I grew up in an apartment in Manhattan, so anything green seemed natural to me. It’s only much more recently that I’ve come to see lawns as man-made objects imposed on the environment—often an unforgiving and unreceptive environment.
Then Eric Vinge of Planet Natural asked me to write an article on organic lawn care. Writing that article (A Home-Owner’s Guide to Organic Lawn Care: Maintaining a Chemical-Free Lawn) was my education in lawn-care pesticides and other chemicals, and it was quite a class. Obviously, I started with a strong bias towards the organic point of view. But I have a strong skeptical streak, and I decided to trace every claim about rising cancer rates and endocrine disruption, about tracked-in chemicals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and the rest to either a university or a government study.
You know what I found? It was all true. All those claims about contaminated well-water and streams, the danger of childhood exposure, reproductive disorders—they’re all true.
This show is an attempt to share some of what I learned.
Next week’s interview with Evelyn Hadden, author of Beautiful No-Mow Lawns: 50 amazing lawn alternatives, provides lots of information about what you can have instead of grass—including a terrific conversation about providing play possiblities for children.
Both of this week’s guests came to their environmental work on lawns via personal experiences. In the case of Paul Tukey it was the headaches, nausea, and other ailments that started afflicting him every spring after years working as a lawn-care professional. Cristina Milesi‘s story is less dramatic but no less telling. Italian by birth, she arrived in Missoula, Montana for graduate school, looked at the brown hills above the green lawns of the town, and said, Something’s not right here.
Both guests have become serious advocates of reform in lawns. Paul and I spend some time talking about 2,4-D, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and one of the two key ingredients in the defoliant Agent Orange. Paul tells the story of Dr. June Irwin, the
- author, lecturer, activist, film-maker, T.V. show host
- 2006 winner of American Horticultural Society’s Horticultural Communication Award for lifetime achievement.
Website: paultukey.com
Blog: SafeLawns.blog Daily Q & A
Books:
- The Organic Lawn-Care Manual: A Natural, Low-Maintenance System for a Safe, Beautiful Lawn, 2007
- Tag, Toss & Run: 40 Classic Lawn Games co-authored with Victoria Rowell, 2012
Videos, movies
- People, Places & Plants – HGTV television show, 2003-2007—DVD set available on Paul’s website.
- “Making the Organic Lawn Care Transition,” 2007—a series of brief videos available free on the SafeLawn.org website as How-To Videos.
A Chemical Reaction, 2009—the story of Dr. June Irwin’s successful 6-year campaign to get her town to ban the cosmetic use of lawn pesticides and herbicides. In 1991, Hudson, Quebec became the first town in North America to enact such a ban.
– Senior Research Scientist, University of California at Monterey Bay, NASA Ames Research Center
– member of the NASA Climate Science Adaptation Investigators team
Website: Ecocast
Selected articles and presentations*
“Regional Climate Pojections: What the Science Says” —presentation for Association of Women in Water, Energy and Environment, May 2011
- looks like power point, but downloadable as PDF
- lots of useful (and scary) graphs, maps, etc.
“Mapping and modeling the biogeochemical cycling of turf grasses in the United States” Milesi, C. et al. 2005. Journal of Environmental Management. Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 426–438.
- This is the article that led to interviews and/or articles in everything from Forbes to U.S.News.
“Assessing the Extent of Urban Irrigated Areas in the United States” Milesi, C. et al. 2009. Chapter 8 in Remote Sensing of Global Croplands for Food Security, ed. Prasad Thenkabail et al.
“Looking for Lawns” by Rebecca Lindsey, Nov. 8 2005, feature article about Milesi’s work on NASA’s Earth Observatory site.
- Cristina recommended this article to me as the best overview of her work for the lay reader.
“Study: A Link Between Pesticides and ADHD.” By Alice Park. Time Monday, May 17, 2010.
“Pesticides Linked to ADHD in Children” Environmental Protection Blog Posted by Laura Williams on Sep 13, 2011.
*Very selected.
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