I think all the mowing is very wasteful, mowers pollute the air and use fuel. As I mow my side yard, I fantasize about making some sort of park/garden out of it, with low/no maintainence plants and trees.
Are you telling me that a landscaping paradigm created in temperate England is not a good match for the desert?!?
I think you will find in areas affected by droughts, there are rules in place. I know in Sacramento they often ration landscaping water during dry season, and in San Francisco they put incentives in place for people to turn their gardens into rock gardens or native plant gardens.
I think it is a good idea to encourage people’s yards to look like a better-kept version of the local landscape if there are water issues. Obviously this doesn’t apply to places that are already lush and verdant. But any Californian can tell you that there is a political, economic and environmental cost to trying to keep a lawn like a putting green in a desert.
I was under the impression that these are sysnonyms or quasi-synonyms for xeriscaping. With the possible exception of the panacaeic “smart scaping”, none seem applicable to New England.
Another thing- the problem with water politics is that the people who make good choices (building homes in areas with plenty of water) end up paying just the same as the people who make bad choices (building a sprawling metropolis in a desert) so normal free-market forces don’t really work well.
Not for nothin’ but the ads for fertilizer at the page bottom are ironically amusing. Yard/lawn care is one of those things that I won’t miss living in an apartment.
Damn weeds.
I think it’s a matter of balance with the environment. In the United States water isn’t a rare commodity except in the Southwest and a few municipalities that have really stupid water policies like Atlanta. Around the Great Lakes region we have 1/5 of all the fresh water in the world. Getting rid of the chemicals might not be a bad idea, but caring for a lawn isn’t really all that terrible for the environment.
At a certain point, we must accept that human beings have an impact on the environment. Hummers seem to have shown us precisely where we should place that limit.
If you want to do something better for the environment, stop using disposable items. Don’t use paper towels to clean up spills, don’t use plastic forks, don’t use paper plates. That will reduce your usage by a good margin. We use cloth napkins and cloth towels at our house to clean up spills.
Or putting spawling metropolis in hurricane prone areas
Or in flood zones…
Or in tornado prone areas
Or in earthquake prone areas
Or volcanic prone areas
Or…
Or…
Or…
Depends on both how you care for the lawn and what the environment is like. Chemical that are frequently added to lawns include fertilizers and pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides). Fertilizers are mostly benign if they’re applied responsibly, you can run into a problem when too much is applied or if the wrong fertilizer is chosen, resulting in an agronomic imbalance between N-P-K availabilities. Too much fertilizer can lead to eutrophication, which can be a pretty significant environmental problem, in the areas that accept the runoff from an overfertilized yard. Pesticides, since they’re designed specifically to kill things, can cause far more of a problem. In addition to being far more toxic than fertilizers, they’re more persistent in the environmment, less readily degraded, and usually readily soluble and mobile. Applying of pesticides, even according to the instructions on the label, is introducing toxic stuff to the environment.
Everybody puts that limit at a different place. I’d place it well before hummers - in a lot of cases, I’d place it before pesticides.
All good things to do, certainly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look at your lawn too. When you’re looking at lasting environmental impacts, I think a typical suburban lawn will have a greater environmental impact than the disposables consumption of a suburban family.
In the time it’s taken you to compose your posts in this thread, you could have mailed a big check for aid relief to the Sudan.
Actually I agree with most of your anti-lawn sentiments, and do not use synthetic fertilizers or weedkillers on my own lawn. It stays green when there is rain, and goes brownish and dormant in summer droughts. The neighbors have not yet complained. I “waste” water on my ornamental and vegetable plantings instead.
I’m all for encouraging people not to go hogwild with lawn chemicals, and to find alternatives to bluegrass lawns in suitable (or unsuitable, rather) climates like much of the West and Southwest. Buffalograss lawns grow relatively slowly, need much less water than bluegrass lawns, and look pretty nice. I anticipate that sooner or later places like Las Vegas and Phoenix will come to their senses and legislate against lawns far more severely than they do now.
Can I wear a Che Guevara t-shirt and chant Marxist slogans at the same time?
In a stunning display of idiocy, the developers who built my house included a CC&R (same for every house in the neighborhood) which specifically requires that a large percentage of the front yard be devoted to a lawn, and that the lawn must be kept green…on a hillside with clay soil. Can you say “runoff”?
I use one of each - a Flymo roller mower and a grass knife (like an extra-long machete with the last 10cm of the blade bent) for the long grass. It’s a workout, but my lawn (which never gets watered or fertilized) is only few square metres.