Freedom Lawn
Our tribal leaders in Franklin Lakes, Oakland and Wyckoff could gather around a ceremonial fire and cover themselves with buckets of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and honor the mysterious powers of growth these products bestow on our lawns….or maybe not…. The studies on the neurological impact of these substances are not well documented, and the bags usually carry a warning to use gloves.
The lawn did not really exist in America till the mid 1800s when Andrew Jackson Downing, from nearby Rockland County, authored a treatise explaining to the unenlightened American populace- specifically those living in the Northeast – that a well manicured lawn was intrinsic to being a good and decent person. The need to display to the world, and neighbors, a definitive sense of culture, grew along the Eastern Seaboard and only gravitated West in the 1900s.
The 1950s established the lawn as intrinsic to the perfect household, and the fashionable spare tire sported by many American men was slightly tempered by the weekly lawn mowing. But mowing lawns eventually became an underground industry for teenagers looking to make some money in the summer months, and that lasted a few decades till the 1980’s and 1990s when the industry grew to be dominated by adults – A swing back to the early years when a manicured lawn was the province of those who could afford to have someone else maintain it.
1962 brought the first well reported indictment of the lawn culture, “Silent Spring” by Rachael Carson. The extensive use of pesticides was a focal point almost 50 years ago; but today the American lawn, acre-for-acre, uses up to 4 times more pesticides than an acre of farmland. Canadians, on the other hand, have banned pesticides for non-agricultural use in five provinces.
The EPA requires the testing of just 200 chemicals used in the United States, only a small portion of the 80,000 in use. Common products like the popular RoundUp are coming under more scrutiny. A new study published by the American Chemical Society in 2008 indicated that some of the inert ingredients were more damaging to human cells than previously reported by the manufacturer Monsanto, and should not be considered inert at all.
Monsanto was a leading a manufacturer of plastics in the 1940s, and made the natural leap into food products to become one of the largest chemical companies in the world. DDT and Agent Orange were some well known products from the past, and today the company is known for Roundup, NutraSweet, and aspartame. Recently, the company has been facing opposition to their genetically engineered seeds, some of which are grown specifically to allow a more liberal use of the Roundup pesticide. The poison will now not kill the genetically engineered plant, but the verdict is still out on how the poison impacts people.
While activists fight the increasing use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in the food chain, others are assuming fighting positions on the home front with respect to their lawns. The Freedom Lawn, a coin termed in the 1990s, promotes the use of organic material to maintain a garden/lawn; and the word lawn itself is redefined, the perfect picture changes.
Freedom Lawns, advocated by such groups like The Wild Ones, continue to gain favor as people seek to reduce their lawn space with other vegetation be it wild grasses, flowers or even the planting of vegetables. Milford Connecticut, for the past ten years, as held a Freedom Lawn Contest to promote gardens and lawns that are free of toxic pesticides and herbicides.
The video below describes how dandelions will not kill you