law'n'order

I think I'm about due to write my anti-lawn diatribe so here it is. The problems with lawns are as follows:

1) they replace natural vegetation with a manufactured landscape made out of artificially cultivated grasses from lord knows where

2) they are inimical to most wildlife for a host of reasons (see below)

3) they are often terrible polluters, largely because of the amounts of chemicals that are employed; the chemicals destroy everything on the surface except the grass and then leach down into the water table, severely polluting our tap water but also our bays and wetlands.

4) they are also noise polluting to an extraordinary degree, especially when the landscape crews arrive at 7 am with their loud lawn mowers and leaf blowers

5) they are expensive to maintain and potential health hazards (see No. 3 above)

6) they need inordinate amounts of water (to compensate for dry seasons and sandy soils that let any surface water right right through) and the water is extracted from our sole source aquifer

7) In my opinion, they are not attractive (a sort of slice and dice approach to landscaping) and they are not really suitable to our climate and soils (which is partly why they are expensive, hard to maintain and inimical to native plants and wildlife). Lawns were invented in Britain where the climate is perpetually wet and where sheep and other livestock were used to keep the grass short. American lawns are a pathetic attempt to emulate the great British estates on a suburban lot and in a drastically unsuitable environment.

There, I got that off my chest!

Eric Salzman