Guest laugh by David Middleton
Being that this is the time of year when I have to start spending entire weekends on yard work, I almost agree with Mr. Holthaus on this one…
SCIENCE
Get Rid of Your Lawn
It’s a waste of land, and it’s terrible for the environment. You can do something better.
By ERIC HOLTHAUS
MAY 06, 2019This story was originally published by Grist and has been republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
My strategy for finding a house was probably a little different than most: I looked for the one with the smallest lawn I could find.
The privilege of homeownership is increasingly rare these days, and I wanted to make sure my little plot of land would have a net benefit to my city and the environment.[…]
[L]awns are awful for the planet. Our addiction to lawns means that grass is the single largest irrigated agricultural “crop” in America, more than corn, wheat, and fruit orchards combined. A NASA-led study in 2005 found that there were 63,000 square miles of turf grass in the United States, covering an area larger than Georgia. Keeping all that grass alive can consume about 50 to 75 percent of a residence’s water.
Lawnmowers suck up gas and pollute the air: Every year, U.S. homeowners spill about 17 million gallons of gas while filling up mowers. We use tens of millions of pounds of chemical fertilizer and pesticides on our lawns.
All this effort, of course, isn’t cheap. Americans spend more than $36 billion every year on lawn care, 4½ times more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
[…]
My lawn’s days as a grass-based environmental scourge are numbered. I have big plans for my outdoor area: fruit trees, garden space, native plants. It’s small enough that this project should be manageable, even for a single parent with two small kids.
Slate
However, after reading Mr. Holthaus’ rationale for getting rid of his “grass-based environmental scourge”, I am now encouraged to mow, fertilize and water my lawn more often than ever before.
If spending more money on my lawn will cut into the EPA’s budget, I’m ready to break the bank at Lowes Home Improvement and Calloway’s Nursery!
A NASA-led study in 2005 found that there were 63,000 square miles of turf grass in the United States, covering an area larger than Georgia.
Here’s an idea for Mr. Holthaus: Get Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to write a new and improved Green New Deal Cultural Revolution Bill… Forcibly relocate all lawns to Georgia and then cover them with solar panels! Then cover Washington State with wind turbines. This would be enough solar and wind to replace coal and natural gas! Well, except on windless nights and windless cloudy days.
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Mine is at its best right now – before the first mow. After that, all bets are off. I’d prefer to let it grow, but the city wouldn’t allow it. Goats would be another alternative that the city wouldn’t allow – but they’d be good for the lawn and save me gas.
I think people underestimate the value of the average urban lawn. You’d be surprised what’s going on. They are an invaluable resource for feeding birds, hedgehogs, amphibians…… Fungi, insects, worms, slugs…..
Obviously every thing in moderation, most people do not blitz lawns withe chemical and ‘manicure’ them, and a variety of garden habitat is best.
Petrol mower fumes are the work of Satan, but then BBQs fumes come straight from Satan’s arse.
Keeping all that grass alive can consume about 50 to 75 percent of a residence’s water.
Eh? I never water the grass. Nature does a fine job of watering it all on it’s own.
We use tens of millions of pounds of chemical fertilizer and pesticides on our lawns.
Again, never use the stuff on the lawn.
Lawnmowers suck up gas and pollute the air:
Yes, the lawnmowers do suck up the gas, but the benefit far outweigh the cost. I get the exercise from pushing the mower round the yard to cut the grass and the planet’s plants get the benefit of the extra plant-food that is released into the air. win-win.
Let’s put aside all the dislike for this guy for a moment. What he says has a lot of truth in it. 2 cycle mowers pollute the air. People tend to over fertilize their lawns which eventually runs off into local waterways. The same with pesticides and herbicides. They always end up in the water. In the Las Vegas area new lawns are a no-no and there is even a rip it out payback system to get rid of existing lawns ….. they use too much water.
I did away with my lawn years ago. My front yard faces due west and is exposed to the Sun all the way until sundown. I am on a well system and couldn’t justify wasting all MY water in a losing battle against the Sun. I replaced the front lawn with cypress mulch and native plants and cactus that once established do not need to be watered. I added shell walk ways all around those plants. I liked did so much that I did the same for the back yard. Large bougainvilleas rim the entire back yard making it private and keeping those pesky kids away. I painted my house paprika color and now I have the “Arizona” property in my neighborhood. I have an abundance of birds, butterflies, snakes, rabbits, and other wildlife that take advantage of the area. In the evening I sit in one of the many seating areas I created just taking in all the natural animal activity and enjoying the peace and quiet of it all. It should be noted that I do not live in a gated or HOA controlled neighborhood so there are not rules about how a property looks to deal with.
