Rethinking Lifestyle

As a group of us sat at GreenSpace Options last week for our Green Drinks discussion, surveying our different grass management treatments, we were approached by a Steinbacher who had his own views on lawncare.

He told us that he works in the Steinbach area dealing with weeds in lawns and that he could ‘sort our dandelion problem’. We thought it was great someone wanted to talk to us about it, so we asked him ‘how?’, and his response was that the best treatment is Par III, and that’s what he uses for all his customers. We pointed out that its use is banned, to which his response was ‘Oh, I apply it after 5pm when there’s no one around to tell me otherwise’ He wasn’t interested in a discussion about why herbicides for cosmetic purposes are banned and what the alternative options are but, after he had gone, we of course talked about his views.

What struck us was how easy it is to follow a logical path to make a decision that seem so right and obvious even when it is morally or even legally wrong.

This gentlemans’ logical solution to dealing with the dandelion problem was to illegally apply a banned herbicide after office hours when enforcement officers wouldn’t see him. This made perfect sense to him. Just as most of us speed just a little bit on the highways because even though we know the limits are there to make it safer, we know we are unlikely to get caught, and our speed gets us to our destination on time.

We debated the moral issues – his illegal use of herbicide, and making his money by doing so. We wondered if his customers knew what he was doing. We wondered who could be subject to enforcement action – the herbicide user or the customer.

We concluded that with enforcement being unlikely, it is going to take a transformational moral shift before people are concerned more about the health of their children, their pets and the environment, than they are about whether there are dandelions in their lawns.

And maybe the children, pets or environment, are not the issues that concern people. Having seen a number of our neighbours swap their gravel drives for concrete I suspect that what matters more are what makes life easy, and fashion.

Lawns became a status symbol in 17th century Europe for the landed gentry, and became an indicator of who could employ enough people to cut and weed, before lawn mowers made lawns within reach of the masses. And so, every week we hear the hum of mowers as we strive for a green monoculture. Now the status symbol is the type of mower you can afford, and whether you cut it yourself of pay others to maintain your lawn for you!

A fashion shift to transform lawn to trees and shrubs (which have a proven benefit on health, and keep us cool), to rain gardens (which would help with our recent weather), to xeriscapes using native plants, or pollinator gardens that look so beautiful and colourful (much prettier than grass), seem a reasonable hope.

At any rate, given human nature, it seems more likely that our gardens will change through a shift in fashion than from acceptance of the cosmetic herbicide ban for health and environmental reasons.

Or am I being unfair?