Americans ritually coat their property with fertilizer, chemicals, and thousands of gallons of water in order to achieve a picture-perfect lawn. It burns up gasoline. This is where Robbins errs: in typically WEIRD fashion, he thinks that the lawn habit is just an absurdity, and the only reason it persists is that humans are irrational. One following the other so not one leaf is missed. Pets develop cancer if they spend time on these fields. Like on crops. If you must have a green lawn lay an artificial lawn (it comes on rolls just like a carpet). In other words, a good-looking lawn really is a reliable index of other forms of cooperative investment. Why? Delaware is 10 percent lawn… They strap on noisy diesel-powered backpack gear to blow a handful of leaves around. The rhetoric he uses - the stymied March of Progress - is straight out of the WEIRD playbook. Using Lake Powell to keep lawns green in Utah would be a waste of resources Felicia Fonseca / AP This June 21, 2015, photo shows Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Ariz. Academic researchers tend to be highly WEIRD, which leaves them crippled in their ability to understand social signals and rituals. The lawn is thought to have originated in Europe, which makes sense because the moist, mild climate supports open, close-cut grasslands. They have this done because their neighbor does it and his neighbor does it and his neighbor does it. Courtesy of Qsthomson. These lawns that existed back in 16th, 17th, 18th-century England were typically found on estates. Grass lawns could also be replaced with clover, wildflowers or a meadow, all which require fewer resources to grow effectively. New Posts Coronavirus Work-life. Are lawns a waste of space and resources? Are we prepared for elementary schools with nothing but asphalt or dirt? Robbins thinks this is a tragedy. 4. Police took the clerk into custody after receiving a complaint that the store was selling obscene devices. Well, habit, for one. Humans really are messing up the planet. Otherwise the police would be called!) FOLLOW US. A 10-minute job easily done with a push mower maybe once or twice a The way we manage waste in Australia is changing. The roadmap also highlights the need to ensure high-quality recycling, eliminate landfilling, limit energy recovery to non-recyclable materials, and stop illegal shipments of waste. he also says slice seeding is a waste of time. Rituals like obsessive lawn care aren't good or bad - they're just how the vast bulk of human communication happens. There are somewhere around 40 million acres of lawn … Find out how people are designing an end to the toxic yard and bringing new models to life. Grass lawns waste energy. It’s a team of 3 to 6 people on average. Americans do love their lawns. The other stooge gets out a ride-around lawn mower nearly the size of a volkswagon. Within societies, liberals and highly educated people are even WEIRDer than conservatives and the less educated - a gap that contributes to ideological misunderstandings. We made it easy for you to exercise your right to vote! Everyone feels heavy social pressure to maintain their lawns. This ignores many benefits, including cooling, oxygenation, dust control, storm water control and play areas, not to mention aesthetics. Relaxing your aesthetic and letting your yard fill up with weeds will just make your neighbors decide that you're a lazy bum. 7 Like . EDITORIAL: Using Lake Powell to keep lawns green in Utah would be a waste of resources. And seems particularly wasteful in consideration of drought plagued places, like … So how could we wean ourselves off our addiction to lawns? Las Vegas Sun. Robbins is, to put it bluntly, a sworn enemy of American lawns. Robbins is right: the amount of energy and resources that we pour into our lawns is absurd. It's not a vegan-specific issue, so it doesn't really relate to whether or not all humans should go vegan. They park their trailer on the side of the road, set up cones, and leap out with their wonderfully colorful neon yellow vests. The recent downgrade in the forecast for the flow of water in the Colorado River should be a death punch to the proposal to build a new pipeline out of Lake Powell. Now, that ideal has become a part of law in many communities; many zoning rules and homeowner codes mandate grass in front of our houses. I'm doing a research paper on fresh water and home lawns. NewsChannel 11 is taking a closer look into the arrest of a local lingerie store clerk. 21st Century Americans only care about image not substance; about keeping up with the status quo and their precious cliques. The environment and our collective pocketbook would both greatly benefit if we'd relax our lawn obsession. Our yards are our outdoor homes: fun, beautiful, great spaces for relaxing. The Honeybee Conservancy can show you how to make your yard a friendlier place for pollinators, and Plant Native has information about biodiverse alternatives to traditional lawn. 580 million gallons of gasoline are used for lawnmowers. Leading all the way back to the first McMansion the block. Neighbors who have 12’x12′ front lawns (some slightly more, some slightly less) hiring professional landscapers to manicure their lawns every week. From the beginning, a landscape can be designed to reduce the amount of resources needed to maintain it and the amount of waste it produces. Robbins, Paul, Sharp, Julie. Outdoor water use accounts for more than 30 percent of total household water use, on average, but can be as much as 60 percent of total household water use in arid regions. Xeriscaping is the practice of landscaping with slow-growing, drought tolerant plants to conserve water and reduce yard trimmings. Keep the lawn for the places where it gets the most use, and you’ll have more time to enjoy picnics and play baseball on that small patch of green. I despise them. By taking care of our lawns and gardens properly, we can save money, time, and help the environment. But more