Yesterday was a beautiful day and I went for a 20 mile bike ride on my large island in northern Puget Sound. I happened to notice someone near my (solar) home mowing a a prominent hillside field of about 6 to 8 acres in size on a riding lawn mower. Then as iI rode I kept passing these large multi-acre parcels of mowed grass surrounding mostly average looking homes. These large parcels of mowed grass rarely see any kind of use, they become formal buffer zones surrounding most of these homes. They just become a kind of no man's (or woman's) land.
Lawn mowing season has arrived in here in Puget Sound and people are struggling to get their yards into their desired states. With all our rain here and the way it makes stuff grow its hard to keep ahead of everything during this time of year.
So I have to wonder why anyone would want to go back and forth the many times it takes to mow one of these monster yards. Is riding on a mower that therapeutic? I wouldn't know, I've never been on one. Or does our society tend to confer higher status to those with large expanses of mowed grass around their dwelling? That would be more my guess.
I remember studying a tribal group in New Guinea during a college anthropology course, where the tribal members status was determined by the size of the pile of rotting yams in front of each hut (yams being their staple food). The bigger the pile of rotting yams in front of your hut the higher your status was. The people in the tribe worked very hard to pile up extra yams so they can be left to rot. I think that's a big part of the motivation at work here for creating these monster lawns.
Now I know that mowing keeps brush and our tenacious Himalayan Blackberries at bay, but many of the larger sizes of these buffer zones make little sense to me just to look at them.
I'll get to my point. The American obsession with creating pleasant looking buffer zones (and the bigger the better) of mowed grass around our homes is extremely wasteful and needlessly destructive to the environment. The small engines in lawn mowers spew disproportionately large amounts of carbon monoxide, and other pollutants.
Cleaner Air : Gas Mower Pollution Facts
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a traditional gas powered lawn mower produces as much air pollution as 43 new cars each being driven 12,000 miles.
Gardeners Spill More than the Exxon Valdez
And speaking of gas, the EPA states that 17 million gallons of fuel, mostly gasoline, are spilled each year while refueling lawn equipment. That's more than all the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez, in the Gulf of Alaska. In addition to groundwater contamination, spilled fuel that evaporates into the air and volatile organic compounds spit out by small engines make smog-forming ozone when cooked by heat and sunlight.
One greener choice is an electric mower, (I confess I haven't made the switch to a greener mower yet). Sweeden's Husqvarna makes an "auto mower" that is solar powered but it costs $2,500 and its not yet available in the U.S. The greenest way to power a lawn mower is to do it yourself with a push mower. As a kid I was the oldest so pushing the family mower fell to me. Now at 55 my back rules out returning to that kind of option.
Back to my neighbor. He really did make good use of his hillside field overlooking the state highway last summer when he used his riding mower to spell out O B A M A in letters about 30 feet high.