2 cycle mowers pollute the air
*******************************
and in US lawnboy (last 2 stroke mower manufacturer) stopped selling them decades ago.
now if you meant to say weed wackers/leaf blowers they are still made BUT are more efficient than the 4 cycle counterparts.
Thanks, shows how long I haven’t had to mow.
“The privilege of homeownership is increasingly rare these days…”
Single family homes have increased in number is the US ever since 1940, which was the earliest data I could find. Inserting these little throwaway phrases to support a narrative is a propaganda technique.
I have a “lawn” of thyme. It smells like Italian food when I mow… mmmmm
I know someone who replanted with clover when most of his grass died. It keeps the weeds down and doesn’t grow high enough to need cutting. Plus he says he gets lucky more often because there’s always a few 4 leaf ones among the millions in the lawn.
Yes, crimson clover is on my shortlist for planting over large areas at my retirement farm. It fixes nitrogen and blooms beautifully.
How’d you do it? I’ve got a bare patch in my front lawn that I want to turn into 100 % thyme so I never have to cut it. The rest is a mix of thyme and grass which the thyme is slowly killing.
I don’t get this statement:
Fruit trees ? … Garden space ?
Gardens don’t require water? Fruit trees don’t require energy-demanding care or water?
How does he plan to manage the grass that grows around his garden? — goats, maybe? — then he’s got to build proper containment fences, which require more materials produced using fossil fuels, and then he’s got to care for the goats.
And how does he plan to manage the fruit trees ?
I just don’t see how this plan would be less resource-consuming than a lawn. Maybe if he explained in more detail, I would get it.
Do you think we’ll see maximum lawn size regulations someday?
Lawnmowing is good therapy. Holthaus could use an electric lawnmower if that would make him feel better about mowing. And like I say, lawn mowing is good therapy so that would benefit him, too.
Holthaus proposes to remove his grass so he doesn’t have to water it, and then replaces the grass with other plants that need to be watered. I’m not sure how this makes much of a difference.
I never water my lawn. When it stops raining, the grass stops growing, and I don’t have to mow. A blessing in disguise. Of course, we don’t want it to get too dry.
It’s raining right now. That’s a good thing because we can store up moisture for the hot, dry summer to come. The closer we get to summer with it still raining around here, the better.
I noticed a while back that NOAA was claiming the “severe weather bullseye” was moving east because of CAGW and was centered somewhere near Mississippi and Alabama.
I said at the time that my observations were that the “bullseye” moved around a lot from year to year Some years it would focus in one geographic area and move to another area in other years. This is based on how the jet stream configures itself, imo.
It looks like the current focus of severe weather is beginning in the Texas-Oklahoma-Kansas corridor and then moves east. Some years the focus will be east of Oklahoma which means fewer severe storms for us.
But this year it looks like the fronts are blowing up over the south central U.S. Still not too powerful though. The number of tornadoes from the last front to come through Oklahoma last week was up to 30 but none of them were very powerful, EF-1’s and 2’s. They will get stronger as the temperatures climb.
This focus will move to the east as the summer proceeds because Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas usually get a high pressure system sitting on top of us during the heighth of the summer warmth which suppresses severe weather and pushes it off to the east where moisture is available to blow up big storms.
Holthaus could use an electric lawnmower if that would make him feel better about mowing.
Better yet, he could use a non-powered lawnmower. They do make and sell those as a quick google (or other search engine of your choice) for “non powered lawn mower” will reveal.
Holthaus proposes to remove his grass so he doesn’t have to water it, and then replaces the grass with other plants that need to be watered.
he proposes replacing grass, which you can leave to ma nature to water (if the grass doesn’t get enough water, well he doesn’t like the grass anyway, so no biggie) with other plants (a garden) which will require watering when ma nature isn’t providing enough (gardens aren’t much good when you let the plants in them die from lack of water).
“My strategy for finding a house was probably a little different than most: I looked for the one with the smallest lawn I could find.”
Right there he fails his green socialist credentials test. He should be living in a re-purposed cargo container stacked on top of other re-purposed cargo containers. Composting toilets, drink his own urine (or someone else’s, ideally). He’s not really committed, but he should be.
Seventeen million gallons of gas spilled per year?
That’s BS.
