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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.

If you’ve ever mucked out a barn, you know how far theoretical manure is from the real thing. For quite some time, my life has been confined to the theoretical version. My mucking out days didn’t coincide with my gardening days, so I’ve never used manure in my gardens, first because I didn’t have easy access, and then because I kept hearing scarey things about it.

Imagine me in my desk chair, googling away about manures, at the start of my relationship with the theoretical version. Here’s what I found. Continue reading →

This post includes another entry about my father's stroke, an ongoing series I started on June 8th. Quit at the asterisks if you just want the gardening news.

Several days ago, my friend Sarah and I made the rounds of my garden, noting especially all the unprecedented molds and fungi that have sprung up. Sarah is the silver lining to the cloud that was the Bozeman Home and Garden Show last March; she's the person who came to check out the solar-panel possibilities of our shady lot, and while I haven't decided to spring for twenty-thousand dollars worth of panels, I have gained a new gardening friend–one who knows her mushrooms.

This has appeared in one of the plots on the alley:

Continue reading →