“Say, was you ever bit by a dead bee?”         -- To Have and Have Not, 1944

It’s just a matter of a few months until things start growing like crazy again and lawn care resumes after a wet winter break. Wait – did I say lawn care? I meant lawn combat. According to the Lawn Institute in Pleasant Hill, Tenn., Americans spent over $30 billion a year on lawns in 2004. While some of that tidy sum was likely spent on hiring help to mow the grass, I would venture to say that, judging by the number of chemical products lining the aisles of garden centers, much of it is spent on poisons.

Digging a little further, I came across Gimme Green, a 2007 film that takes a humorous look at America’s obsession with lawn and the effects it has on the environment, our pocketbooks and “our outlook on life.” As I suspected, all our little lawns really add up. Using info from the U.S. Geological Survey, the EPA and other agencies and groups, the filmakers present some appalling facts about water, such as:

    · Ninety-seven percent of the earth’s water is saltwater or is otherwise undrinkable and another two percent is frozen in ice caps and glaciers (well, for now anyway), leaving only one percent for all of the world’s needs — agricultural, residential, industrial, community, and let’s not forget wildlife’s needs.

    · If we continue to use like we do, two out of every three people on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025.

    · Forty to 60 percent of residential water use goes on landscapes in the U.S.; in southwestern states, it jumps to 75 percent, on average.

and about chemical use:

    · Americans apply 30,000 tons of pesticides (mainly herbicides and insecticides) on 41 million residential acres each year.

    · Children living in homes using pesticides have a 6.5 times greater chance of getting leukemia, according to the National Cancer Institute, and of course that applies to companion animals as well.

    · Of the 30 most common lawn pesticides, 19 are linked with cancer, 13 are linked with birth defects, 21 with reproductive effects, 26 with liver or kidney damage, 15 with neuro-toxicity, and 11 with disruption of the endocrine system.

    · Of those 30 pesticides, 23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources, 24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to ecosystems, 17 are detected in groundwater, 11 are toxic to bees, and 16 are toxic to birds. Such groundwater pollution can persist for several thousand years.

I can recall walking by front yards with the little signs by chem-lawn companies that advise people to keep kids and pets off freshly sprayed grass. Who wants a yard with toxic side effects?

Strolling in my garden last fall, I came upon a fuzzy little bumblebee on the parched earth, walking in circles and doing somersaults, seemingly overcome by some uncontrollable force. I had witnessed another bumblebee exhibiting the same thing a day earlier and later found it dead. After watching the poor thing for some time, my angst led me to end its suffering and I threw a brick on it. This may not seem like a big deal, but for someone whose values revolve around causing no harm, this upset me.

Then I remembered other dead or crazy-acting bumblebees I’d seen around the yard in recent years – not a large number, but enough to make me wonder if someone nearby was using pesticides that were causing their pitiful deaths. I know that bumblebees, like most insects, don’t live long lives – usually a year or less – but all the reading I’ve done recently on the shocking declines of honeybee and native bee populations suddenly came home.

Concerned and wanting to verify what I considered to be pesticide poisoning, I contacted the Xerces Society, an international non-profit based in Portland that works to “protect biological diversity through invertebrate conservation.” While waiting for a reply, I started wondering which neighbor could do such a thing … was it the manicured lawn fanatic around the corner or some uninformed little old lady who really meant no harm … I even imagined myself going door to door around my block armed with Integrated Pesticide Management brochures, calmly asking folks to please refrain from any pesticide use, as it was causing great harm to pollinators. But the response from Xerces was that while I was correct about the probability that the deaths were due to pesticide application, bumblebees, unlike some other bees, normally forage for many miles. On hearing that, the door-to-door idea was became less appealing to me, so instead, I will blurt it out electronically for all within earshot: Eschew pesticides! Your garden will be much healthier without them and so will you and everything else downstream.

Besides pesticides, the application of chemical fertilizers does more harm than good. While they do add nutrients quickly to the soil, chemical fertilizers don’t add anything else – like organic fertilizers do – and they can leach out easily. Made from petroleum, they may weaken soil structure and kill off beneficial microbes as well. And dead zones in oceans have developed all over the world and the chief cause is overuse of chemical fertilizers which cause explosive growth of algae, which later die and sink to the bottom where its decay depletes oxygen. This creates an oxygen-depleted layer where creatures either escape or die. Bottom-dwellers like crabs and oysters are hardest hit because they can’t just swim away. Certainly this is mostly the result of conventional agriculture’s overuse of fertilizers, but we, as individuals, don’t need to add to the problem. Lawns may need some fertilizer from time to time, but they will need less if you allow grass clippings to remain in place after you mow. For more detailed information on how to keep your lawn healthy without chemical fertilizers, check out Stuart Franklin’s “Building a Healthy Lawn.”

Planned landscapes of which we are fond usually include a lot of lawn, but what is a lawn, really? We might define it as a relatively soft place for kids to play or a pleasant spot to picnic on, but in terms of ecological function, it’s a vulnerable monoculture with zero diversity that does nothing but require considerable attention. It can control erosion to some extent, but so do many other plants with better attributes. When clients say they want low maintenance, I suggest losing the lawn, or at least part of it. Diversity is a good thing in urban areas as well as in the country. Gardens that include different types of plants – evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs, forbs, ferns and other ground cover – offer so much more for birds, butterflies and other wildlife and to top it off, are infinitely more interesting to look at than a uniform expanse of lawn. Lawns are basically destroyed habitat with bad habits.

Certainly everyone with a lawn doesn’t douse it with pesticides and chemical fertilizers or wastefully keep it green all summer. I have a little bit of lawn, although it’s slowly becoming a weed patch so I think eventually I’ll take it out and replacing it with a grass/herb/wildflower mixture such as Fleur de Lawn. Realizing options is sometimes the hardest part of change.