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Bush's Worst Appointment
Yet?
Read Jeffrey
St Clair's blazing expose of the new Interior Secretary nominee
, Dirk Kempthorne, and make up your own mind. Even in the dingy
history of Idaho's predators, Kempthorne stood proud as the dingiest
of them all. Now he's poised to seize his place in history. Will
he be the sleaziest Interior Secretary in history, sleazier than
Watt, fouler than Fall?
More on the great Israel Lobby debate! Norman Finkelstein cuts
a new path, asks "Are the Neo-Cons really committed Zionists?" "Bliss was it
in that dawn" Not in Michigan! Raymond Garcia describes
Dem governor's appalling plan to scapegoat youth and teachers. Plus the full print version of Virginia
Tilley's savage dissection on this website of the double-standard
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Now!
Now that May is here, perhaps you're
looking out at your lawn and thinking it needs mowing. Instead,
you might want to think about whether you need that lawn at all.
The problem isn't grass. Humans first lived on the grasslands
of Africa, and until not so long ago, grasslands covered far
greater swaths of North America than they do now.
But landscapes like those bear little resemblance to the classic
American lawn -- an industrial, shocking-green carpet whose very
survival depends on our polluting the environment and disturbing
the peace.
Other kinds of home landscapes
can grow pollution-free. A natural-yard movement is showing that
combinations of rugged plants, including grasses, can be far
more interesting than a standard lawn while requiring little
mowing, no spraying or fertilizing, and even no irrigation.
By contrast, the "perfect
lawn is a monotony of color and texture, yields no useful harvest,
and may rarely even be trod upon. But for growing the lawn-care
industry a crop of hard cash, the synthetic grasslands of suburbia
are fertile ground indeed. To replace all of that high-maintenance
turf with something more resilient -- to stow all that equipment
and dispose of all those chemicals -- would cause a $35 billion
industry to wither.
Among the industry,s ever-proliferating lines of new-and-improved
products, the most visible -- and audible -- are those that replace
muscle power with fossil-fuel power. The lawn mower has undergone
what is probably the most astounding metamorphosis, the larger
commercial versions now resembling a hybrid between lunar rover
and La-Z-Boy recliner.
Despite tightened regulations, mowers are still serious polluters.
On average, 2006 lawnmower engines contribute 93 times more smog-forming
emissions per gallon of fuel than do this year,s cars, according
to the California Air Resources Board. For homeowners, a little
electric mower may seem clean, but its cord likely leads back
to a coal-fired power plant that belches global-warming carbon
dioxide.
And other gas and electric contraptions, like leaf blowers and
string trimmers, have joined mowers to make Saturday afternoon
in suburbia sound more like Monday morning in a sawmill.
Meanwhile, the nearly universal creed for weed and pest control
has become Let us spray. The Environmental Protection Agency
says pesticide use in the home-and-garden sector, once in decline,
has grown by more than 25 percent since 1995. Herbicide use almost
doubled between 1982 and 2001, and continues to grow.
Of the 30
most commonly used lawn pesticides, 29 are toxic to birds,
fish, amphibians and/or bees . Environmental groups have raised
the biggest clamor over the herbicide 2,4-D, which a growing
number of studies show to be a possible contributor to non-Hodgkins
lymphoma and other cancers.
Whether or not they use pesticides, homeowners know the only
way to get a lawn as deep-green and uniform as a pool table is
to pour on fertilizer and water. Much of that fertilizer washes
right past the shallow roots of lawn grasses and into storm drains.
One Minnesota
study showed that "lush lawns are more of a water quality
problem than poorer turf lawns," because of phosphorus runoff.
Some states and communities have restricted fertilizer use, and
many others are considering it.
In a 2003 look at the lawn industry, Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp
of Ohio State University cited studies showing that to homeowners,
"property values are clearly associated with high-input
green-lawn maintenance and use," so many Americans have
"associated moral character and social responsibility with
the condition of the lawn."
How can a patch of ground that delivers fertilizer-laden pollution
into streams, greenhouse gases and a terrible racket into the
atmosphere, and pesticide residues into the neighbor's dog --
and probably the neighbor -- come to embody "moral character
and social responsibility"?
Last summer, my family and I removed our front lawn and replaced
it with an edible
landscape" of fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs and other
plants as part of a project by our local art center and Los Angeles
artist/architect Fritz Haeg.
We've been asked plenty of questions about this move, the two
most common being, "What do your neighbors say?" and
"Has the city fined you?"
Our answers: "They like it" and "No."
But fears like these still keep Americans from ditching their
lawns.
Stan Cox, a plant breeder and senior scientist at the
Land Institute, Salina, Kan., wrote this for the institute,s
Prairie Writers Circle. He can be reached at: mailto:t.stan@cox.net
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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