In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan suggests that the best way to personally reduce your carbon footprint is to rip up your lawn and plant a garden there instead. It clears up any worry about which produce is the best purchase in terms of carbon footprints. And it also addresses concerns about whether “carbon saving” acts such as biking are negated by the carbon necessary to sustain our resulting increased food intake (This issue was also recently discussed in this post from http://benjacat.blogspot.com/). You don’t have to worry about the energy expenditure of gardening causing you to eat more, because the food is right in front of you.
Pollan also argues that our lives and careers are so specialized these days that we’re disturbingly removed from the origins of the food and energy that sustains us. Intensive gardening reconnects us with this.
Of course, one might quickly become the pariah of one’s neighborhood for ripping up one’s lawn. And this project would also require a lot of work. But wouldn’t it also save a lot of trips to the grocery store? And don’t we mow, water and even till our lawns anyway? And wouldn’t the produce be the freshest you could possibly find?
Ripping up one’s lawn might at first be seen as shameful, but eventually the waste of land and soil required for a lawn could be seen as the real shame.
Lawns as we know them are rather ridiculous. We spend countless hours, money, water, resources, and chemicals growing and maintaining a non-native plant (our grass) so that it looks “healthy.” Just plain silly.
On that topic, I think that the local organic lawn care company should add something similar to the following language on the sign they place in people’s yards after they are treated:
You, your children, and your pets are encouraged to play on this lawn at anytime after our natural treatment of it.
It would be great marketing, and would be a great way to get others to think about what they are doing when they pay others to place poison on their lawns.
I’ll get off of my soapbox now.
I love this idea. When we move we’re looking into a no mow lawn mix for the little patch we will have for the kids to play on. I also love the idea of a freedom lawn.
The no mow lawn mix sounds like a really good idea. And we at least have a patch of our back lawn seeded with lettuce (in addition to our small garden), which is growing nicely.