http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/07/21/080721crbo_books_kolbert
Books
Turf War
Americans can’t live without their lawns—but how long can they live with
them?
by Elizabeth Kolbert July 21, 2008
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One of the most popular herbicides was—and continues to
be—2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4-D, as it is commonly known, a
major ingredient in Agent Orange. Regrettably, 2,4-D killed not only
dandelions but also plants that were beneficial to lawns, like
nitrogen-fixing clover. To cover up this loss, any plant that the
chemical eradicated was redefined as an enemy. “Once considered the
ultimate in fine turf, a clover lawn is looked upon today by most
authorities as not much better than a weed patch” is how one guidebook
explained the change.
The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible
were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked
the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer
to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul
Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly
spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both
lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane.
Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and
chlorpyrifos—both of which affect the nervous system—took their place.
Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be
hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping
dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl,
which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied
to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause
developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to—among many other
organisms—tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green”
(2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve
University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with
homeowners as the guinea pigs.”
Meanwhile, the risks of the chemical lawn are not confined to the people
who own the lawns, or to the creatures that try to live in them. Rain
and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where
the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce
aquatic “dead zones.” Manhattanites may not keep lawns, but they drink
the chemicals that run off them. A 2002 report found traces of
thirty-seven pesticides in streams feeding into the Croton River
Watershed. A few years ago, Toronto banned the use of virtually all lawn
pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4-D and carbaryl, on the ground
that they pose a health risk, especially to children.
Although it was not intended as such, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,”
published in 1962, is often cited as the first work in the anti-lawn
tradition. In her study of America’s indiscriminate use of pesticides,
Carson was repeatedly led back to the front yard.
“One may get a jar-type attachment for the garden hose, for example, by
which such extremely dangerous chemicals as chlordane or dieldrin are
applied as one waters the lawn,” she observed. “Power mowers also have
been fitted with devices for the dissemination of pesticides,
attachments that will dispense a cloud of vapor as the homeowner goes
about the task of mowing.” Rarely, she argued, was the homeowner aware
of the dangers of what he was doing, because it was not in the interests
of the manufacturer to inform him of these. “Instead, the typical
illustration portrays a happy family scene, father and son smilingly
preparing to apply the chemical to the lawn, small children tumbling
over the grass with a dog.”
Right around the time that Carson was writing “Silent Spring,” Lorrie
Otto, a mother of two from the Milwaukee suburb of Bayside, decided to
restore her front lawn to prairie. One day, while she was folding
laundry in her basement, some village workers arrived and, without
consulting her, mowed her yard. Otto began speaking out against lawns,
calling them, among other things, “sterile,” “monotonous,” and
“flagrantly wasteful.” Her talks inspired the founding, in 1979, of what
might be described as the nation’s first grassroots anti-grass movement,
which dubbed itself Wild Ones. (Wild Ones now has chapters in twelve
states, including New York and Connecticut.)
Between them, Carson and Otto introduced all the main anti-lawn
arguments: toxicity, habitat destruction, resource depletion, enforced
conformity. They accepted the moral interpretation of the lawn, only to
perform yet another inversion. Instead of demonstrating that a homeowner
cared about his neighbors, a trim and tidy stretch of turf showed that
he didn’t.
“If they’re so large that you cannot use just a little hand-push lawn
mower, then I truly think they are evil,” Otto once said of lawns.
“Really evil.”
But what is the conscientious suburbanite supposed to do? If one accepts
the idea that lawns are, in a deep sense, unethical, how does one fill
the front yard?
Over the years, many alternatives to the lawn have been proposed.
Pollan, in his book “Second Nature” (1991), suggests replacing parts—or
all—of the lawn with garden. In “Noah’s Garden” (1993), Sara Stein, by
contrast, advocates “ungardening”—essentially allowing the grass to
revert to thicket. Sally and Andy Wasowski, in their “Requiem for a
Lawnmower” (2004), recommend filling the yard with native trees and
wildflowers. For those who don’t want to give up the look or the playing
space provided by a lawn, the Wasowskis suggest using Buffalo grass, one
of the very few turf species native to North America. Smaller American
Lawns Today, or SALT, is a concept developed by William Niering, who for
many years was a professor of botany at Connecticut College. Niering
planted trees around his property, then left most of the rest of his
yard unmowed, to become a meadow. “The meadow can take as much of your
remaining lawn as you want,” he observes in an essay posted on SALT’s
Web site. “There are some people who prefer no lawn, which is ideal!”
For the past few decades, David Benner, a horticulturist from Bucks
County, Pennsylvania, has been touting moss as an alternative to grass:
he himself has a one-acre “moss garden.” Recently, there have been
several calls to make the lawnspace productive. In “Food Not Lawns”
(2006), Heather C. Flores argues that the average yard could yield
several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. (If you live
in an urban area and don’t have a lawn, she suggests digging up your
driveway.) “Edible Estates” (2008) is the chronicle of a project by
Fritz Haeg, an architect and artist, who rips up conventional front
yards in order to replace them with visually striking “edible
plantings.” Haeg calls his approach “full-frontal gardening.”
Of course, to advocate a single replacement for the lawn is to risk
reproducing the problem. The essential trouble with the American lawn is
its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so
much as an idea imposed upon it—all green, all the time, everywhere.
Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by
the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses,
lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an
area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that
most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where
turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns
in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it
would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per
day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection
Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States
currently goes toward landscaping.
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