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 ow many tons of pesticides will unnecessarily
be poured onto our nation's soil this summer, do you suppose? Unnecessarily,
because in spite of the enormous amount of land which has been treated with
pesticides, we're not eradicating the bugs we've targeted (supposing that
all the bugs need to be exterminated in the first place). As a result, just
half a century after the discovery of DDT's insect-killing powers and despite
the development of scores of potent poisons, the bugs are doing better than
ever.
 What has been documented to the dismay
of any individual who is downwind and downstream from any toxic application,
is the association between pesticides and cancer rates. A further cause
for concern is that children face a much greater risk than adults from pesticides.
If you believe that the largest amounts
of toxins are just poured onto farm land, then the following should change
your mind: According to a report by the National Academy of Sciences, residential
lawns and gardens receive heavier doses of pesticides than most other land
areas in the United States, as much as ten pounds per acre of lawn versus
two pounds per acre of soybeans.
Why do Americans believe that we
must use so many chemical applications to have a socially respectable lawn?
Perhaps we have been more influenced by advertising and a superficial emphasis
upon appearances than we think? If we have been conditioned to include the
poisoning of our land as part of our property and household habits, then
we must begin to think realistically, to acknowledge the effects of toxins,
and to change our toxic rituals. |
Raising Pennsylvania
"Lawns cover some fifty thousand square
miles of the surface of the United States an area roughly equal to Pennsylvania,
and larger than that occupied by any agricultural crop. ... Each year, to
maintain this American quilt, we spend thirty billion dollars, an investment
whose complexity is in inverse proportion to the monoculture it sustains.
The lawn industry is only tangentially about grass. At base it is a stunningly
elaborate enabler of petrochemical addiction....
"Consider the network of petrochemical
inputs we use to keep the national sward green: the gasoline-fueled tractors
and bulldozers that first scrape the topsoil off the home site; the genetically
engineered seeds and sods; the fertilizers; the pesticides that keep it
free of insect life; the herbicides that keep it free of 'bad' plants, like
dandelions and clover; the mercury-based fungicides that kill the microbes
and the earthworms and keep the dirt under the grass from becoming soil;
the mower, the blower, the edger, and the trucks that haul the crews and
the clippings to the landfill; the power plants that pump the water through
the deserts to the sprinklers.
"In the West, an estimated sixty per cent
of municipal water ends up on the lawn; in the East about thirty per cent.
In 1990, we poured an estimated seventy million pounds of pesticides (not
including fertilizers) on our lawns. Most end up in the water supply...."
Excerpted from "The Grassman" by
Wade Graham, in the Aug. 19, 1996 New Yorker.
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A further dimension to the lawn problem
is the effect of lawn chemicals on birds and small mammals. Many animal
lovers unwittingly pay landscaping companies to poison their front lawns
while they're busy putting bird seed in their backyard feeders. Yet tens
of thousands of beneficial insects, birds and small animals are killed every
year by the lawn chemicals we apply to our yards. Migrating wildfowl and
resident song birds are poisoned on golf courses, on front lawns, in orchards,
even on wildlife refuges by legal applications of common chemicals (such
as 2,4-D, a commonly used herbicide which is suspect in causing cancers
and increasing the incidence of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.) The birds and animals
are being poisoned simply by feeding on sites where we grow our food and
where we let our children play.
Chemical companies deflect responsibility
by claiming that there are no harmful effects to these chemicals if they
are "properly applied." In his book, The Pesticide Conspiracy,
Robert van den Bosch strongly disagrees with this excuse as he lists pages
of chemical disasters involving disease and death, all of which occurred
after applications of toxins which were "properly applied." And
this dodges the problems that much of the time the chemicals are in fact
not properly applied.
Whether chemicals sink into farmland
or land designated as "lawn," they eventually percolate into groundwater.
Because groundwater is the source of drinking water for nearly half of the
nation, this gives us ample reason to reflect on what unintended side effects
chemicals used on lawns might eventually cause.
Pesticides are not the only chemical
problem associated with lawns. Chemical fertilizers are another issue. In
1990, roughly three million tons which amounts to 15 percent of all American
fertilizer use went into lawn care. The average large American front lawn
requires more fertilizer than is needed to feed a Third World family. Because
church lawns tend to be substantially larger than home lawns, this can equate
to an amount of fertilizer that might feed several families for an entire
year. To provide perspective on this quantity of fertilizer, India, with
a population more than twice that of the United States, used about the same
amount of fertilizer on all of its food crops as Americans use on their
lawns.
What has been presented here is a
brief overview of problems associated with an imprudent use of chemicals
on lawns. The more thoroughly readers investigate this problem, the more
convinced they will be to stop this chemical insult to creation's integrity.
If there is any moral substance to our claims to care for creation, it has
to manifest in our behavior. Religious or any belief without behavior soon
becomes empty and breeds cynicism. We must be called to steward the earth,
to care for it with love and to avoid any action which can cause harm to
our neighbors, either the two-legged or the four-legged varieties.
We've all made a lot of mistakes
in our lives, and in some ways we may be like the old farmer who said, "We
get old too soon and smart too late." But we owe it to our neighbors
and to future generations to correct the more visible errors of the past.
One correction we can all do something about is to eliminate the need for
unnecessary chemicals in our lawns, especially when there are alternatives
such as avoiding pesticides on lawns, developing organic lawns with new
grass products such as the Green Cross lawn combination, or even putting
open spaces to other uses beside lawn.
If we continue to use all manner
of pesticides and herbicides on our lawns, we fail to take responsibility
for being a thoughtful steward of that part of creation which is actually
within our control. To me, this becomes a refusal to appreciate the blessings
God has given us in this magnificent creation which we call earth.  |
