Why should we rethink the traditional concept of a backyard as a lush carpet of perfectly mowed grass?
Let’s start by looking at the following facts from the EPA, which shed light on how devastating to the environment lawns can be: • The amount of pollution emitted by a lawnmower operating for one hour is equivalent to the amount of pollution emitted by a car driven for approximately 20 miles. And nearly 70,000 severe accidents result from lawnmowers. Meanwhile, we use 580,000,000 gallons of gasoline to power them. • Up to 60 percent of urban fresh water can be used for watering lawns. • Americans spend more than $5 billion on fossil fuel-derived fertilizers for their lawns, and $700 billion on pesticides, totaling 67 billion pounds of synthetic pesticides. Lawn care is a $25 billion industry. Now consider that 20 million acres of U.S. land are planted with residential lawns. With these figures in mind, it is clear that if we reduced the size of a standard lawn and standard lawn inputs by half, we could also cut back dramatically on the energy and chemicals used to maintain them. So wha
