On Pharyngula, PZ Myers doesn't just want cut your grass—he wants to tear it out by the roots and leave it to rot in the sun. He quotes J. Crumpler on The Roaming Ecologist, who calls lawns "sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments [...] that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage." To make matters worse, lawnmower use adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, while beautiful bermuda grass requires a lot of H2O in a world that is increasingly insecure about water. During the depths of California's drought—which has seen some relief from El Niño this year—many residents took a hard look at their lawns. On Significant Figures, Mathew Heberger writes, "many Californians could reduce their outdoor water use by 70% or more by landscaping with low water-use plants." It's not as if the alternative is a dirt patch in front of your house; there are a wide variety of plants you can grow with nutritional, ecological, and aesthetic value, that will be less of a middle finger to the planet.
Well-Manicured Wastelands
Just before we turn the corner, a woman goes jogging past with a Golden Retriever. As we continue on our way, I can hear the Doberman three houses up barking at them as they go past. The windows muffle the sound, but I can make out a bit of it. "Get offa my lawn! Gonna bite you!
I see the brown streaks and spots and blotches all across your lawn, every brown area exactly like every other in its tone and hue, because all were caused by a single event, that being your misapplication of high-nitrogen fertilizer, as part of your misguided effort to make your lawn look like a
Another morning, another gastropod foray.
Conditions in the yard were a little odd this morning, owing to the fact that our wee patch of lawn was watered last night. This means that conditions were moist in the vicinity of the lawn but fairly dry otherwise.
It's spring here in suburbia, which means my neighbors were all out this weekend hastening the doom of the planet by running their gas-powered lawn mowers. Not me-- I was, um, paying our neighbors' teenage son to mow our lawn. With a gas-powered lawn mower.
Lawns are a loathsome obscenity. Sometimes I feel the high maintenance of them is intended to drain one's life away so that the realtor can turn over the house quicker.
I was peeing brown one summer; It turned out that I had given myself 'white collar rhabdomyolysis' (muscle destruction) pushing a people powered mower over way too much bermuda (a bane, precluding growing anything else in the vacinity) on hot days.