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The single most irrigated crop in the United States is lawn. Yep, 40 million acres of lawn for which Americans collectively spend about $40 billion annually on seed, sod and chemicals. And then there's all that water. If you include golf courses, lawns in America cover an area roughly the size of New York State and require 238 gallons of (usually drinking-quality) water per person, per day. According to the EPA, nearly a third of all residential water use in the US goes toward what is euphemistically known as "landscaping."
"Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland," writes Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community. "These pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease, and birth defects."
"The vast expanse of forever-green American lawn is not only the most resource intensive agricultural crop in the world," writes Tobias Policha in Green Anarchy, "but also an obscene icon to our arrogant privilege and total alienation from a life in harmony with nature."
Imagine, as Food Not Lawns does, each house not with a lawn but instead with a small organic "Victory" garden from which the family is fed. Imagine those without a lawn joining their local community garden to re-connect and grow their own. Or perhaps you'd like to imagine them getting more hardcore and engaging in some green graffiti, guerilla gardening, and seed bombing.
That, green comrades, is delawning.
More About Eco-friendly Lawns
Book Review — Food Not Lawns
Quote of the Day: US Lawns as Big as New York State
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