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The Environmental Holocaust of Grass Lawns

06/04/2022 Modified 11/14/2022
PenguinPete


Hello, I'm "Penguin" Pete, the guy with the indignant rant about palm trees you all seem to love. I'm back today to talk about an even worse environmental blight, and even more pervasive intrusion on our living space: GRASS!

You don't notice grass. Those of you who live in cities are barely even accustomed to seeing plants anymore, so you never stop to think that our obsession to coat the Earth in a fuzzy layer of green micro-plants is anything abnormal. But we have all grown up used to suburban tracts of endless lawns around houses, married to the vision of the American dream of a white-picket-fence neighborhood, all made of ticky-tacky.




Here's a few reasons why your vision of suburbia is far creepier than you think:

  • Lawns aren't just an option. They are ENFORCED. You can go to jail for not having a perfectly manicured lawn.
  • Lawns affect neighborhood real estate values, which is why they are enforced.
  • The pathological degree of conformity in suburbia isn't just for an aesthetic. Its purpose is to expunge all diversity.
  • Lawn enforcement prevents people from celebrating their ethnic or cultural heritage via growing other plants. Especially people who moved here from somewhere else.
  • Grass, like palm trees, is so bad for the ecology that you are doing the world a favor if you literally replace it with bare dirt.
  • The lawn aesthetic is based on an imperialist Victorian nostalgia for "gentlemen" sports like golf, bowling, polo, and croquet. It is a class privilege signal.
  • Not a single blade of grass growing in any lawn in the United States is native to North America.

But here's the worst problem with grass lawns:




Grass Lawns Are An Ecological Holocaust

It's been said before, only as "an ecological catastrophe."

The Earth's environment, as we have slowly come to realize in the 21st century, depends on the concept of bio-diversity. Ignoring the need for preserving a diverse habitat has painted us into an ecological corner, one so dire that experts predict we might just starve ourselves right off the planet if we keep this up.

The chief wildlife victim of our lawn obsession is bees. It turns out that we need bees to pollinate the crops we depend upon, and keeping bees around isn't just a matter of nailing some wooden boards together for a beehive. Bees need to eat, and their food source is all the native plants around - which we kill off to plant lawns in their stead. Beyond merely removing their blossoming food sources, we also kill off bee populations with pesticides, herbicides, and all the weapons-grade chemicals we deploy to create this artificial lawn aesthetic.



That addresses the bees, but they are far from the only ecological concern. Bird populations are dying off en mass, which is once again triggered by our scorching and bleaching of the Earth's surface so that nothing is left but plain, dead grass. Once again, birds have to eat something, and when we kill all the plant life and exterminate every insect that could possibly spoil our grass lawns, that kills off birds. If you thought bees were an important part of the ecosystem, wait until you see the barren hell that results when you kill off the birds.

https://www.3billionbirds.org/



Aside from killing off biodiversity, pesticides and other lawn chemicals harm birds directly; 7,000,000 birds die each year because of lawn-care pesticides.

That's it for the bees and the birds; what else is there? Everything! Since the flat putting green of an American suburban lawn is found nowhere in nature, it's basically a lifeless desert as far as the Earth's ecosystem is concerned.

When we tend our lawn, it isn't enough to insist on having grass. We also have to fight what we call "weeds." That word "weed" is actually an environmental slur; what we call "weeds" are what the rest of nature calls "dinner, a home, and a source of essential nesting material."


A Personal Anecdote:

Here in Iowa, I once had a lesson in what happens when you just let ONE "weed" grow.



This is the Eastern American Goldfinch, Iowa's official state bird. Note the thistle-d purple-blossom bush he's sitting in.

In my home state of Iowa, back at my former residence before we downsized after graduating to empty-nesters ourselves, we had a place right on the Des Moines river plus acres of open woods. Being situated on the side of a hill made mowing the back part impossible without also mowing the house, so I let some weeds grow in the back where neighbors couldn't see.

What should grow there one spring but this exact bush with the purple blossoms? To my surprise, it was suddenly flocked with Goldfinches by the half-dozen, who pulled the fluffy purple down out and flew off somewhere over and over again, likely building a nest in our eaves. This was right outside my Work-From-Home freelancer's office window. The Goldfinches carried this on all spring. It was magical. I have never before nor since seen so many goldfinches. My state bird.

But by law, I'm not allowed to have even that. I could get away with it because this was a tucked-in corner out of sight of the street. I felt like Winston Smith hiding his double-think from Big Brother.

Since then, we have moved to ticky-tacky white middle-class suburbia, and now have no square of turf outside the judging gaze of our white middle-class neighbors. Which means that we're not allowed one single flowering bush. The birds, as my current neighborhood dictates, can piss off.



Grass Lawns Are Enforced! You Have No Choice!


Some of you have been reading along, perhaps wondering what the big deal is. "You don't like your lawn, boo-hoo, plant a garden instead?" Well, it is not that easy!

