Where We Live: Grass Gets Browner

Okay, I get it: many people like lawns. My wife, for instance, wouldn’t mind having a small lawn for picnics or whatever. It’s hard to play catch without a bit of open grass, and harder to play football or baseball.

Still, they’re inarguably ‘brown’, insofar as to keep them in golf-course condition they require a great deal of area (32 million acres in the lower 48!), money (about $28.9 billion a year- $1200 per household!), time, effort, pesticides (67 million lbs per year!), fertilizers, water (50-70% of US residential water usage!), fuel (58 million gallons of gas mowing!) and noise to maintain. The direct health effects on the human and wild populations are severe, but mostly unreported. Yet as bad as lawns in general are, they could be worse. Now, sadly, they can be.

Scotts Miracle-Gro has just introduced a genetically modified (“GMO”) Kentucky Bluegrass seed they advertise as “Roundup Ready”. What’s Roundup? A wide-spectrum weed killer based on the chemical glyphosate, about which Lincoln P. Brower, an entomologist at Sweet Briar College who is also an author of the paper documenting the decline of monarch (butterfly) winter populations in Mexico, said "It kills everything… It's like absolute Armageddon for biodiversity over a huge area."  

Now, Monsanto has produced ‘Roundup Ready’ soybeans, canola, corn, and others, and they’ve proven to have terrible effects over a wide area, killing many kinds of wildlife, interbreeding with non-GMO varieties, and ruining organic farms for miles. The claim is that Roundup Ready crops would lead to lower pesticide use, since you would use only what was necessary, knowing the crop wouldn’t be harmed, but the reality is pesticide use has gone up, often dramatically.

Indeed, like microbes in an environment of misused antibiotics, overuse of Roundup is breeding weeds adapted to survive it. If the pattern holds, planting this kind of grass will grow weeds which will laugh at Roundup in the future, in the meantime leading to a pattern of escalation- more and more herbicide being dumped on lawns in an increasingly futile quest for a weedless, “perfect” lawn.

Not only that, but you won’t even own the lawn! Monsanto claims they own those genes and regularly sues innocent farmers for growing “their” crops. The farmers didn’t even plant it; their land was polluted by GMO pollen blowing in from another farm or brought by insects.

The rudest surprise of all is the USDA isn’t even going to regulate it. It slipped through a dubious loophole in the law, and is bound to be followed by other opportunists, yet all the EPA has asked Scotts to do is ‘talk to the stakeholders’ and make nice, if they want to.

As suburbanites, stereotype insists we worship the great green lea, the synthetic meadow, the LAWN. I think it’s important to see what effect that has upon the rest of the world, and our piece of it in particular. If we don’t eliminate our lawns we should at least change our practices to reduce their impacts. That includes reducing their size, how often you mow, how much poison you use on them, and not using something which has high potential to injure the world our kids will have to inhabit. Better ways are available, for instance, through Safe Lawns, and we need to use them.   

Thanks to Wendy DiPeso for the idea for this piece.