Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Leaves of Grass
As I dug out crabgrass, raked in topsoil, and planted grass seed in our tiny scraggly front yard this past weekend, I remembered something I said to a friend when I was probably 20 and quite possibly stoned: “But what if later on we get trapped by, you know, lawns and shit.”
I don’t know about trapped, but I sure did spend a lot of the weekend with lawns and shit – well, manure, anyway.
Apparently not as much as a lot of American householders, though. According to Wired, 50,000 square miles of the continental US is lawn – roughly the total corn acreage in Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska combined. (Or, if this is for some reason easier to visualize, the land area of Nicaragua.)
On balance, this lawn mania is probably not a good thing for the planet. True, grass absorbs carbon dioxide, but then there’s all the fertilizer, weed killer, and water for irrigation. And don’t get me started on power lawn mowers.
I’m not planning on fertilizing or weed killing, I’ll start forgetting about watering pretty soon, and I use a hand mower, but I’m not off the hook: it will take a few years of carbon dioxide absorption to make up for the gas burned in trucking from Maine to my local Home Depot the half dozen bags of topsoil I spread. (Incidentally, “dirt cheap” at Home Depot is $1.59 for a 40 pound bag, although there is a lot of water in that dirt.)
I don’t know about trapped, but I sure did spend a lot of the weekend with lawns and shit – well, manure, anyway.
Apparently not as much as a lot of American householders, though. According to Wired, 50,000 square miles of the continental US is lawn – roughly the total corn acreage in Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska combined. (Or, if this is for some reason easier to visualize, the land area of Nicaragua.)
On balance, this lawn mania is probably not a good thing for the planet. True, grass absorbs carbon dioxide, but then there’s all the fertilizer, weed killer, and water for irrigation. And don’t get me started on power lawn mowers.
I’m not planning on fertilizing or weed killing, I’ll start forgetting about watering pretty soon, and I use a hand mower, but I’m not off the hook: it will take a few years of carbon dioxide absorption to make up for the gas burned in trucking from Maine to my local Home Depot the half dozen bags of topsoil I spread. (Incidentally, “dirt cheap” at Home Depot is $1.59 for a 40 pound bag, although there is a lot of water in that dirt.)
