Turf Wars

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted November 17, 2005.

"I was boarding a flight in Atlanta and a couple of dozen troops with the 101st Airborne, just back from Iraq, got on the plane. They were all fired up about being home. I was sitting next to one of the guys. We chatted for a while, and I asked him what three things he'd missed most over there.

"He listed -- in this order -- green grass, Domino's pizza, and beer. In that order! I'm telling you, Stan, in this country, with our beautiful lawns and parks, we take green for granted."

With that anecdote, Den Gardner, executive director of Project Evergreen, underlined his organization's big message on lawn care: "You can water, you can put on nutrients, you can use pesticides, and, yes, you can apply organic products -- if they are used responsibly. And if your kid falls down and rolls around on a soft, green lawn or soccer field, and doesn't get hurt -- that didn't happen by chance!"

Gardner and I sat on a park bench in the midst of a vast carpet of green -- not grass, but a real carpet. Tools of the lawn-care trade -- mowers, sprayers, blowers, sprinklers and spreaders, along with gallon jugs and 50-pound bags of products to be sprayed, sprinkled and spread -- formed a backdrop stretching out to what would have been the horizon, had we not been inside the Orlando Convention Center.

The Green Industry Expo is an annual trade show for the lawn and landscaping industry. It was held this month in conjunction with a Green Industry Conference sponsored by the Professional Landcare Network, or PLANET. Project Evergreen had a small booth and a high profile at the Expo. And its president, Paul McDonough, spoke at the PLANET conference, declaring that his organization wants to be "the green industry's 'Got Milk?' campaign."

An ad from Bayer Environmental Science. As if toxic pesticides weren't scary enough...Gardner told me that from the moment Project Evergreen was formed in 2004, "activists tried to paint us as a front for the pesticide industry. That really upsets me."

He explained that it's a much broader coalition: "When I started this group, I called up about 25 people, from the turfgrass industry, golf course superintendents, sports turf managers, equipment, pesticide, and fertilizer manufacturers, PLANET, and others. I said, 'Let's get together and talk.'"

"Our goal," says Gardner, "is to set the record straight so consumers can make their own decisions."

A self-guided mower, because human labor is just too unreliable. (Photo by Stan Cox)

You need only look north, she says, to see that's not true: "In Canada, where bans on toxic lawn chemicals have been implemented in over 70 municipalities, the lawn care industry as a whole has continued to grow by 10 percent a year."

Green battlefield

A pesticide-and-fertilizer lobbying group called Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment (RISE) made news earlier this year, announcing in its "2005 Outlook" report that "We are watching the entire United States, but particularly the border states of New York, Connecticut, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Washington, for any activity relative to banning pesticides."

That image -- patrolling our border states to interdict and neutralize Canadian-style environmentalism -- may seem a bit over-the-top, but it's right at home in the "green industry," where vigilance and struggle are always prominent themes.

Those themes were strikingly evident in Orlando. The industry's mascot may be that linchpin of life on earth known as the chlorophyll molecule, but the Green Industry Expo is all about horsepower, lethality, and hustle. (View scenes of the 2005 GIE here.)

Let us spray

There's no question that chemistry plays a central role in the American lawn. According to Project Evergreen's website, 50 percent of households treat their lawns or gardens with pesticides, applying active ingredients at average annual rates of 2 pounds per acre for herbicides and 0.4 pounds for insecticides. Professional applicators apply an average 193 pounds of fertilizer per acre per year, while do-it-yourself homeowners use 139 pounds.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. Since this past July, his front lawn been lawn-free.

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