Jul 24 2008
bmtv88 Your Lawn, Our Ocean
This video entry is to explain some recent goings-on as well as tell about a good friend who gave up growing a green lawn in suburbia. Around the same time he was telling me this, I had also visited the Jersey shore where there were reports of an dangerous explosion in the Jelly Fish population. The causes? Nitrogen from all the fertilizers people use on their lawns that washes into the ocean. Another cause, warm water from the Oyster Bay nuclear power plant nearby.
My focus here is more on the fertilizer and energy wasted on lawn care versus the price we pay collectively for the damage done to the environment. This situation was very well illustrated by a recent edition of On Point from NPR. Wherever you live, I encourage you to stop watering the lawn, stop fertilizing, take a stand in your everyday life and change this rediculous and dangerous suburban tradition.
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funny how a natural substance such as nitrogen can do all that, even when there’s so much of it in the natural air. but its all about the balance… and now its only gonna get worse. with costs so high, people aren’t fixing their pets as much, and we’ll probably get more strays. more strays peeing on our nice green lawns and adding more nitrogen to the water runoff…
btw, i peed all over your parents lawn. its dead now. your welcome.
Keith,
I expect you to replace my lawn. I am very attached to it, thank you.
i have to go kill myself now… i meant “you’re welcome.”
youre so Jim Norton.
I letting my mom respond to all comments about her lawn. Youre in big troublez.
Mark,
the quality of the video is better than before. Sorry but I like to see green…
Moma…Make your green without pesticides! (we usually did, do we still?)
Quality looks good, Mark!
Where I live (in Oklahoma), grass is not as important to landscapes as trees. Being in a very windy environment, trees block wind and keep the soil from blowing away. Grass is also used in fields between crop rotations to allow the topsoil to recover.
I mow a few family lawns to help out the older folks, and because of gas prices and maintenance costs constantly on the rise, I sold my gas mower and purchased a motor-less lawnmower.
I’ve been wanting a new video camera for months now, and I think I finally settled on which one to purchase: Sanyo Xacti HD800.
PS: I wish you had this plugin.
Plugin: I’m on it! What Nick wants he gets on this here blog.
Motorless lawnmower? like the old push ones? wow.
The HD800 looks cool.. it does. Oddly enough, though Im excited about this new xacti I got, and it is my second one, IM still not convinced Sanyo knows anything about video for the web. or video in general. But Im excited at the prospects!
i watched this quite a while ago and it has been sticking with me.
<3
Hello bicyclemark, this is Kerrin over in the UK.
I’m currently stuck in suburbia (while I get my life sorted out) where we see something equally as disturbing as the “how astroturf-green can you get YOUR lawn, neighbor?” syndrome: the tendancy to pave over lawn to provide extra parking for the second SUV + vehicles of the two teenage children. This nationwide trend is apparently contributing to increased flooding as the rain water which would normally be absorbed into the ground through soil (no matter what was planted there) now follows a different path to man-made drainage systems not designed to handle such a volume. This, plus numerous other social and environmental problems found here, have me convinced that the core problem is suburbia itself, feeding back as it does into the minds of those who live there (here… good grief…) providing a kind of self-satisfied, structural justification for everyone’s actions. Where we live, a handful of enlightened residents use part of their garden space for growing vegetables but by rough calculation it only amounts to 0.01%. Even among the enlightened we see the use of organic compost on vegetable plots while chemical weed killer is applied to the remaining area.
Not related to suburbia, I recently watched your excellent talk from 24C3 on the Arctic Cold War then listened to the earlier interview with Tim Pritlove and enjoyed them both immensely. It was a thought provoking experience and I’d like to thank you very much for doing what you do. Long may it continue.