Why You Should Get Rid of Your Lawn

Everyone knows what the lawn in front of a house looks like: an unbroken sea of neatly trimmed, (mostly) green grass. But, did you know that your lawn is not only incredibly wasteful but actively harming the biodiversity of your neighborhood?


What Lawns Do

Realistically, they only show who has enough extra money they can spend it on something completely useless and aesthetic. Some houses, especially larger ones, have perfectly manicured lawns that can cover thousands of square feet, doing nothing beneficial at all to anyone.

Wow! So Useless!

Besides this "function," lawns and lawn care actively harms the environment despite being made of plants and dirt. Grass itself is extremely harmful to the environment especially because it decreases the biodiversity of ecosystems by outcompeting every other plant (with human help, of course). To read more about the scourge on our country that is grass, visit this wonderful blog post written by one of my amazing peers! Lawns also waste horrific amounts of water (over 30% of domestic water consumption), are treated with harmful pesticides and herbicides ("weed killers"), are cut with lawnmowers that cause at least 5% of our country's air pollution whose spilled fuel alone amounts to more oil than the infamous Exxon Valdez spill.

This is less oil than what lawn mowers waste every year

(statistics courtesy of this paper published by Columbia University)

How You Can Help Stop This Tragedy

Have I convinced you to get rid of your lawn yet? Good, because here are some great ways you can convert yours into an ecological paradise. Imagine how cool it will be if we could all produce the food we needed for ourselves and our native species. We'd be saving money while developing a green thumb! 

 
Buy and re-introduce native plants to your yard! Just in case you don't know many off the top of your head, here are some beautiful flowering plants:

Anemonalla thalictroides, pink variety (Pink Rue anemone)

Leonicera sempervirens (Coral Honeysuckle Red)

You can find a huge list of more seasonal beauties in this gallery, created by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. You can even plant specific flowers to attract different animals, such as butterflies or bees!

Who doesn't want some of these guys to hang out with?

Plant seeds of your favorite fruits, veggies, herbs, and spices! This is actually one of the easiest ways to save money in the long run (less grocery shopping).

Please, do the planet (and yourself) a favor and get rid of that nasty homogenous green blob in front of your house.