Why Lawns?

Culture is an insidious thing. Culture is life giving in the sense that it helps us find a place to belong. It gives us a sense that we are where we belong. But culture can also be destructive, as when our culture expects us to do things that ultimately contribute to the destruction of our habitat.

Take one of our cultural icons: THE LAWN. We deliberately set our houses well back on our lots so there will be room for a lawn, and we expect our lawns to meet certain very precise standards. It needs to look “healthy”, but ironically, healthy in this context means that it is and looks different than anything ever found in nature. This “healthy” lawn, if neglected by humans for a little more than a week, begins to look unhealthy. So we create an artificial ‘normal’ for our lawns, and redefine the word “healthy” to describe that look.

And nuturing that “healthy lawn” contributes to the destruction of our habitat. Note:
• This lawn needs nitrogen fertilizer. This fertilizer is derived from natural gas, a limited resource, that surely ought to be preserved for other more important purposes. Also to satisfy our notion of a “healthy” lawn, it is imperative that more nitrogen be applied than the grass will use up, which means there will be nitrogen runoff, fouling our water ways.
• This lawn needs phosphate fertilizer. This fertilizer too is in limited supply, and the readily available deposits are used up. The fertilizer we have needs to be saved for food production. Again to achieve our ideal, more phosphate needs to be applied than the lawn can use, so there will be nutrient runoff – and fouled water ways.
• Clippings need to be removed. They fill up our landfills (unless of course they are composted).
• This lawn needs herbicides. Herbicides are chemical products used to kill plants we don’t want. Farmers use them to remove weeds from their fields, the US military uses them to defoliate forested areas so enemy soldiers cannot hide there, and we use them to keep our lawns “healthy”. The question is, how confident can we be that these chemicals do only what we want them to, and don’t have any negative side effect? What is the effect of repeated use of these chemicals? Are we OK with risking our children’s health so we can have a dandelion free lawn?

Dr. June Irwin, a Quebec dermatologist became convinced there was a link between the skin rashes she was seeing and exposure to lawn-care chemicals. In the end she succeeded in convincing the city council that the use of herbicides for cosmetic purposes was not in the town’s interest. This resulted in a ban on the use of those products in that city, a ban that has spread to many other cities. Her story is told in the movie A Chemical Reaction.

Eric Rempel