Pristine turf grass lawns are as synonymous with America as baseball and apple pie. For those of us who grew up in the suburbs, waking up to the lulling drone of lawnmowers signaled the start of a summer Saturday with all of its anticipated pleasures. I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t enjoy the smell of fresh-cut grass. And deep down, even those of us who are staunchly anti-herbicide harbor a secret hatred of dandelions, if only for the glares they evoke from our neighbors: Do they think I’m lazy? Or letting my property go downhill?
Yet despite what Scotts®, Bayer, TruGreen®, and other corporations in the so-called green industry would have us think, lawns are far from green, environmentally speaking. (They’re not American, either.) We’ve known for decades about the harm lawns cause, but we are still mowing and blowing: Irrigated turf grass covers nearly two percent of the land in the United States, more than 40 million acres. Every square inch of it replaces diverse habitat for wildlife with a monoculture of nonnative plants, and we keep it going with fossil fuels and chemicals toxic to most living things.
http://www.ecolandscaping.org/07/lawn-care/lawns-killing-us-time-kick-habit/
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