In the first place, much of American real estate is controlled by HOAs (home owners associations) which mandate a green grass lawn, cut to a specified height. Not only are you not allowed to rip out the grass and replace it with native plants or even a gravel patch, but you are further required to keep it alive and maintained - they will check with a ruler!



And God help you if you are allergic to grass and try to replant your lawn with alternative plants - a court in Missouri pursued a case against a widow who did just that (shown above) for just such a reason. The case has dragged on for five years while this innocent woman minding her own business is threatened with thousands of dollars in fines and decades in prison - just for NOT GROWING A LAWN.

Then there are local, municipal government regulations about this, in places like, say, my city in Iowa.


Polk County Weed Commission


Local lawn-mowing ordinances can fine you up to $10,000 for being caught with your grass too long. If you don't pay that, in some cases, you can see jail time and lose your property. Yeah, you heard that right. A country where half the murder cases go unsolved, but by God, we have Grass Police.

The Draconian enforcement of this minuscule issue can reach the realm of bureaucracy run wild. A Florida resident was fined $500 per day while out of town, racking up a $29K debt which he has tried to fight in court, and judges have upheld. An Indiana resident has spent $15K fighting his city's lawn ordinances, even standing and obstructing a mower sent out by the city like a Tiananmen Square reenactment. It is like this in state after state.

To quote one victim of this legal overreach: "We’ll end up with a planet full of chemicals because everything that is living will disappear." Buddy, you don't know the half of it!


https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/expert_assessment/season_drought.png
National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center



Lawns Are Also Destroying the Earth


Let's start with Sarah B. Schindler, University of Maine School of Law, who brings us a modest proposal - ban the lawns.

> "This psychological attachment to lawns, however, results
in significant environmental harms: conventional turfgrass is a non-native
monocrop that contributes to a loss of biodiversity and typically requires vast
amounts of water, pesticides, and gas-powered mowing."


Let's talk about that water. Turfgrass is the most-irrigated "crop" in the United States, covering 128K square kilometers of the nation. Meanwhile, a single golf course in Tampa, Florida consumes 178,800 gallons of water PER DAY, an amount which could go to the daily household use of 2.2K Americans per day instead. To quote more from that source:

> "Keeping a lawn green takes one to two inches of water per week; for a mere thousand-square-foot lawn, that easily adds up to over ten thousand gallons a summer. Less realized is that, like a fully loaded luxury sedan, lawns are hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels. It takes natural gas to produce lawn fertilizer; petroleum to power the wide-area mower that runs 'like a Deere'; oil to keep the weed whackers, edgers, and blowers all buzzing."


Mere homeowners, without considering golf courses, sports stadiums, and other businesses, consume 9 billion gallons of water in the average day, with most of that just being dumped on the useless grass outside.




Can We Ever Get Over Lawns?


Some drought-stricken states are finally waking up to this issue, such as California, which has suffered a decades-long drought while blithely gushing gallons of water onto their patches of turf year-in-year-out. Finally, as the reservoirs drain and citizens are starting to get the dust out of their taps, California is starting to pay urban residents a bonus for tearing up the turf and replacing it with alternatives, such as woodchips or low-moisture succulents.

Naturally, this kind of environmental wokeness doesn't happen by itself in government; it takes years of activism. There are sites like lesslawn.com which have been around for years. Quoted there is this excerpt:

> "In her 1992 book Requiem for a Lawnmower, Sally Wasowski wrote: "I belong to the school that believes a natural landscape should be composed of only those plants that would have naturally occurred on that site. That means native plants - combined in the way that Mother Nature arranges them. Today, many native plant lovers and environmentalists are taking this innovative and, to me, quite sensible point of view."


Meanwhile, the Wild Seed Project offers step-by-step instructions on how to convert your lawn back into a native meadow nurturing to your surrounding area.

Native plants! Remember what I was saying about "weeds" back there and how one "weed" ended up being important to our official state bird? For all we know, nobody has even observed that goldfinches need purple thistles because I might have been the first person to allow one to grow.

The process of letting a lawn become a meadow is quite simple, the simplest thing to do in fact: nothing! Don't water, don't mow, don't fertilize, and let nature do its thing. Naturally, you will still want to cut a path or trim back shrubs so you can walk around and have a view out the windows. But you just might be rewarded with a beautiful property blooming with wildflowers and merry with hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees. Which, you know, can also help us not starve to death in the long run.

We can do that, or we can pour all this effort - watering, mulching, fertilizing, weeding, mowing, watering again - into a useless plant that had no business being in the borders of North America in the first place.

Of course, people are broken, so we'll likely stick mostly with the grass. In that case, nature will have to wait until the humans kill themselves off - and then it will get back its sunny happy meadows anyway.





#environment, #Landscaping, #global-warming, #climate-change, #USA, #wildlife, #conservation
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