The Future is Green

Ahmadinejad, Gas Prices, and the Price of Freedom

Why is this man smiling? I'll tell you why; he can't believe his luck; Oil addicted Americans keep flooding his treasury with obscene amounts cash. This makes his life very easy. He can afford to suppress dissent and he can afford to develop nuclear weapons. Why wouldn't he be smiling?

In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman again reminds us that we are Ahmadinejads enablers, and that . . ."the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people  . . . is to end our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America," he writes, "would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.."

Friedman's column, "The Green Revolution(s)," is well worth reading. He points out that we could effect change in Iran and other petro-dictatorships simply by cutting our oil use. And the way to achieve that, he says, is to impose ". . . an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — [It] would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator."

When gas gas hit $4.00 a gallon, Americans immediately reacted by using less of it. Keeping gas prices high is the smartest thing we could possibly do. This is how we can bring Iran into line, speed the development of clean energy, save the auto industry, and slow global warming. It's the bargain of the century.

Lawn Care and Other Unnatural Acts: Are Eco-friendly Lawns an Oxymoron?

Few things give me as much pleasure as spending time on my front porch. In all kinds of weather I love to sit here, where I am as I write this, and enjoy the show: the change of seasons, the play of sunlight on foliage, the antics of the squirrels and chipmunks, the call of songbirds, the perfume of flowers. Such peace.

All too often, however, the peace is shattered. With fearful regularity, a small battalion of gardeners swoops down on the neighborhood, unloads the materiel and ordnance of lawn care - mowers, edgers and blowers, with their noisy, smelly, and highly polluting two-stroke internal combustion engines, along with sacks of fertilizers, weed killers and pesticides, and proceeds to wage war on crabgrass, insects, dandelions, and any blade of grass which isn't precisely the same height as every other. 

Lately, I've been pondering the tyranny of grass, the cultivation of which is, after all, an unnatural act. It's such a ubiquitous feature of suburban life that we tend to assume this is what nature intended. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Grass is the least green thing you can plant.

The American lawn, that lush carpet of green that is the icon of suburbia, didn’t always exist. Heretical as the thought may seem, this uniform swath of emerald is a complete fabrication, something not found in nature.

Entirely the creation of mankind’s desire to control nature – a futile task, if ever there was one, lawns have been around for a long time. Just how long is a matter of conjecture, but one of my favorite theories on the origin of lawns was put forth in the musical comedy, The Apple Tree.

In Act One, based on Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve, we find a somewhat testy Adam listening to yet another in a long list of helpful suggestions from the garden’s other two-footed tenant:

EVE     I’ve been thinking . . . we’re different from anything else on earth. And our home should be different.
ADAM    I thought it was.
EVE    And today I had the feeling that the grass around our hut should be different from all other grass.
ADAM    Different how?
EVE    Shorter.
ADAM    How could it be shorter – unless it was . . . cut?  

Somehow, we have come to accept the inevitability of lawn care. We love our lawns. We must – why else would we devote such vast amounts of time, effort and expense to cultivating an estimated twenty million acres of this industrial monoculture. We enthusiastically water, weed, fertilize and mow in pursuit of a more perfect lawn than our neighbors. 

Yet lawns are an environmental nightmare. The millions of tons of chemical fertilizers and weed killers that we apply have high environmental costs. They wash off our lawns and run into our wells, streams, and lakes, wrecking havoc with aquatic ecosystems, and turning up in our food supply and drinking water.

Power motors contribute to air pollution and global warming. One lawn mower emits as much CO2 as a dozen or more cars. Grass clippings that are bagged and hauled away clog our landfills, and the watering of lawns depletes critically scarce water supplies.

In our zeal to eradicate the lowly dandelion we blithely pour poison onto the soil and then watch our children and pets gamboling on that grassy patch of green we call the back yard, all the while feeling grateful to be raising our family in the safe, healthy, leafy suburbs. It doesn’t even occur to us that there might be an alternative.

Sustainable alternatives
There are many ways to reduce the negative environmental impacts of our lawns and gardens.