On Lawns II – Published in the Bend Bulletin

I remember as a young boy, watching my dad sweating and swearing to mow, edge, weed, fertilize, and water our lawn after coming home from work. We got yelled at for leaving our bikes and toys on the front lawn so we chose to play in the back yard under a huge willow tree whose understory defined a shady bare dirt patch where we could dig, scratch, and ride to our hearts content. My dad liked to sit on the porch drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, smoking a Lucky Strike, and admiring his lawn. The King of the Castle gazing over his holdings to be seen and admired by passersby for being a good neighbor.

As summer yielded to autumn his master work became blanketed with dried leaves, triggering a frenzy of raking them to the curb to burn them releasing the pungent smoke we always associated with the fall season. As the advancing cold weather drove him indoors, he would gaze out the front window smoking a Lucky and drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, lamenting the inevitable returning of his lawn into a brown blanket.

Because lawns are so ubiquitous in human landscapes, we have fallen prey to the dependency relationship with our lawns that reassures our sense that all is well with the world. It is a feature of modern human settlements that we strip away all the naturally occurring infrastructure (forests, streams, mountains) of native vegetation, recontour the land, and replace it with human built infrastructure (roads, bridges, buildings, non-native plants) and fill in the blank spaces with lawns.

Anyone who really wants a lawn should be able to have one and a certain amount of lawn is essential to our modern way of life, but if we use lawns, we should know some facts about them.

There are 44 million acres of lawn in the United States, equivalent to the area of New England. American lawns consume 20 trillion gallons of water and are “treated” with 90 million pounds of fertilizer, 78 million pounds of pesticides, and 600 million gallons of fossil fuel per year; ten times the amount per acre used for agriculture. Water runoff from “treated” lawns cause fertilizer and pesticides to wash into streams contributing to the decline in insect and amphibian species and impacting fish populations.

What is the answer to this dilemma caused by the removal of naturally occurring infrastructure? I suggest that we all commit to reintroducing some native trees and plants into our landscapes as is done successfully in parts of the world. Native species provide cooling of the earth’s surface, help to control erosion, are very effective at sequestering carbon, and provide the optimum habitat to encourage the support and return of native species.

There is some “low hanging fruit” that could make a tremendous immediate impact. There are many high value “keystone” native trees in our communities whose full potential is stunted by mismanagement of their canopies. The leaf litter that falls from the trees should remain under the canopy where it provides essential nutrition for the tree, habitat to butterflies, moths, and insects that form the foundation of our food web. Removing the leaves or planting a lawn under the canopy are major culprits causing the loss of biodiversity we are witnessing.

Let’s start by replacing a portion of our lawns with some native plants and trees or clear the lawn our from under current trees. “Leave the leaves for the birds and bees.”

I’m sitting on the porch drinking a microbrew, smoking a cigar, while gazing beyond the lawn at my native landscape.