For the last dozen years or so, I have taught a course at the University of Delaware called The Literature of the Land. It’s one of my favorite classes, not least because of the writing requirements. In addition to asking students to read a half dozen books about a particular subject (nature and religion, industrial food production, climate change), I have them spend at least an hour every week sitting in the woods and writing about what they see. Not what they think about. What they see. Learning field observation, I tell them, is as important for aspiring writers as it is for aspiring naturalists. Both demand attention to detail, both demand the ability to shut up and listen. Students are required to carry a field guide with them, and to take detailed notes on the things they see springing to life or dying back.
Over the years, a pattern has emerged. At first, all the students see are “trees.” A week or two later, they are seeing “white oaks” and “tulip poplars” and “sugar maples.” A few more weeks, and their eyes are more fully accustomed to the pace of life in the woods. They move through the space more slowly, and more quietly. They see foxes. And great blue herons. And barred owls.
My goals, not usually articulated until well into the semester, go beyond writing instruction, of course. What I’m trying to do is encourage students to spend some time, every week, turning down the noise in their lives. I want them to try—just for a time, but every week—to unplug from their cell phones and laptops, to disentangle themselves from the social and academic pressures of college, to take a walk in the woods. This also offers, not incidentally, an opportunity for self-reflection, for meditation, and for a renewed sense of engagement with the natural world.
Over the course of a dozen years teaching this class, something has become clear to me. Every semester, more and more students enter my classroom having spent virtually no time outdoors. They have not camped or climbed trees. They have not backpacked. They have not paddled rivers. They don’t fish, or hunt, or climb mountains. Not with their families, not with their friends.
A couple of years ago, on the first day of class, I asked my students what words they think of when they hear the word “wilderness.” In past years, they offered both concrete, experiential words (“my family’s trip to Yosemite”) and what were surely abstractions (“jungle,” “rain forest,” “wild animals”). But this year was different, and for me, it marked what I still think of as a benchmark moment. What words did this group of students have me list on the board? What did wilderness mean to them?
“Rape,” said one.
“Fear,” said another.
“Loneliness,” said a third.
What was going on here? I knew most of these kids were suburbanites, but hadn’t they ever been Girl Scouts? Or gone to a summer camp? Where were they getting their news about the natural world? Nature, for these students, had somehow become an abstraction at best, and a source of anxiety at worst. There was no sense of joy, or adventure, or mystery. No wonder. Forget about fantasies of strapping on a backpack after college and hiking the Appalachian Trail, paddling the Mississippi River, or bumming around Alaska. These kids seemed afraid to leave their backyards.
I mention this because it has begun to seem that the degree to which we have become abstracted from our natural surroundings might tell us a lot about the degree to which we are willing—consciously or not—to live with synthetic chemicals. If a college student can’t tell you what river or reservoir his tap water comes from, why would he ever stop to think about all the toxins that water might be collecting on its way to his tap? If she has no concept where the meat in her Big Mac came from, what possible reason would she have to consider buying food grown on a local farm, or on land that has not been sprayed with pesticides? If his concept of a beautiful college campus is unbroken stretches of perfectly groomed lawns, why would he possibly object to the acres of toxic herbicides that such lawns require to look so pristine? Likewise, this same student has likely never considered that these chemicals will wash off the lawn at the first rain, will flow into a storm sewer, and will end up, eventually, somewhere in a river, where they will at least damage aquatic life and will probably make their way back into his own (or someone else’s) drinking water. But why would he think about this? He can’t see the creeks, because they are all buried underneath what he thinks of as a Frisbee field.
One recent spring, fifteen students and I spent most of the semester talking about environmental contaminants in our food, in atmospheric greenhouse gases, and, via toxic chemicals, in our everyday lives. On a beautiful April day, we decided to meet outside, on the campus’s central lawn, right between two classroom buildings that just happened to bear the names of two gargantuan chemical companies: the DuPont building was to our left, the Gore (as in the Gore-Tex chemicals and textiles company) building to our right. In the middle of a conversation about agricultural pesticides, a university groundskeeper, dressed from his feet to his neck in a white chemical suit, drove by on his rider mower. He wasn’t cutting the grass, though; he was spraying it. And not from one nozzle, but from a half dozen. Up and back he went, describing parallel lines as neat as those in any Iowa farmer’s cornfield. Up and back. Up and back. Not a blade of grass escaped the spray.
