Breaking: Lawns Not Green

by Erik Vance · 2010-01-19 14:30:00 UTC
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Scientists today have made a shocking announcement: The grass is not greener on the other side.

That is, if you live next to a sports field. New research out of Southern California announced today that the amount of carbon needed to maintain a pretty green lawn is more than that lawn could possibly absorb. More than four times as much. The culprit, it seems, is a combination of greenhouse-gas-emitting fertilizers and the energy needed to mow and maintain the lawn.

University of California Irvine's Amy Townsend-Small, lead author on the paper -- which will appear in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters -- says lawns are bad, but the worst offenders are sports fields because they just don't absorb much carbon.  Townsend-Small says when compiling greenhouse gas levels, people often forget that not all green space is good.

“The current trend is to count the carbon sinks and forget about the greenhouse gas emissions, but it clearly isn't enough,” Townsend-Small says.

Of course greenhouse gases are not the only byproduct of modern lawns. Chemical fertilizers and herbicides are nearly unregulated and tend to seep into water tables and streams. I personally experienced this years ago when I led school science trips in wetlands around the San Francisco Bay. As part of the class, we would sample the phosphate levels in the water and they were always off the charts next to the soccer fields. Most of that was from insecticides like diazinon (since banned).

This seems to me one more reason not to have a lawn in front of your house. I am not saying we get rid of sports fields (I played college baseball, after all), but we could have Xeriscaped yards and rely on public sports fields, which cities should care for in less damaging ways.

"What will our kids do for fun?" you might say. Well, land planners should think more about how to create access to open space instead of fooling themselves into thinking that tiny, individual grassy plots are what it takes to keep kids occupied.

Photo credit: American Geophysical Union

Erik Vance is a freelance science writer. His work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, Scientific American, and the Utne Reader.
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