“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
-Albert Einstein
WHEN WE SEARCH FOR ways to personally improve the environment, one obvious place to look is literally in our own backyards. In the seventeenth century, British noblemen surrounded their estates with green lawns, kept closely shorn by herds of grazing sheep. Viewed as a sign of wealth and status, this custom eventually crossed the pond and has since become a revered American tradition – although we now typically use power mowers instead of sheep to clip the grass on our lawns.
It was at an early age that I developed a deep appreciation for the beauty of rolling expanses of lush, green grass. Indeed, owning a plot of grass was a part of my own American dream, evoking pleasant childhood memories of playing ball with my brothers and our friends; or of just stretching out on a green lawn, gazing upward to watch a few clouds drift lazily across a summer sky.
But, if we are not careful, this pleasant dream can begin to morph into something more foreboding. For many adults, a perfectly manicured expanse of weed-free deep green turf has become a badge of honor and, somewhat curiously, is often equated with neighborliness and good citizenship. We have forgotten that our yard should be considered a refuge – a safe and comfortable place for playing games with our children or entertaining friends, while also serving as a haven for many living creatures.
We have slowly changed our perceptions, and have conditioned ourselves to define a completely unnatural ecosystem as necessary and beautiful; often choosing to value the appearance of our yard over its usefulness as a playground for humans, and as a home to many diverse life forms.
We do so at a significant cost. Better adapted to the climate and terrain of the British Isles, a closely cut monoculture grass lawn is not suitable for many regions of America. In an attempt to maintain our unrealistic vision of what constitutes beauty, we fight the natural order of our environment, spend countless hours of time, and apply millions of pounds of toxic chemicals to our yards and gardens. Perhaps we should simply adjust our way of thinking, choosing to change our perceptions rather than to continue to perpetuate this impractical dream.
In an effort to maintain an artificial beauty, we place the safety of our children and others at significant risk. Many lawn chemicals are very dangerous to our health, with some of them linked to increased rates of leukemia, lymphoma, and asthma. Children are more susceptible to the effects of these toxins, and they are of course the very ones who often play and roll around on our lawns. Our pets also run across chemical laden yards, exposing themselves to high doses of toxins, inadvertently carrying them into our homes, further increasing our dose exposure as well as their own.
Attempting to create a flawless outdoor carpet of deep green grass and a weed-free garden, we often kill beneficial pollinators and countless other necessary organisms as collateral damage. Many of these applied lawn chemicals will also eventually leach into our aquifers and poison our drinking water supplies, ultimately ending up in our rivers, lakes, and oceans. The synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that we add to help the grass grow – and the gasoline burning mowers that we use to cut it back down – also emit greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change.
If you plan to someday build a new home, consider designing a yard with little or no grass. If you already live in a home with a grass yard, attempt to manage it responsibly, and maybe try to look at it from a new perspective. Adjust your mower blades to the highest setting and leave the clippings on the lawn, which is much healthier for the grass. Pull weeds in your lawn and garden by hand. If you choose to fertilize, do so sparingly, and consider using compost or an organic fertilizer without pesticides.
Accept a few dandelions, and actually encourage the growth of clover in your yard. I have learned to love clover, and I over-seed my grass lawn with it.
Clover adds valuable nitrogen to the soil, and is quite beautiful when flowering. Deeming clover to be a weed is based purely on perception, and a misguided one at that.
Dandelions provide food for bees, butterflies, and birds. If you are not quite ready to make friends with dandelions – I am still working at this – you can simply dig them up rather than spraying them with chemicals. Dandelions may also be outcompeted by a mixture of clover and grass grown together in non-compacted well aerated soil.
We can challenge current notions born of social conditioning, and change our perception as to what constitutes a beautiful yard. We can think of our parcel of property as an integral part of a broader ecosystem, remembering that what we put on our lawn can eventually end up in an ocean a thousand miles away – or perhaps remain very close by, in the bodies of our children or other loved ones.
A perfectly green yard without weeds and pests may indeed look quite beautiful when viewed in isolation. But if we choose to stand back, and widen our field of view, we will get an entirely different perspective. We will see that the chemicals that bring perceived beauty to our yards may also result in dead fish, sickened birds, collapsing bee colonies, and malignant tumors – none of which are the least bit beautiful.