Lawn be gone

By Chris Bolgiano

07/28/2009

The husband just had surgery (honestly, not my fault this time) and can't mow the lawn. So, seduced by our new solar panels into shopping for electric gadgets I never knew I needed, I bought a cordless electric lawn mower. No more pulling that darn starting cord every time a tussock stops me on the scruffy paths we maintain around our Appalachian homestead.

But while Googling which mower to buy, I stumbled into something far more serious than simply choosing the best tool to destroy the natural environment around me. I found religion. The culture wars have moved out on the lawn.

A green sward around the manor has gone from designating eighteenth century aristocracy to expressing modern, middle-class homeowner righteousness. Since 1841, when the first American landscaping book called for "grass mown into a softness like velvet," lawns have become a national passion. "A lawn bespeaks . . . personal values," claims The Lawn Institute on a website that explains the environmental benefits of lawns, which consist largely of being better than bare, eroding soil.

Lawns are a form of ecocide that most people prize as a standard of aesthetics if not morality. Our lawns now cover 21 million acres, an area nearly the size of Pennsylvania. Statistics for the Bay watershed are hard to find, but Maryland alone mows close to a million acres of lawn, most of it surrounding single family homes.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans spend some thirty billion dollars a year maintaining lawns; one acre costs more than raising an acre of corn or rice, two of the world's major food crops.

Mowing uses 800 million gallons of mostly foreign gasoline a year, not counting the paltry, but toxic, 18 million gallons spilled during refueling. Burning fossil fuel in a conventional mower spews so much air pollution - like driving a car half a million miles a year -- that Los Angeles and other smoggy cities have offered programs to swap gas for electric mowers. Lawn lobbies prevented regulation of mower emissions until recently.

My mower (I named it Snipper) emits nothing except grass clippings, useful for compost. Our solar photovoltaics supply about 70% of the electricity to recharge it, which helps offset emissions from the coal burned for the rest of the necessary electricity.

At 76 pounds, Snipper weighs nearly two thirds of what I do, but handles easily, and makes about half the noise of a conventional mower. It used to be so quiet here on Cross Mountain that I would hear trees fall instead of lawn mowers. Now I hear trees falling to make lawns.

The development of riding mowers has contributed to massive spreads of suburbia in backwoods, and some amazing backside spreads, too. The loss of wildlife habitat is beyond calculation, especially because lawns often ruin what could serve as essential wildlife travel corridors connecting islands of habitat.

Lawns soak up nearly a third of all water used in the U.S., much of it treated drinking water. As water drains from lawns it carries residues from seventy million pounds of pesticides every year, ten times more per acre than agricultural crops. Sales of lawn care pesticides to Americans accounted for about a third of total world pesticide expenditures, in 1997, according to the EPA, and we suspect little has changed since then. Many of these chemicals are known to be carcinogenic in animals; others have never been tested, although children playing in the grass constitute an unofficial test.

Lawns examined have aspects of Hell as well as Eden. As society takes going green more seriously, the anti-lawn movement that has been languishing for decades is growing a few new "plants-roots." Dozens of websites and books advise on how to create lawn alternatives from prairie to forest, and online testimonials confirm that people who mow less have more fun, because they have more time for it.

But lawns continue to grow at the rate of almost four hundred thousand acres a year. Many people like to mow; like commuting, mowing offers a rare byte of personal time, plus real conquest to show for it. Homeowner associations and municipalities often impose lawn standards, even in deserts, although these have been successfully challenged. In 2007, a bruised, seventy-year-old grandma in Orem, Utah, made international news when she was jailed in handcuffs for letting her grass go brown. She bargained the charge down to disorderly conduct and a $100 fine. Clearly, it will be a while before we as a nation are ready to admit that we fought the lawn and the lawn won.