This became what is known as a perfect teaching moment.
Who’s going to go up and ask him what he’s spraying? I asked.
My students smiled nervously at one another, until a bright young woman volunteered. We watched as she marched over to the groundskeeper and waved cordially until he turned off his engine. They spoke for a minute or two, out of earshot, and she returned.
“He said he’s spraying 2,4-D,” she said, and it was clear that she had no idea what this chemical was. “He said we didn’t need to worry, because he sprayed the place where we’re sitting at five A.M. this morning.”
About seven hours earlier. My students chuckled self-consciously. Seven hours? He’s wearing a full-body chem suit, and we’re sitting on the grass, seven hours later, in shorts and bare feet?
My students had never heard of 2,4-D, otherwise known as 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. But they had heard of Agent Orange, the notorious defoliant used in Vietnam. This pesticide, 2,4-D, I told them, is a constituent of Agent Orange.
My guess is that except for my students, who happened to be studying pesticides, few of the thousands of people walking across the great expanse of lawn that morning noticed what was happening, let alone cared. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, the grass was green. What’s not to like? The guy in the white suit, on a machine with nozzles going full tilt, is as much a part of the campus landscape as the brick walkways and the grass itself.
Back in our little circle on the grass, I told my students what I knew about 2,4-D. I told them, for one thing, that it is the most extensively used herbicide in the history of the world. I also told them that it was developed secretly during World War II, mostly as a weapon to destroy an enemy’s rice crops.
Yet despite its military history, 2,4-D has long been presented by the lawn-care industry as safe for civilian use. Some of the evidence, in retrospect, seems less than convincing.
In the 1940s, E. J. Kraus, the head of the botany department at the University of Chicago, said he fed five and a half grams of pure 2,4-D to a cow every day for three months. The cow was fine, he said, and so was her calf. Kraus said he himself had eaten a half gram of the stuff every day for three weeks, and felt great. This was apparently good enough science for the rest of the country; within five years, American companies were producing 14 million pounds of 2,4-D a year. By 1964, the number had jumped to 53 million pounds. “The public’s enthusiasm for the newly unveiled herbicide was equaled by universal ignorance of the chemical and how it worked,” a 1967 history of the compound reported. “Even without clearly understanding how 2,4-D worked, it looked good to ‘weed men.’ ”
Here’s why: beyond its ability to defoliate jungles, 2,4-D proved to have another property that had commercial lawn companies seeing green: it could kill broad-leaved plants, like dandelions and clover, without killing grass. Today, annual sales of 2,4-D have surpassed $300 million worldwide. Since it does not require a license to buy or to use, 2,4-D can be found in many “weed and feed” products, like Scotts Green Sweep, Ortho Weed B Gon, Salvo, Weedone, and Spectracide.
At first, 2,4-D’s impact on human health seemed fairly tame—skin and eye irritation, nausea and vomiting, dizziness, stiffness in the arms and legs—and conventional lawn-care companies have long dismissed health worries. The amount of chemicals in most lawn sprays are so diluted, the companies say, that “even if it were the most toxic material known to man, in the solution we use it, it would be harmless.”
But as with most chemicals, the effects of 2,4-D are more worrisome when they are considered over time. Because it is designed to mimic a plant’s natural growth hormone, it causes such rapid cell growth that a plant’s normal transport systems become destroyed by abnormally fast tissue growth. The stems of plants treated with 2,4-D tend to become grotesquely twisted; the roots become swollen; the leaves turn yellow and die. Plants quickly starve to death.
