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from Natural Life magazine, July/August
2008 by Wendy Priesnitz Tired of cutting the grass? Worried about the pollution from all those small engine lawnmowers? Then tear up your turf! Lawns are monocultures that use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland – chemicals that pollute groundwater and contribute to global warming. Then there is that power mower, which pollutes more than your car. And the water...the lawns in the United States alone consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week – enough to water 81 million acres of organic vegetables for a whole summer. Many people are replacing their front lawns with native plant gardens and other landscaping that fosters biodiversity, but not as many ecological gardeners consider growing food in these spaces. That’s unfortunate, because the space occupied by the grass that surrounds your home could produce enough vegetables to feed your family, with enough space left over for a bit of recreational turf (maintained with a push mower, of course). While it requires more work than the relatively low-maintenance established native plant garden, growing food makes a strong social statement and is a positive step towards healing our planet’s many ills. In her book Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community Writing in the New York Times recently, author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto It’s not difficult to get started. You might want to transition from full lawn to full garden, reclaiming a bit of grass each year. There are a couple of methods for removing grass.... To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's online edition. Author Wendy Priesnitz is the Editor of Natural Life Magazine and a journalist with over 30 years of experience. She has also authored nine books. Read her blog. |
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, Heather Coburn traces the
idea of lawns back to the 18th century when French aristocrats planted the
agricultural fields around their estates to grass, to send the message that they
had more land than they needed and could therefore afford to waste some. Of
course, the French peasants were starving for lack of available land and the
French Revolution was the result.
and 
), suggested that this is one of the ways
individuals can contribute to solving the global warming crisis: “Rip out your
lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t, look into getting a plot in a community
garden. Measured against the problem we face, planting a garden sounds pretty
benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual
can do to reduce your carbon footprint...sure, but more important, to reduce
your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
