Concluding Thoughts On Turf Terror and Those Persistent Connections, 33
Here a Chemical, There a Chemical, Everywhere a Chemical
Sure, a lot of Americans like their guns, but a huge number of us really crave our chemicals and with no questions asked. I think most of us have seen the slick pharmaceutical ads on television with clever names and promises of a happier and a healthier life.
The sound invariably drops, however, when the required disclaimer is offered that quickly mentions the possible side effects of taking a particular drug. Oh, and remember, YOU are most definitely paying the advertising agencies for these elixirs.
At the end of the commercial they always tell us to “ask our doctor” about whatever drug it is they are advertising. The United States and New Zealand (of all places) are the only two countries that allow drug companies to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers.
Now the pharmaceutical reps, the salespeople that provide the “free” samples to the doctors, well, that’s a story unto itself. But, nevertheless, don’t forget to ask your doctor if it’s “right” for you.
Do Not Get Sold on Drug Advertising
What’s this got to do with my lawn you may well ask? Unfortunately, it’s connected, as is frequently the case.
Forever is Forever
According to the article something like 20 million acres of cropland in the U.S. could be contaminated. The contaminate is PFAS, aptly named “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down and are linked to some nasty illnesses—that can affect you, your children, your pets, wildlife … and the planet on which we reside. See:
A number of years ago one of the national lawn care companies stated in its sales brochure that it’s got chemicals for early spring to deal with “winter stresses.” In the early summer it has chemicals to help you “prepare” for the nasty summer. In the early fall the candy man has the cure-all to help your sensitive mono-turf recover from the “stresses of summer.” And, finally, “winter survival,” for which they have winter protection. How did nature survive before humans developed all these chemicals and tools to create and protect our precious artificially induced neighborhood turf?
The Template
What’s the plan? You first have to identify the problem … or create one. There always is THE problem. Then comes persuasive and smiling salespeople, followed by compliant Washington politicians, who are willing to do almost anything if the benefits are right and—most important—gullible consumers determined to clench the “acceptable” standard while, at the same time, believing fervently in claiming their desired status as truly authentic American individualists. Contradictory? Sure, why not. It’s not unique to Americans.
Isn’t it always about being in charge and that elusive “freedom?” Go west young man, as the newspaper editor Horace Greeley supposedly said in 1865, referring to our westward expansion after the Civil War. And, who has it and who doesn’t and who desperately wants it but frequently doesn’t know exactly why they want it. Certainly some of course did know why they wanted it.
But it was Abraham Lincoln who said in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on November 21, 1864, a little more than four months before the end of the Civil War:
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
Vanity Fair magazine recently reported (June 3) on some remarks offered by Congressman Jamie Raskin, a key member of the January 6 committee, on the report that will be made public next week regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election. Raskin said that one of the most surprising discoveries is “the role that money played, and the role of a financial motive behind all these events to keep the money pouring in.” A surprise? It’s about time not to be surprised about corporate corruption in America and the role it plays and its danger to any type of a functioning democracy.
Remember, How to Landscape Your Grounds, published in 1950? Even “those in the lower and medium income groups” want the same refinement as…. Who said America is a classless society?
Chemical Company Slogans & Taglines over the years: carbon is a girl’s best friend … only solutions, not problems … tested and delivered … no unknown reactions here …
Actuality
It’s legitimate to ask what did they know and when did they know it, as far back as the end of World War II. After the war the chemical companies reworked the original formulas. Lower doses were created to kill insects instead of people. The toxicity to humans, however, did not suddenly vanish. What did become more difficult was establishing cause and effect and the connection between symptoms and exposure. But more than seventy years later we’ve learned a lot about the cumulative and possibly long lasting effects of these toxins on the environment, on animals and on people.
A number of commonly used lawn pesticides may have links to cancer, kidney and liver disease, birth defects, and neurological disorders, to name just a few possibilities. Pesticides have been found in groundwater and are toxic to birds, bees, fish and aquatic organisms.
DDT, the pesticide that was banned back in 1971, still turned up in animal tissue more than thirty years later, along with PCBs, chlordane, dieldrin, and a host of other synthetic chemicals.
A few years ago a Canadian study sponsored by Environmental Defense, examined blood and urine samples of volunteers living in different parts of the country. All the volunteers had high levels of assorted chemicals, which included pesticides. The Center for Disease Control in the United States has also conducted similar studies and has come up with similar results.
The chemical fertilizers we still pour on our lawns and golf courses are “stimulants.” They wash away and increase concentrations of nutrients that can end up intensifying algae growth and decreasing dissolved oxygen in water.