Given its effects on cell growth in plants, it should perhaps not be surprising that 2,4-D has also been shown to disrupt human hormones. The National Institute of Health Sciences lists 2,4-D as a suspected endocrine disruptor, and several studies point to its possible contribution to genetic mutations and problems with reproductive health. Although the EPA continues to maintain that there is not enough evidence to classify 2,4-D as a carcinogen, a growing body of research has begun to link it to a variety of cancers, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A 1986 National Cancer Institute study found that farmers in Kansas exposed to 2,4-D for twenty or more days a year had a sixfold higher risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Five years later, another National Cancer Institute study showed that dogs were twice as likely to contract lymphoma if their owners used 2,4-D on their lawns. Like flame retardants and countless other compounds, 2,4-D also tends to accumulate inside people’s homes, even days after the lawn outside has been sprayed. One study found 2,4-D present in the indoor dust of 63 percent of sampled homes; another showed that levels of 2,4-D in indoor air and on indoor surfaces like floors and tables increased after lawn applications. Exposure levels for children were ten times higher than before the lawns were treated—an indication, among other things, of just how easily the chemical is tracked inside on the little feet of dogs, cats, and children.
Of course, 2,4-D is just one of scores of pesticides in broad use today. Dr. David Pimentel, a professor of entomology at Cornell, has written that 110,000 people suffer from adverse health effects from pesticides each year, and that 10,000 cases of cancer may be attributable to pesticide exposure.
All of which makes running around in bare feet—let alone sitting outside for spring seminars—a little less appealing. In the weeks that followed our encounter with the spray nozzles, I encouraged my students to think a little harder about toxic chemicals while completing their journal assignments.
The student who initially spoke to the groundskeeper decided to look into the EPA’s toxic release inventory for her home state of Massachusetts. She discovered that in 2006, 4.8 million pounds of toxic waste were deposited in-state, and an additional 2.1 million pounds were transported out of state for disposal.
Another senior wrote that her newfound awareness of toxins in the environment had left her craving ignorance, if only for a day or two. Her mother, a college professor, is a four-time breast cancer survivor. Another wrote that his father had been treated for prostate cancer, as had one of his uncles. Another uncle had testicular cancer. His grandparents died of lung cancer. His mother has had lymphoma removed from her eyes, and her thyroid from her throat. “That’s how commonplace cancer is now,” the student wrote. “That’s what we’ve been reduced to: future patients.”
A pretty disheartening way to view what once looked like a nice place to play Frisbee.
So how did we come to this?
A hundred years ago, 60 percent of Americans lived in rural country. Today, 83 percent live in cities or suburbs. Along with all that new housing has come an astonishing shift in the landscape. Over the last half century, Americans have become obsessed with grass. When you add up the country’s 58 million home lawns and 16,000 golf courses, you get close to 50 million acres of turf in the United States. That’s a national lawn roughly the size of Nebraska. And that number is growing by 600 square miles a year. Think about that the next time you are worrying about the disappearance of the Amazon rain forest.
I’m not sure if 50 million acres sounds like a lot or a little. But when you consider the total amount of herbicides and pesticides it would take to chemically “manage” a lawn the size of Nebraska, you get a sense of what we’re talking about. Americans spend some $40 billion a year on lawn care, more than the gross national product of Tunisia. Estimates of the number of American households that use pesticides run as high as 82 percent. And this doesn’t even take into account the fuel required to mow Nebraska. On average, mowing your lawn for one hour produces as much pollution as driving your car about 650 miles; in an average year, Americans burn 800 million gallons of gasoline in their lawn mowers. And each time we fill the gas tanks on our lawn mowers, we spill a few drops on the lawn or the driveway. If you tally up all the little spills made by all the people mowing their lawns in the United States, you get a cumulative gasoline spill of some 17 million gallons a year—roughly 50 percent more than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. And blowing the leaves? Using a gas-powered leaf blower for a half hour releases as much carbon as driving a car 7,700 miles at 30 miles per hour.
In other words, a national landscape that Americans still imagine to be a great wilderness has, in a few short decades, turned into an enormous source of synthetic chemicals.