importantly, lawns perform a social signaling function. Robbins, Paul, Sharp, Julie T. “Producing and Consuming Chemicals: The Moral Economy of the American lawn.” Economic Geography (2003) Vol. Well, for starters, by not ignoring or denying what actual homeowners say about why they invest in their lawns. Let's ask ourselves: what new social convention could stably signal investment in the community without requiring massive amounts of water and chemicals? That means that a lawn's condition is an exquisitely sensitive signal of a homeowner's level of investment. In fact, this could be the determining feature of WEIRDness: an atrophied ability to understand social subtext or ritual. WEIRD people are more analytical and more individualistic. this is what a landscaper, who has been in the business for 22 yrs full time said to me. Lawns & Water Pollution The Issue: Run-off pollution occurs with each rainfall and snowmelt when water flows over land picking up soil and pollutants and depositing them in streams, ponds, wetlands, lakes, and rivers. Bee and wildflowers. If they can have it done once a week then so can we.” In other words, it’s all about status not practicality. All rights reserved. It proves nothing but death. That means that a lawn's condition is an exquisitely sensitive signal of a homeowner's level of investment. Imagine instead, some of that space filled with beautiful flowers and other plants that provide variety and diverse habitat for animal species, and don’t need constant watering, fertilizing, or chemicals. For neighbors, a disheveled or weed-choked lawn is a warning … Today is National Voter Registration Day! All projects relating to EDUC of natural resources are projects of the state, thus, the projects nevertheless remain as state The State may directly undertake such activities, or it may projects and can never be purely private endeavors. It’s like something out of The Three Stooges. That is, you probably live in a society that's Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Lawns are a resource waste (being decoration and not for food) and in general should be removed. We plant lawns for several reasons, and one might be to furnish a nice ground cover on which children may play. 17 million gallons of gas are spilled each year refueling lawn and garden equipment – more oil than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. What’s that? SPOTS Syndrome is big evidence that an organization’s strategic plan has been a waste of time and resources. The need to do more to tackle waste has never been so important. But he's wrong here. They also tend to be Trump-kissing Republicans: environmentalism? It’s stupid and a giant waste of money and resources. It’s Noisy. The official blog of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window). Your email address will not be published. This means that there's a rational motivation to keep up the lawn ritual after all. So the only way for any single homeowner to relax her lawn care routine without suffering social consequences would be a community-wide agreement to switch to a new setup all at the same time. Some of the earliest lawns … Notify me of follow-up comments by email. While it is impossible to know the exact amount of water used on lawns on a daily basis across the entire country, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 30% of the average household’s water use is outdoors, and half of that is to water lawn. It takes energy, time, commitment, and resources to keep a lawn looking healthy (as any exasperated homeowner can confirm). Source: Dvaires on Flickr. It’s only function is to Prove Something to those who see it. Tucked in among the normal profiles of professors and inspiring athletes is modest one-page interview with Dr. Paul Robbins, the director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. People would tell me when we're interview them, "You know what's going on inside a house by what you see outside the house.". With all respect to Dr. Robbins, this is just tone-deaf. These chemicals not only harm the things you’re after, they can be toxic to people and other animals. In some states, a significant chunk of the landscape is covered in turf grass — meaning residential lawns, commercial lawns, golf courses, and the like. I can understand that kind of thing, but in fact the grass need not be green to function in this manner. This spring, think about pulling up some of that grass, especially along the sides of your home and in the front yard. If people recycle the grass clippings, leaving them to decompose on the lawn, the U.S. lawn area could store up to 16.7 teragrams of carbon each year. Advertising is not waste of resources, in opposite sense it is the proper utilization of resources, as it allow users to make good decisions about the products and give them proper information. It nearly covers parts of peoples’ lawns in itself. And lawns really are wasteful. And the EPA has good advice, too–on watering, pesticides, and fertilizer. And that’s a pretty bold statement to make when you consider Tesla is solely responsible for launching the electric car revolution. Some people in town say enforcing this law seems like a waste of resources. They would not be caught dead performing the work of Peasants. (This indicates they’re Hired Working Class as opposed to vandals or vagrants–Very Important in Modern America! Why? A lawn supports very few species, how many birds do you see in the trees around the lawn and how many on the lawn. In addition to technical, social and political conditions it … If the speed at which the person is alleged to have driven as provided in section 28-707, subsection A or the speed at which the court finds the person drove is sixty-five miles per hour or less, the offense is designated as the waste of a finite resource and is a civil traffic … NewsChannel 11's Ben Lawson has more. And it is possible to achieve these things. 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