I don’t know precisely what we toss on our lawns and gardens today, but some fifteen years ago it was estimated that at least 90 million pounds of pesticides were spread across our green spaces and gardens. As well, homeowners tended to apply them more intensively than farmers do on their crops. Agriculture averaged about 2.7 pounds per acre, while homeowners averaged somewhere between 3.2 to 9.8 pounds per acre for lawns.
The Audubon Society had once estimated that a “typical” lawn might receive as much as 20 pounds of fertilizer and 10 pounds of pesticide a year. Finally, a one-third acre lawn could consume 170,000 gallons of water in a summer.
The Environmental Protection Agency had listed lawn mowers as an important source of ozone-causing pollution. In fact, the EPA found that lawn and garden equipment in metropolitan areas (where most of us live) increases air pollution in some cases by more than 20 percent.
A member of the California Air Resources Board once said that using a gasoline-powered lawn mower for one hour is like “driving a minimum of 10 cars.” This person also added it could be “up to 30 or 40” if you’re using an old lawn mower. But? Yes, yes I know. Lawnmowers today are more efficient and some people even use electric mowers. Aren’t we making progress?
Want a lawn that’s fairway smooth? Sam Snead’s voice whispers from the past. Well, not as much as we once did fortunately. But we’re still poisoning ourselves and our children to death. But don’t worry. Trust us. Be happy. The market always knows what’s best. A perfect lawn is still the American success story, don’t you know.
The Enemy Within
We are watching the entire United States, but particularly the border states of New York, Connecticut, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Washington, for any activity relating to banning pesticides. (pesticide/fertilizer lobbying group, 2005)
Weed control ordinances started appearing in the mid-1940s and spread to practically every metropolitan area in the United States. Within a remarkable uniformity of acceptable appearance, there were also numerous differences. It was generally agreed that grass had to be kept short, but short could mean no more than 10 inches in some towns, 12 inches in others, 14 in some, and so forth.
Everyone agreed that “weeds” were bad, but what constituted a weed could vary considerably from one town to the next. Once you got beyond crabgrass, dandelions, and one or two other all-purpose villains, the weed menace got murky.
A quick word on crabgrass and dandelions, the two plants most commonly mentioned as lawn murderers. Leonard Barron, a “lawn expert,” wrote in 1909 that it had been reported that, “Rolling with a three-thousand pound machine has killed crab grass in Philadelphia.”
Regarding dandelions, Barron went on to say that it was not “uncommon to see itinerant Italians traveling from garden to garden digging up the dandelions which they sell in the cities for salad purposes.” He stated that “these scavengers should be encouraged.”
Well, crabgrass is not bad for your lawn and is not only nutritious but one of the world’s fastest growing cereals. Dandelions aren’t harmful and they are food for insects and some small rodents—no, not large, voracious, plague-infected rats. The dandelion’s biggest fault is that it spreads quickly through the seeds carried on the wind by the trademark gray fluff. Don’t believe the nonsense that is offered up by corporate America and their compliant politicians.
Penalties varied as well, from only a slap on the wrist to hefty fines for violations. The stated reasons for enacting these laws were numerous. For some communities weed control laws “protected” the public from neglectful homeowners. Sometimes it was because tall grass and weeds were considered a fire hazard or an attraction to rats and mosquitoes. In some cases weed control laws were enacted because weeds supposedly produced pollen and therefore caused suffering among people with allergies.
Once in a while the ordinance was thought important because it helped prevent the growth and camouflage of, er, possibly an illegal substance? The lawn and garden industry, in general, was more than happy to encourage and promote half-truths and outright fairy tales that have blanketed America pretty much to the present.
Still today across America, perhaps on a Saturday in June, the noise levels can approach mid-town Manhattan at rush hour. SUV-sized lawnmowers lumber across the grass, while the sound from the house next door might be the whirl of the omnipresent weed slayer or better still, the screech of the leaf blower.
Then, as the late afternoon approaches, the lawn company truck pulls up. This time it’s the chemical folks about to put down the “needed” spring fertilizer, the June herbicide or maybe the quarterly fungicide. Right across the street is the lawnmower guy with his gargantuan machine. He’ll race across the lawn, then give a quick once over with the “whacker” and then hop back in his truck. Time is money. Turn on your lawn sprinkler and relax.
A Cry in the Wilderness
Someone actually spoiled the party in 1962. A little known marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service named Rachel Carson wrote a book entitled Silent Spring. This is one book that ought to be required reading even 60 years later.
Perhaps what we were doing to our planet might be very bad Ms. Carson suggested; the massive, indiscriminate use of pesticides had to stop if we wanted a livable environment. The lawn care industry, especially the chemical companies, did not like what Rachel Carson had to say.