And like most synthetic things, the suburban American lawn has its roots in the postwar 1940s. With GIs returning from the war by the hundreds of thousands, developers like Abe, Bill, and Alfred Levitt reacted to the explosion in demand by building homes as if an assembly line. Within a couple of years after the war, Levittown, Long Island, went from a potato field to a full-blown suburb with more than 17,500 homes—each on one-seventh of an acre. Only 12 percent of each Levittown lot was taken up by a house. The rest was devoted to landscaping. There were a few fruit trees and a couple of evergreens, but everything else—times 17,500—was grass. “A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling,” Abe Levitt said in 1949. “It is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are lasting ones.”
Especially for a country so unsettled by a world war, the consistency and conformity of the Levittown vision felt comforting. As the fear of fascism gave way to a fear of communism, the state of one’s lawn was considered a public declaration of one’s allegiance to the American Dream. In a 1948 newspaper column, Abe Levitt wrote that a manicured lawn was the clearest possible sign that a home owner was both honorable and trustworthy—that is to say, not a Communist. “Remember, your lawn is your outdoor living room about 7 months of the year,” he wrote. “Your visiting friends form their opinions of the neatness and cleanliness of your house at their first approach.” Neighborhood covenants required home owners to mow their lawns at least once a week between April and November.
The May 1957 cover of the Saturday Evening Post showed four families reposing on identical postage-stamp squares of grass, separated by identical lengths of white picket fence behind identical tract houses. All of the people were white (until 1960, Levittown’s 80,000 residents included no African-Americans), and they were all engaged in some form of “gardening”—a man pushing a lawn mower, a woman walking, apparently barefoot, across grass that looks as manicured as the felt on a billiard table. This was the postwar suburban dream: lawns became as controlled and as sanitized as the interiors of the homes themselves. In suburbia, Time magazine noted in 1959, crabgrass on a lawn can lower a man’s status “faster than a garbage can in his foyer.” The weed “has become a neighborhood problem like juvenile delinquency. If not snuffed out in one spot, it quickly spreads to another.”
Connecting (and encouraging) all these new suburbs, of course, was the country’s brand-new interstate highway system, and along with the four-lane highways came 200 feet of right-of-way, or 25 acres of turf per mile. By 1961, this added up to the equivalent of some 29 million football fields—all of which needed regular mowing and regular spraying. In 1962, Rachel Carson noted that an area larger than New England—50 million acres—was under management by utility companies and that much of that land was treated chemically for “brush control.” In the Southwest, an additional 75 million acres were managed with chemical sprays. “Chemical weed killers are a bright new toy,” Carson wrote. “They work in a spectacular way; they give a giddy sense of power over nature to those who wield them, and as for the long-range and less obvious effects—these are easily brushed aside as the baseless imaginings of pessimists. The ‘agricultural engineers’ speak blithely of ‘chemical plowing’ in a world that is urged to beat its plowshares into spray guns.”
The trouble with a grass obsession is that grass, strictly speaking, is an early stage of ecological development—especially since the grasses we have planted here are not even native to North America. Kentucky bluegrass comes from Europe and northern Asia; Bermuda grass comes from Africa; zoysia grass, from East Asia. What this means is that lawns actually want to be invaded, by everything from weeds to wildflowers to trees. Since nature trends toward diversity, not uniformity, keeping a patch of land exclusively in grass requires ceaseless human intervention, as any suburban teenager knows: lawns have to be mowed and sprayed and reseeded constantly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to keep a lawn the size of Nebraska in good health, especially on a continent where lawn grass itself is an exotic guest.
Keeping a patch of grass from doing what it wants to do—turn into a field, and then into a forest—requires a lot of work. But Americans have been up to the task: in just a dozen years, from 1946 to 1959, sales of lawn mowers went from 139,000 to 4.2 million. By the 1960s, Americans were so worn out from all the time they devoted to keeping their lawns intact that they did what anyone does when they get exhausted: they paid someone else to do the work. And a lot of work there was.
