People Still Love Their Lawns

Virginia Scott Jenkins described our lawn love affair in her 1994 book, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession:

Forty million acres, or thirty? Whichever way you slice it, these two recent estimates of the amount of turf in the United States surely boggle the mind. Add in the US $10.4 billion spent each year on seed, sod and chemicals, and an untold amount of professional lawn care, and the importance of the American (and Canadian) lawn becomes apparent.

While legislative restrictions on cosmetic pesticides should help curb their usage, the overall culture of mono-crop (one grass variety) lawns, which are heavily watered and use synthetic fertilizers, continues to have a detrimental effect on groundwater, rivers, lakes, and harbours, and is wasteful of precious natural resources.

In HRM, a recent Marketplace documentary by Wendy Mesley showed that some of us love our lawns so much we’re willing to break the law for it. This program featured a mystery shopper who had no problem finding pesticides on the shelves of major retailers throughout the HRM. Helpful sales staff explained that as long as the neighbours don’t call the cops, or if one sprays at night, it’s okay to use pesticides, even though it’s illegal. Buying the products is still legal in HRM, even though using them is not.

Still, EAC believes that bylaws do help, because landscaping companies tend to follow the law. Their use of organic alternatives to pesticides has considerably reduced the amount of toxins in our environment and in our bodies.

Yet, as we have seen, some individual lawn-lovers seem willing to break the law to use these products. They are, after all, still legal to buy.