But imagine, in addition, more organic lawns made of pollinator-friendly grasses peppered with clovers, violets, chamomile
and other flowering lawn plants; imagine short green turf replaced in places by a diverse wealth of native plants bringing new colors, scents and blooms.
I still see the wide expanses of green, but I also see the high cost of keeping these nonnative monocultures growing: the wasted water, the overuse of fossil-fuel fertilizers, the threats to human
and environmental health, even to the health of our dogs.
For example, microbial ecologists using DNA sequencing have found — in New York City’s Central Park
— a diversity of soil organisms equal to anything they might have found in a tropical rain forest.
But the chemicals we pump into our lawns kill off the upper level of these microorganisms, which then requires us to use synthetic fertilizer to do their job — some 90 million pounds of fertilizer
and more than 75 million pounds of pesticides per year.