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Kill Your Lawn!
One of the house projects we've been working on at home is replacing as much of our lawn with garden beds as makes sense. We do want a little bit of (unwatered, organic) lawn, for sitting, but we're planting most of our mid-sized urban lot in vegetables, herbs and bird-/butterfly-friendly flowers. We aren't talking the 100-yard diet, and we definitely have a ways to go before you could call our backyard a wildlife sanctuary, but just removing some the grass has already made us feel more comfortable in our home.
We're not alone. One of the biggest underground cultural shifts in North America is focused in some vague yet powerful ways on the question of sod. Big, perfectly smooth, green lawns have become for many of us, a symbol of unsustainability that rivals the SUV.
We've written a lot about the problems with lawns and about innovative ideas for replacing them. Covering the same turf is Elizabeth Kolbert, who's latest New Yorker article is a must-read:
To advocate a single replacement for the lawn is to risk reproducing the problem. The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it—all green, all the time, everywhere. Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.
What's your favorite idea for replacing lawns?
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Green Building at 4:29 PM)
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