The BP Oil Spill And Your Lawn: Get Your Grass Off Gas

by Brent Blackwelder, President emeritus, Friends of the Earth

Have you ever sat on a porch to relax or read a book and been driven indoors by sonic booming lawn mowers that make you feel part of the runway at National Airport?  If this is not enough, how about adding a few leaf blowers into the mix as you stroll through your neighborhood and you might as well be operating a jack-hammer.

Did you ever wonder about the ecological cost of modern lawns beyond the noise and pollution from mowing.  I’m talking about the pesticides, fertilizers, and water needed for maintenance and the subsequent runoff into rivers and streams, bays and estuaries.

When looking at greenhouse gas emissions, off-road machinery and vehicles annually produce 220 million tons of carbon dioxide.  Of this total from off-road vehicles, over half comes from mining, construction, and farm machines.  Surprisingly, lawn and garden equipment like mowers and leaf blowers produce about 12% or 26 million tons of the total.  Air quality in urban areas can suffer greatly in hot weather as a result.

Fortunately, a number of organizations such as Beyond Pesticides have been promoting alternatives to lawns and safer lawns and have a superb website with numerous fact sheets covering some of the points I am making.  One organization SafeLawns.org has featured the slogan: “Time to Get Your Grass Off Gas”—most fitting as the BP spill is the latest in the ongoing oil spills, leaks, and other fiascoes attributable from our dependence on oil.

By growing a smaller lawn and/or switching to organic lawn care you can reduce or even eliminate many of these gas guzzling components.

Switching to efficient Energy Star electric mowers or battery-powered cordless mowers can get rid of oil spills, save on trips for fuel, and reduce noise.

In addition to the reduction of gasoline usage, there are great health benefits for your family such as less asthma and other diseases, reduction in leukemia rates in your pets, and  fewer contaminants entering the Chesapeake Bay. Studies find that pesticides such as the weedkiller 2,4-D pass from mother to child through umbilical cord blood and breast milk. A study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute finds that household and garden pesticide use can increase the risk of childhood leukemia as much as sevenfold.

Getting rid of noisy and unnecessary machines would make for a salubrious city.  Over 100 cities have ordinances restricting leaf blowers.

Botany Professor Douglas Tallamy at the University of Delaware has pointed out the great opportunity to reverse declining biological diversity in the United States by converting numerous urban lawns into attractive native shrubs, bushes, and small trees.  With native bushes and shrubs which are pest resistant, you don’t have lots of maintenance that consumes energy,  water, pesticides.  And you can get a lot more butterflies in your yard.