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- <text id=91TT1203>
- <title>
- June 03, 1991: Can Lawns Be Justified?
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- June 03, 1991 Date Rape
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- ENVIRONMENT, Page 63
- Can Lawns Be Justified?
- </hdr><body>
- <p>Awash in fertilizers and pesticides, they may be a hazard to
- homeowners--and children, pets and neighbors
- </p>
- <p>By JOHN SKOW--Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York and Joyce
- Leviton/Atlanta
- </p>
- <p> Lawn is the curse of suburban man, his bizarre fetish,
- the great green god he sprays to. Lawn must be barbered to the
- satisfaction of one's neighbors, or it earns their dirty looks
- and, in some tightly strung communities, a summons from city
- hall. The ideal lawn is featureless, a living imitation of
- Astroturf. Striving to achieve it soaks up water, money and
- weekend goof-off time in fantastic quantities.
- </p>
- <p> Never mind that trying to grow grass in hot, cold or arid
- regions is almost as silly as trying to grow kelp. Americans
- have belawned 25 million to 30 million acres, an area larger
- than Virginia. Lawn is our connection to the English manor
- houses to which most of us cannot trace our ancestors; it is the
- decent, respectably dull necktie we knot around our houses.
- </p>
- <p> Now--is this really a surprise?--lawn owners are
- hearing from environmental activists what common sense has been
- telling them for some time. The herbicides and insecticides they
- spread on their lawns are poisons. They can be deadly, the
- charge goes, not only to the noxious bugs and broad-leaf weeds
- they are supposed to kill but also to useful bugs, to the
- earthworms that aerate the soil and to pets and people.
- Do-it-yourselfers don't read warning labels or take precautions
- to protect themselves, and they use up to six times as much
- pesticide per acre as farmers do. Runoff of fertilizers from
- farmlands has tainted water supplies, and though industry
- experts say it doesn't happen, critics fear similar troubles
- from suburban lawn runoff.
- </p>
- <p> Children are especially vulnerable to the junk that your
- neighbor's lawn service fogs around or to the "completely safe
- for humans" stuff that you bought at the hardware store. Lawn
- poisons can cause headaches, dizziness, eye problems, mental
- disorientation and lasting damage to the nervous system. Cancer
- is also a possibility, since some pesticides contain known
- carcinogens. Of course, your lawn looks great.
- </p>
- <p> So the testimony, much of it bitter, went this month
- before the Senate environment and public-works subcommittee on
- toxic substances. Dallas petroleum consultant Tom Latimer, 36,
- testified that he used the widely sold insecticide diazinon six
- years ago to control grubs eating grass roots at the same time
- that he was taking the drug Tagamet to control warts. Neither
- chemical came with a warning of dangerous interaction, but the
- impact of diazinon, an organophosphate that inhibits nerve
- action, was apparently magnified by the Tagamet. Today his
- eyesight remains severely damaged; he has constant headaches;
- his memory, concentration and mental acuity are dulled.
- </p>
- <p> Proving legal responsibility and collecting damages in
- such cases are difficult, and Latimer has had no luck. Nor, so
- far, has Christina Locek, 42, of River Grove, Ill., a onetime
- professional ice skater and pianist who says her health was
- destroyed in 1985 when a lawn-care service sprayed her
- neighbor's yard. Her cat and dog died the same day, she says,
- and she continues to suffer partial paralysis, substantial
- vision loss, headaches and blood disorders. Another woman told
- the Senate subcommittee that she sometimes slept in her car to
- avoid lawn spraying in her neighborhood.
- </p>
- <p> Such people can seem distraught to the point of
- crankiness, but extreme sensitivity to chemicals is not a rare
- condition. How much regulation the multibillion-dollar lawn-care
- industry should have was the main issue before the subcommittee.
- Neighborhood warnings before pesticide dousings and signs on
- treated lawns afterward were proposed. ChemLawn, the big
- lawn-care outfit with headquarters in Columbus does not oppose
- such measures, though a spokesperson said last week that a study
- of 100 employees who applied lawn chemicals showed "no long-term
- health effects."
- </p>
- <p> Until now, government supervision of lawn pesticides has
- been notably drowsy. The Environmental Protection Agency is
- required to review the dangers of pesticides that were in use
- before 1972, when more stringent regulations went into effect,
- but so far has completely cleared only two of the 34 most used
- chemical agents. While the EPA deliberates, all of them continue
- to be used on lawns. According to the National Coalition Against
- the Misuse of Pesticides, an advocacy group critical of the
- lawn-care industry, nine of the pesticides may be carcinogenic,
- 10 may cause birth defects, three can affect reproduction, nine
- can damage the liver or kidneys, 20 attack the nervous system,
- and 29 cause rashes or skin disease. Pesticides, says NCAMP
- national coordinator Jay Feldman, are defined "as acceptable
- poisons. But nothing out there is safe."
- </p>
- <p> In a political climate that favors market forces, not
- regulation, the EPA has been unwilling to crack down. Noting
- that geese had been dying from ingesting diazinon, the pesticide
- that gave Latimer so much trouble, the agency did ban the
- chemical for use on sod farms and golf courses. What it failed
- to do, perhaps fearing the wrath of the pesticide industry, was
- ban diazinon's much more extensive use on home lawns. Those
- fellows at the hardware store will still sell you as much as you
- want.
- </p>
- <p> Tom Adamczyk, EPA deputy branch chief of herbicides, says
- it did not seem likely that geese would be landing on suburban
- lawns (though ornithologists have known for several years that
- lawn-care pesticides are killing songbirds). Adamczyk went on to
- note that the EPA has banned the pesticides chlordane, 2,4,5-T
- and Silvex from the market. He says quicker re-evaluation would
- be desirable "in the ideal world" but the agency has not had the
- money or personnel to speed up the process. "You can't just yank
- a product off the market without incontrovertible proof that
- it's harmful."
- </p>
- <p> Pesticides, it seems, are innocent until proved guilty.
- Tom Watschke, a turf-grass scientist at Penn State University,
- derides pesticide critics for "saying that until the EPA can
- prove that any chemical for sale in a garden center is safe, it
- shouldn't be available. That's ridiculous. The real risk is the
- person who has no knowledge of agronomic principles and thinks
- if a certain dose of pesticide is good, then double is better."
- Worry about fertilizers and pesticides running off into lakes,
- rivers and groundwater and causing fish kills and algal blooms,
- Watschke insists, "is just propaganda that unfortunately is
- scaring the public unnecessarily."
- </p>
- <p> Maybe, but why take the risk? Brain tumors must be
- excised, if possible, but dandelions don't really do any harm.
- In fact, they are pretty, enthusiastic, nutritious in salads and
- excellent for wine making. Of course, if they ever became
- popular, the lawn-care megacorporations would sell us patent
- medicine to encourage them by killing the grass. In the
- meantime, California may be the waterless wave of the future.
- In Los Angeles, Robin Thomas is trying to revive his dried
- yellow grass with organic products, not chemicals, because "I
- have children, and they play on the lawn." In Oakland, Rachel
- Blau's lawn is green because it rained recently. But if there's
- no rain, "we let it go," she says, bravely adding the unsayable
- "I don't care how it looks."
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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