I wonder who Eric thinks granted him the “privilege” to own a home?
I miss my .5 acre yard in Idaho w/ our 3 chickens, cat and 2 dogs. Every “Earth” day I would burn a pile of tree limbs, leave the truck running for 6 hrs, drink heavily and fire up the charcoal grill for supper. (T-bone steaks, natch!)
My conscience is clear – the back patio was built using TREX. P.S. – Want to lower CO2 levels? Duck tape the mouths of all envro-nazi’s. Res Ipsa Loquitur.
I’m a happy owner of a battery powered lawnmower (I have a large lawn, but no problem, I have two high capacity batteries, that’s enough for more than enough lawn mowing time for one day). AND my lawn has a lot of fruit trees on it.
#thatgreensmugnessfeeling
The best limit or don’t fertilize ad was put out by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. They gave you the “choice” of fertilizing or having more blue crabs and using the excess water to boil those crabs. They did it with good humor and no lectures.
In my area people want to have nice green lawns with fescue. We are too warm to have fescue without fall seeding, fertilizing, aeration, spring fertilization and lots of water. I decided to go back to native Virginia growth, but my wife didn’t like poison ivy. So, instead of trying to kill bermuda grass, I let it grow and now she complains about wiregrass. Wiregrass chokes most everything else out. No watering, some chemical warfare and if I want to cut grass all winter, sow annual rye.
And we have plenty of water for doing the lawn.
His photo looks like “Pajama Boy”
Meanwhile they ignore the parking lot encroachment effect on UHI which they are not allowed to talk about. They also don’t talk about the extra air miles of changing the mix of leisure time and money in the story. How does a jet trip to Hawaii compare to my small engine mower? And how does that golf resort team compare to my handheld fertilizer spreader?
Eric seems to think that fruit trees, gardens, and “native species” require nothing more than good wishes and an approving glance. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have about an acre of lawns, with a small vineyard, a blue berry patch, and several ancient fruit trees. Most of them require protection from deer, meaning fencing and netting, and all of them require days or weeks of work pruning and weeding. The lawn, making up 90% of the yard, requires a couple of hours each week on my riding mower, and another couple of hours pushing a lawn mower on slopes that are too steep or fragile for the mower. If I neglect to mow, or if the mower is in the shop for maintenance, the black berries, scotch broom, bamboo and any number of companion invasive species will quickly emerge. Lots that are left to themselves become “briar patches”, thorny jungles five to seven feet tall, that serve as hidden camp sites for “homeless” vagrants who support their drug dependencies by robbing from those who prefer to live in houses. Their victims, the home owners, pay taxes in the forlorn hope that the county will provide a modest level of protection from the lawless.
And those fruit trees are perhaps the most demanding category of vegetation, especially if you choose to cultivate them using just a few modest chemical treatments for fungus. As apples drop from the trees, some ripe, and others not, you will discover that few are of the unblemished perfection that we find in the local grocery. The ripe ones that fall on a well tended lawn may survive the fall unbruised and end up on the table a few hours later. The rest of the fruit needs to be picked up and disposed unless you want your yard to smell of vinegar, while simultaneously providing sustenance to all sorts of creatures that you really don’t want to share your house with. Our most treasured yard investment after the riding- and push mowers is a 1 ton utility trailer that allows us to dispose of the yard waste, including fallen fruit that is not simply not edible. Fortunately, the county does provide a free disposal service for the yard waste, so this is all “recycled” into compost that the county sells. But most of my neighbors are old style, and the burn pile pits are a rather common feature of many of the better-kept yards.
Holthaus reminds me of several delusional city types who live in our rural community who seem to have a hard time grappling with reality. One fellow brags of hosting 18 raccoons on his deck with a steady diet of cat food. He lives several miles from us, but his neighbors must wonder why they suddenly have a platoon of raccoons terrorizing the neighborhood, and very few other species. If the daily ration is stopped for some reason, this will be a dangerous place for children and pets.
Holthaus needs to spend more time with his virtual reality simulations, and less time instructing those of us who experience actual reality.
I suspect this is his first home.
My wife convinced me to convert parts of our lawn to “landscaping”.
It’ll be easier, she said.
So now, instead of spending an hour every 7-10 days mowing an open space, I spend an hour every 7-10 days winding my way around my “landscaping”…and I spend several hours a week mulching, weeding and edging the “landscaping”.
Good exercise for a retiree, but not much fun for a working stiff.
Of course Eric may be one of those limousine liberals that can hire a working stiff to do it for him.
