTE=Renob]

How do you know what I’m doing to conserve water? Frankly, my lawn is far nearer to the natural state desired in the OP than most around here. But if I choose to water or I choose not to water then that really has no effect on the people in Africa, that’s for sure. And it has very little effect on the environment. In the end, if my neighbors and I deplete the aquifer we’re the ones who are screwed. We pay the price for our own stupidity.
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Well, not necessarily. The guy that was smart and conserved his water is just as boned as the guy that wantonly wasted it, since it’s the same aquifer. Plus, resources that we consume now are resources that are not available to the next generation of humans. A lower, sustainable level of consumption is better than one generation gorging leaving the next to scrimp.

29

I haven’t studied up much on gardening, but when I got a bit of space to plant something, I went out and got mostly native plants and shrubs, kept a layer of leaves as a natural mulch around the plants, and bascally just let 'em go. I’ll water 'em once every five days or so if there’s been no rain at all. I wish I could say I was Xeriscaping, but really, I just didn’t want to have spend all my time maintaining the garden. It’s just the second year but just about everything is growing fine, if a bit scruffy. It’s Houston, though; lack of rain is usually not much a problem, although so far this year is rather different.

The main things I do avoid on environmental grounds are fertilizing and spreading weedkiller; likewise, I would never water grass, at least not in this area. If it browns out it browns out.

As for shipping water saved from not watering lawns and shipping it overseas, hopelessly impractical and AFAIK it makes much more economic and environmental sense to treat local supplies on site.

30

See, where I live, we got a nice acre and a bit of lawn. It’s got a stream running through it and a nice big pond.

We don’t water it. We mow it a bit. Don’t need to use much besides some seed now and again.
As far as I can tell, it’s as natural as it gets. The pond runs into the next pond, and then down a stream a bit. Comes from a stream running under the street that comes from a pond across the street… near as we can tell, it comes from a waterfall a mile or so away.

Clearly, it should be banned. I’m a bit puzzled as to why, though.

We have used a little fertilizer to clear up some brown spots over the years, but mostly, we reshaped the yard a bit to even out things, and we don’t need that anymore. Most of the problem was having too much water coming down the side of the hill near the road. Had to dig a ditch to divert it a little.

Nope, not seeing the problem here. Two?

31

My understanding was that Xeriscaping was using natural desert-based methods for areas in the American Southwest, a notion supported by the etymology of the word, and which the linked article does nothing to dispel. I think it’d be wrong for me to call anything I did to my Massachusetts lawn “Xeriscaping”, short of transporting it to Arizona.
Xeriscaping makes a lot of sense in places like that – In Salt Lake City, everyone had to water their lawn every day, or else it;d go back to what it looked like in pre-puioneer days, or the West Valley. In more desert areas, xeriscaping makes sense for a host of reasons.

Has anyone come up with a name and a strategy for “more natural” lawn treatments in water-rich areas like New England?

32

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Has anyone come up with a name and a strategy for “more natural” lawn treatments in water-rich areas like New England?
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Weeds?

:cool:

33

Once we got the grass in good, the weeds don’t grow so much. Roots are nice and dense.

34

It’s a bit more complicated than simply “allowing the lawns to revert to their natural state.” You can’t just quit watering your lawn and then expect it to start looking like Nature intended–what you’d actually get would be a lot of dead grass and opportunistic weeds (bermuda grass, bindweed, wild barley, star thistle, puncture vine, etc. around here) which are usually imported pests that make trouble for locally-occuring species. Then you’d likely get mice or even rats.

So you’d have to study your local environment and the natural water-retention patterns of your particular patch of land. Then carefully plant native species, most of which you will get wrong at first, so they’ll die. Be sure to vigilantly weed out imported pests.

Around here, the natural pattern is for a lot of weeds/grasses to grow in the spring rains. Then everything dries up and dies, creating a lovely fire hazard. In fact, just yesterday Cal Fire finally contained a huge wildfire between my town and the next one; it was nearly 30,000 acres of natural land that burned, plus 74 houses (and almost the local community college).

So you have to carefully manage those fire hazards too. Natural brush is quite dangerous and has to be cleared–the grasses must be mowed before they dry out completely. A completely natural landscape doesn’t necessarily go with modern life very well.

Now, personally I would like Southern CA to quit taking all our water and build its own dang water reclamation plants. Then, it’s just possible that rice farming is a slightly strange industry for land that is more deserty than wet. I would guess that those drains on our local water resources might be more urgent to address than lawns. Certainly we could benefit from taking a good hard look at our water usage and our love of sprinklers and green lawns–but it’s just not as simple as saying “let lawns revert back to nature!”

35

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Has anyone come up with a name and a strategy for “more natural” lawn treatments in water-rich areas like New England?
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36

[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
Nope, not seeing the problem here. Two?
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Well, sounds like you’re already doing what the OP wishes more people would do. So, no, no problem.

As for the “there’s lots of water around here” argument, to some extent I can support that…but only to a point. I live in Chicagoland, and while I don’t own a lawn, I do water my vegetable garden every day (well, every day it hasn’t rained) because it’s all containers, and the plants are trapped - they can’t send down more roots for deeper water; they’re in captivity, and so I must bring the water to them. I don’t feel the need to switch to a cactus garden quite yet, what with those huge lakes to our right. OTOH, I have nixed the kids playing with the hose for hours in favor of filling up a small kiddy pool and letting them splash that finite amount of water around. (When the pool’s empty and the children soaked, water time is over.)

Chicago landscaping crews have been putting in more drought resistant plants, and watering crews are seldom seen anymore. I don’t know if we have residential watering restrictions; if we do, they are not well advertised. Then again, we mostly have postage stamp sized lawns. It’s the vegetable and decorative gardens that probably get most people’s outside water usage up.

About 20 miles south in one of the suburbs, my mother’s city does regulate watering, and has for at least 10 years now. At the moment, because of less than average rain fall, they’re on a watering ban, with the exception of “manually water[ing] trees, shrubs and flowers based on an odd/even system during the evening hours of 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. only.” This is to keep the local water storage above 50% capacity, not only so people have drinking water, but so that the fire departments have enough volume and pressure to put out fires on demand.

This is just outside Chicago, with a huge amount of lake and ground water. So to say that no one is concerned with the environmental impact of landscaping and lawn care is just stupid or willfully naive. Most homeowners and certainly all city councils are more than slightly aware of the problems and already moving to make what changes they need to. Are they changes enough? I’m not sure. But it’s not like no one’s paying attention.

37

Why are you people wasting valuable electricity responding to this thread? That electricity could be used to power the pacemakers of suffering Kenyans! All we’d have to do is ship it to them!

38

See, I keep telling my homeowner’s association that I’m being environmentally conscious, and they keep telling me “mow your damn lawn!”

39

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
Why are you people wasting valuable electricity responding to this thread? That electricity could be used to power the pacemakers of suffering Kenyans! All we’d have to do is ship it to them!
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And on that note I’d like to suggest that we leave water for other factors - for example, mowing.

It’s still possible to buy a reel mower (saw one at Lowe’s just the other day). And really ambitious folks could cut their grass with a simple sickle.

40

[QUOTE=BJMoose]
And really ambitious folks could cut their grass with a simple sickle.
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See, and you could cut out your gym membership at the same time! :smiley: