Mar. 1, 2009 (World News Trust) -- The single most irrigated crop in the
United States is… (drum roll please) lawn. Yep,
40 million acres of lawn
exist across the Land of Denial and Americans
collectively spend about $40 billion on seed, sod, and chemicals each
year. And then there's all that water.
If you include golf courses,
lawns in America cover an area roughly
the size of New York State and require 238 gallons of (usually
drinking-quality) water per person, per day. According
to the EPA, nearly a third of all residential water use in the US
goes toward what is euphemistically known as "landscaping."
We have become a nation of pawns with lawns. Food
comes from the drive-thru, entertainment is televised, the concept of
play exists on hand-held computers, democracy is a reality show every
four years, and that tiny parcel of land we allegedly share with some
bailed out bank is inevitably set aside to be a lawn.
As described by Ted Steinberg, author of American
Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,
when it comes to lawns, social and ecological factors often work in
coordination. "Perfection became a commodity of post-World War
II prefabricated housing such as Levittown, N.Y., in the late 1940s,"
writes Steinberg. "Mowing became a priority of the bylaws of
such communities."
Lawn mowers produce several
types of pollutants, including
ozone precursors, carbon dioxide, and polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons (classified as probable carcinogens by the CDC). In
fact, operating a typical gasoline mower produces as much polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons as driving a car roughly 95 miles. Since some
folks are legally required to maintain a lawn (more about that
shortly), here's a suggestion or two: human-powered
mowers or try using your
bicycle.
Besides the air and noise pollution of mechanized
mowers, there's another form of toxicity directly related to
America's lawn addiction. "Lawns use ten
times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland,"
writes Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food
Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood
into a Community. "These
pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater
and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global
warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease,
and birth defects."
“If the Bill of Rights
contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal
poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public
officials,” wrote Rachel
Carson almost five decades ago,
“it is surely because our forefathers … could conceive of
no such problem.”
We now produce pesticides at a rate more than
13,000 times faster than we did when Carson wrote Silent Spring
in 1962. The EPA considers 30 percent of all insecticides, 60 percent of all
herbicides, and 90 percent of all fungicides to be carcinogenic, yet
Americans spend about $7 billion on 21,000 different pesticide
products each year. "Prior to World War II, annual worldwide use
of pesticides ran right around zero," says author Derrick
Jensen. "By now it's 500 billion tons, increasing
every year." As a result, about 860 Americans suffer from
pesticide poisoning every single day; that's almost 315,000 cases per
year.
As mentioned above, maintaining a noxious and
unproductive lawn isn't just a simple case of one-size-fits-all
conformity in the face all logic and evidence; it's often the law.
In October 2008, for
example, Joseph Prudente of Beacon Woods, Florida, was sentenced
to jail for failing to sod his
lawn as required by the local homeowner covenants. Before you label
Mr. Prudente a modern day insurrectionist, take note that the reason
he failed to live up to his suburban obligation was predictable: he
couldn't afford to replace his sprinklers when they broke. "It's
a sad situation," said Bob Ryan, Beacon Woods Homeowners
Association board president. "But in the end, I have to say he
brought it upon himself."
I'm guessing Mr. Ryan has
never heard of Food
Not Lawns.
Imagine, as the folks at Food Not Lawns do, each
house not with a lawn but instead with a small organic "Victory"
garden from which the family is fed. Imagine those without a lawn
joining their local community garden to re-connect and grow their
own. Or perhaps you'd like to imagine them engaging in some green
graffiti and/or seed bombing.
(For the uninitiated, seed
bombs are “compressed
balls of soil and compost that have been impregnated with wildflower
seeds. Jettisoned onto barren, abandoned, or otherwise inhospitable
land, including construction sites and abandoned lots.” Liz
Christy -- who started the "Green
Guerillas" in 1973 -- coined
the alternative term, seed grenades. Smaller versions are commonly
called seed balls. No matter what you call them, seed bombs are part
of the ever-increasing international
trend of guerilla
gardening and you can find
kindred spirits here.)
"The vast expanse of
forever-green American lawn is not only the most resource intensive
agricultural crop in the world," writes
Tobias Policha in Green Anarchy,
"but also an obscene icon to our arrogant privilege and total
alienation from a life in harmony with nature."
The sterile
lawn -- complete with its requisite sprinkler, chemical cocktail,
bug zapper, and "keep off the grass" sign -- is an ideal
symbol for America's cookie
cutter culture. Lawns, writes
Ted Steinberg, are "an instrument of planned homogeneity."
He asks: "What better way to conform than to make your front
yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?"
To which we must reply: Fuck
homogeneity and fuck conformity.
Why don’t more people
step away from the coast-to-coast mall mentality? Once reason is the
looming Green
Scare, a term which refers to
“the federal government’s expanding
prosecution efforts against
animal liberation and ecological activists, drawing parallels to the
“Red Scares” of the 1910s and 1950s.”
The answer to this tactic,
as always, is more solidarity. More of us need to embrace
ideas like dumpster diving, off the grid living, wwoofing,
billboard liberation, monkey
wrenching, radical
love,
bartering, freeganism, veganism, transition towns, and other forms of
the DIY ethic. We need organic vegetable
gardens, not lawns. We need two wheels, not four. We need food not
bombs. We need immediate courageous collective direct action, not
"hope and change." We need comrades, not pawns with lawns.
And we need it all now.
Mickey Z. has lived in
apartments his entire life but can also be found on the Web at
http://www.mickeyz.net.