Yep… Mowing is easy. Blowing leaves out of simulated dry river beds filled with well-sorted pebbles, cobbles and the odd boulder is a fracking nightmare.
People have been doing stuff for a long long time.
One of the biggest reasons grass is used around the house is that, over a period of a long long time, people figured out that short grass is easiest, overall.
Some people only learn from their own experience.
I agree that lawns and open spaces around homes have been around for a long time. I’d imagine early settlers in areas where there was no reasonable expectation of a response by a sheriff or deputy found that open spaces provide no cover for those who would approach a properly fortified abode with ill intent. Don’t give the bad guys anything to hide behind.
Sadly, AOC is not available to write the bill this week, and probably she will be tied up for an extended period of time.
It seems she has just discovered a new fangled gadget that her DC apartment is equipped with, that she did not know about and never heard of. She is naturally terrified, and needs to take some time learning how to operate the darn thing, and who can blame her?
I am speaking of something she calls a “garbage disposal”.
Apparently she will also be researching whether or not this gizmo is harmful for the environment, or if it is another of the evil plots from corporate planet killers.
So count her out.
In case there is anybody who is the early adopter type and already knows how to use one of these dealios, I am sure she would appreciate any tips you might have.
I mean the thing was only invented 92 years ago, so having one of these things is about like if you already had an electric light in your house in 1972.
You can leave comments for her here:
https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1125661872479453185
Oldie but goodie: Mr Obvious
Garbage disposals are outlawed in NYC. They like they’re garbage and the vermin it draws.
Funny, I always thought of lawn maintenance as a form of exercise, and doing my part to keep the neighborhood looking nice. I guess I’m not as slovenly as ERric Holthaus, and I care more about my neighborhood than he does his.
17,000,000 gallons of gas is produced from about 800,000 BBL of oil, or less than 1/20th of our average daily petroleum consumption. This would be yet another insignificant micromanagement of USA emissions.
Maybe next he can tell us all how much food gets wasted feeding all of the useless pet dogs and cats so many of us have?
You know, since he is on the subject of things people have and spend money on but do not care about.
I agree with Eric Holthaus, especially about the waste of water on lawns in water-scarce states. But I’ll take a green lawn where my kids can play and friends and family can come over and recreate over a prickly and unusable xeriscape any day. I’m working out how to make the lawn portion of my yard smaller but still usable and fun, plant shrubs and trees, reduce water use, and most importantly, reduce my maintenance effort. And if anyone can tell me how to stop the %#$! deer from eating my flowers and plants and the blinkety-blank neighbor dogs (and deer) from taking a dump on my lawn, I’d love to know. Shooting one and leaving its carcass to rot as a warning isn’t an option. The smell.
Keeping a rather large python or two in the yard might help.
Tannin at 10% weight/volume reduces deer feeding by 72%; as per Monteith’s S.D.Univ. thesis (2012) “Nutritional Ecology of White-Tailed Deer: Assessment … Repellent.” Tannin can be bought inexpensively by the pound on eBay.
Sicklepod planted next to other plants can confuse deer from browsing because it has deterrent compounds. But sicklepod is quite dangerous to many animals that eat it & a safe tactic in a residential area seems problematic.
We keep a green lawn between us and the chaparall for fire prevention mainly. The brush, despite the relatively dry climate, grows back in gangbusters if you don’t keep it at bay by mowing. And I want to see the rattlesnakes before they see me. Our beautiful greenspot in the midst of the dryer foothill region is like a magnet to all kinds of wildlife – birds, deer, bear, fox, bobcat, you-name-it, we’ve had it in our yard. We cultivate fruit trees, grapes, berries, flowers and a vegetable garden but eat very little of any. The animals get most of it before we have a chance to harvest anything but the excess. Not much of this abundance would exist if we didn’t have a lawn. And I’d do a lot more couch-potatoing.
I worked for a number of years as an independent contract gardener in the Los Angeles area. (Basically a machine operator behind a lawn mower.) Got to thinking I was throwing away a lot of useful cattle feed. So I took a grass sample out to a Riverside chemist for nutritional analysis. Don’t remember the specific results, only that it was surprisingly (to me) high in protein. I also contacted one of the Chino dairymen, where I learned that they can’t use it because it affects the taste of milk.
Never fear, I found a use for it. One at a time, get a Red Angus, Charolais, and Holstein calf and raise it for beef. First two, good for back yard barbecue. Holstein, good for dog food….