But of course the industry knew only one way to deal with any critic. They attacked her. She was threatened with lawsuits, and accused of being unqualified and a hysterical woman, among other things. But a lot of unquestioned beliefs slowly began to unravel in the 1960s. The beliefs, however, have not disappeared and the chemical industry only went on to bigger and better “practices” in the following decades along with increased profits.
Getting Lost in the Weeds
Today what do we believe in as Americans? What do we want to believe in? What do we think we believe in? Many of us glibly talk about another civil war, as though it will lead to some promised land for the winners. Well, delusion is one of America’s principal personality traits.
The last American civil war ended only 157 years ago over the issue of human subjugation and enslavement of African-Americans, you know, people as property, a commodity that you buy and sell, like sugar or wheat or the herbicide for your lawn or the menthol cigarette that darkens your lungs or the promise of “clean” coal … or the gun disease that will protect your children from harm, but the “war” had actually begun 185 years before in New England starting on June 20, 1675 and known as King Philip’s War, of which my ancestors were familiar with.
It was a war between the English colonialists and, initially, the Wampanoag Indians and turned out to be one of the bloodiest conflicts in U.S. History.
There has never been a “cleansing” of the American soul nor a closure in America’s violent and bloodthirsty history. It will not occur in the latest potential iteration either.
Making Sense Out of It, Sort Of
Does it ever seem that behind America’s flag waving, its pious incantations, those celebratory days of independence and sacrifice that we Americans, more than we may want to consider, have rarely had any genuine sense of us or for that matter the recognizable achievement of actually creating, albeit very imperfectly, a literal and figurative attempt at a democratic republic in the 18th century … but all too often have regarded the country as good or worthwhile in a far more narrow sense, principally for our own personal pocketbook or merely the corporation’s shareholder value, a kind of emptiness regarding the space we call the United States.
Why is it easy to imagine a vacuous info-entertainer like Tucker Carlson, a degenerate like Donald Trump and a motley group of mediocre politicians going to Hungary run by a second rate autocrat, who babbles about his country’s “illiberal democracy” to hold some ridiculous convention about—in reality—how to get rid of our democracy and create some stupid American autocracy.
Probably the term “capitalism” is outmoded and inaccurate when we speak of our current economic system today. Capitalism, the buying and selling of goods and the creation of factories for manufacturing them, have been around for thousands of years, certainly in ancient Rome and China more than 2,000 years ago, and even in ancient Egypt possibly 3,000 years ago.
What we have today is different. It’s hard for me not to think of our current economic system as little more than an established, well organized (or not) and ruthless GRIFT. It’s a global system in a deep crisis and even though it has been remarkably successful over the years in its willing “shape shifting” to accommodate generally non-threatening or temporary change, it is incapable, it seems to me, of ultimately addressing the world as it is today and will likely become. It can’t overcome its self-serving and never ending delusional hustle.
Our economic world has become increasingly unequal, certainly since the beginning of the 1980s. For that matter, private wealth is now about 700 percent of GDP and inherited wealth has increased significantly, which means that wealth is not earned by production or employment or glowing brilliance. Poor Horatio Alger has no clothes anymore.
We’re in a world of “rentier capitalism.” It’s now about fees, bonuses and rents and the share of capital going to labor is shrinking. It’s about the narcissistic rantings of billionaire entrepreneurs and rich, autocratic gangsters like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jiping of China counting their bags of money.
The economist Joseph Stiglitz believes the global rules have been designed to serve corporate interests. Yanis Varoufakis on the other hand believes that where once before profits were the economic engine, now it is the business of central banks to print money to insure that financial markets remain in good health. He refers to all of this as command capitalism. It’s as though Stalin has returned from the dead to oversea his digital fiefdom.
Shoshana Zuboff speaks of artificial intelligence (A/I), digital accumulation and the storage of information. The economics is really about predicting our behavior. What price are we willing to pay? How much should we charge for insurance? What terms will be required for your bank loan? How often do you go to Costco and on what days? How many people in a given community of 50,000 can be bribed?
This leads us back to the beginning, in this particular case our lawn and what we want it to do for us and the world around us, and what degree of truth we expect from the lawn maintenance company or whether or not we still need lawn maintenance or buggy whips or semi-automatic weapons or wildlife to make us feel comfortable and safe from all the monsters we’re told are just beyond the horizon, who threaten to take some thing from us. Get it now! Only 10 left! We give you choices. WE give you freedom.
THE QUESTION FOR THE READER: What do you think? What is it we ought to do and how should we do it? Many voices need to speak up.
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Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 60 years on. Birds Still Falling From the Skies
Big Tobacco is Killing the Planet With Plastics
NEXT POST IS JUNE 19, 2022