Our obsession with green lawns drives me nuts, and it's killing the environment

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/27/obsession-green-lawns-environment

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On Sunday mornings, you'll often find me sipping coffee with birdsong and the chatter of squirrels in the background as I read the paper.

But then it starts.

A stutter, a sputter, a cough that crescendos into a roar. In answer, another motor rumbles to life, followed by more. The mechanical conversation drowns out the calm, the stench of mower-ready gasoline and the whiff of grass cuts my air, and the weekend mania commences.

Green with envy takes on a whole new meaning during the summer.

Every year, Americans rush out to arm themselves with an arsenal of paraphernalia to obtain the perfect emerald carpet. I don't participate – lawn mania drives me crazy.

I like most of my neighbors, but the lengths to which they'll go to keep up with one another and their gusto to transform weeds into "flawless" turf both fascinates and infuriates me.

There is some entertainment value in the spectacle: for instance, the neighbor who sits astride his lawn tractor sans shirt, socks or sneakers – but with a pair of short-shorts that ride up and become harder to spot as the mowing goes one. (A visiting friend once spotted him and shouted, "Oh my God! Do you know your neighbor cuts his grass naked?")

But I am not amused when the stink of another neighbor's toxic fertilizer application or pesticide treatment invades my house or wafts past as I sit in my backyard. It's fine if he wants to expose himself to toxic chemicals as part of his ritual worship to the outdoors, but there's no reason to poison me, too.

Our frenzied love affair with green lawns fuels an industry worth $40bn per year and counting, as estimated by Ted Steinberg in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn – whether you do it yourself or hire help, it takes some serious cash to maintain that perfect green. A quick shopping list: seed, fertilizer, weedkiller, bug killer, more seed, a lawnmower, maintenance for the lawnmower (gas, blade sharpening, storage), a weedwacker and some sort of irrigation system. Money might not grow on trees, but it is, in fact, growing your lawn.

And then there's the water: according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American household uses about 320 gallons of water per day for outdoor use – and more than half of that is for lawns and gardens. Across the US, landscape irrigation alone sucks up one-third of residential water use (most of it on grass). The grand total: 9bn gallons per day.

All those fertilizers used frequently and indiscriminately aren't helping: they're washed into waterways along with the pesticides – American homeowners use 10 times more pesticides than farmers – and herbicides.

For all these reasons and more, I'm a lawn rogue: I have one, but I don't water it, fertilize it or treat it with anything to kill off some plants and leave others. I do cut it – reluctantly, about once a week so that the neighbors don't call town officials about me – during "normal" hours and definitely not as uniformly as my neighbors do. (If I could, I'd buy a goat to keep the grass in check.) I let the dandelions, crab grass and clover take over. I weed just enough so as not to choke my flowers – mostly perennials, of course. I tend to the native plants and flowers that are recolonizing my property – the coneflowers are robust this year. I watch the birds and the bees.

In the mornings, deer forage in the unlandscaped mini-forest encompassing half of my backyard – it's fenced off to keep them from munching on coneflowers, ivy ground cover and tomato plants – and, in the evenings, they migrate to the front. If I could, I'd train them to stick to the weedy lawn instead of my flowers. Until then, the flowers and plants get sprayed with a healthy dose of coyote pee as a deterrent. Beats some chemical my neighbors buy at Home Depot.

One of my neighbors, Susan, is a retired botanist, and she and her husband don't tend to a single blade of grass, front or back: native plants, flowers and other ground cover blanket the their yard, leaving them with something wild but well-kempt and low-maintenance. My nextdoor neighbors have let a third of their property run wild. They grow vegetables, clovers, dandelions and crab grass on all the rest – just like mine.

Maybe being a lawn rogue is contagious.

After all, who decided that "green" means "grassy"? Maybe that's heresy, but I am saving money, protecting bees, birds, butterflies and other critters and definitely doing more to protect – and nurture – the nature I love.