Effective January 1, 2012, homeowners and lawn care contractors in New York State will no longer be able to use lawn fertilizer containing phosphorus, the runoff of which is a major contributing factor in the overgrowth of algae and aquatic weeds in ponds, lakes and streams. This is likely to be a real blow to those suffering from OCLD (Obsessive Compulsive Lawn Disorder) but it’s great news for those of us who value natural resources over useless Kentucky bluegrass monoculture.
Personally, I’ve been on a mission to kill most of my lawn for some time now, for a number of reasons. Lawns are big, boring expanses of nothingness. Lawns make lousy wildlife habitat. They require endless hours of mowing during the hottest months of the year with a loud, polluting machine. And I’ve never quite understood the irony of pouring expensive fossil-fuel sourced fertilizer on grass in order to make it grow – then obsessively mowing it all down so it looks like a green carpet. (Wash, rinse and repeat – from May til October!) Even with the advent of mulching mowers, a surprising number of homeowners still put piles of grass clippings out for local town pickup, too. (They probably also complain that their taxes are too high.)
Don’t get me wrong; a small, mindfully-designed amount of lawn is just fine. If you have kids, then having a section of lawn makes for a great play area (assuming they actually go outside and use it). A small patch of grass makes a nice sitting area as well. But I would hazard to guess that about 90% of the turf in America really serves no purpose. It’s an endless source of expense, whether you take care of it yourself or pay someone else to do it. Huge expanses of trimmed grass are just one more reason we Americans think we have to work more to earn more.
It makes more sense to me to convert some or all of the lawn to more productive uses, like growing food, restoring native species and wildlife habitat. And yes, these alternatives can be attractive.
Bill Mollison, one of the founding fathers of permaculture, has some rather blunt observations about the lawn phenomenon. In Introduction to Permaculture, he writes,
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India [now banned for the most part here in New York], and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture. The American lawn could feed continents if people had more social responsibility. If we put the same amount of man power, fuel and energy into reforestation we could reforest the entire continent. A house with two cars, a dog and a lawn uses more resources and energy than a village of 2000 Africans…
Yet why should it be indecent to have anything useful in the front half of your property or around the house where people can see it? Why is it low-status to make that area productive? The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. The tradition has moved right into the cities and right down to quarter acre patches. It has become a cultural status symbol to present a non-productive facade. The lawn and its shrubbery is a forcing of nature and landscape into a salute to wealth and power, and has no other purpose or function.
The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled , menial and meaningless toil. The gardener is a schizoid serf as well as the feudal lord, following his lawnmower and wielding his hedge clippers, and contorting roses and privet into fanciful and meaningless topiary.
These days, do we really need to “salute” wealth and power?
My ultimate goal is to have no more lawn than I can mow in about 30 minutes with an old-fashioned reel-type mower. (Imagine mowing your lawn and still being able to hear the birds sing!) Right now I have a gasoline powered mower but there is method to my madness. I’m using it to help kill my lawn. Stay tuned for more on this in future posts!
(Oh, and for those afflicted with OCLD, you might check out Harvard University’s sustainable landscape management techniques for alternative ideas.)