In 1968, a former garden store owner and sod farmer in Troy, Ohio, named Richard Duke got so tired of fielding questions about lawn care that he decided to start his own company, which he named ChemLawn. His signature technique: rather than luring customers into a store to buy lawn chemicals, he hired “specialists” to drive to the customers’ homes and spray liquid chemicals—a mix of synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides—from their trucks. “The ChemLawn truck, a custom-designed six-wheel tanker with a huge lawn-green logo splashed across its sides, would come and go while residents were at work and at school,” a profile of the company reported. “The only sign of its passing was a notice on the door reminding people not to roll around in the grass until the chemicals had had a chance to dry (about an hour).”
What ChemLawn seemed to be selling was more than a kind of exterior decorating; it was selling consistency, even comfort. The lawn “specialists” were like doctors who made house calls, promising to rid lawns of pests and disease.
“Saturday was a big sale day,” said Richard Lyons, who rose from a sprayer to vice president. “More than once, we’d park in a cul-de-sac, and people would come to line up at the truck and sign up for the service. You’d see them walking from blocks away.” The business model was a smashing success: started with $40,000 to outfit a couple of spray trucks, the company was making $300 million a year by 1985.
By 1999, more than two-thirds of America’s home lawns were being treated with chemical fertilizer or pesticides—14 million of them through a professional lawn-care company. A year later, the federal General Accounting Office reported that Americans were spraying 67 million pounds of synthetic chemicals on their lawns every year, and that annual sales of lawn-care pesticides had grown to $700 million. Lawn-care companies were doing an additional $1.5 billion in business.
All those trucks rolling around our suburban neighborhoods seem to represent something more than a communal desire for soft carpets of monoculture grass. They seem to represent a relief from anxiety. (Why else call a company “Lawn Doctor”?) But anxiety from what, exactly? Perhaps we haven’t moved so far from Levittown, after all. Hiring trucks full of lawn-care “specialists” is, for one thing, an unusually public declaration that you have the money not to take care of your yard yourself.
Property values are clearly associated with high-input green-lawn maintenance and chemical use, researchers from Ohio State reported in 2003. Strangely, the researchers found, wealthy home owners continue to use lawn chemicals even when they are conscious of their harmful effects—even those who claim to be concerned about community, family, and the environment. “Lawn chemical users typically associated moral character and social reliability with the condition of the lawn, suggesting that the lawn represents a public statement about proper private behavior,” the study reported. In other words, a chemically treated lawn still means a house is not hiding Communists.
Lawn-care companies have spent so many years marketing their chemicals that tending lawns without them has come to seem quixotic at best. Type “organic gardening” into the Google search engine, and the first thing that pops up is a link to Scotts Miracle-Gro, perhaps the most famous synthetic chemical fertilizer ever put on the market.
But don’t expect Scotts to sit and wait for you to find them. The company sends our house a mailing every spring, urging us not to fall behind our neighbors. “What’s wrong with your lawn?” the flyer asks. “What do you need to do now to protect your lawn from unsightly weeds, insects you can’t even see, and damaging turfgrass disease? Call Scotts LawnService like so many of your neighbors who had those problems. You’ll see us treating their lawns throughout the season.”
This is designed, of course, to cause you anxiety, and then, if you use their products, to offer you comfort. Included in the mailer are before and after photos, showing a lawn that miraculously changes from a shabby patchwork of green and brown to a green mat as uniform as Centre Court at Wimbledon or the eighteenth green at Augusta. There are also plenty of customer testimonials. “Our lawn is looking better and better,” says one Robin M. “We get so many compliments on it and we want the lawn to continue to look its best. A lawn has many challenges and Scotts has been a real plus in our lawn’s overall health and appearance!”
So: Is your neighbor’s lawn greener than yours? Less weedy? What might this mean? Is their net worth higher than yours? Are their kids smarter? Is their sex life better? A TruGreen flyer we got this year features a photo of a smiling young man sharing a patio moment with not one, not two, but three beautiful women. If that comes with the lawn treatment, who could refuse?
Like countless other lawn-care companies, Scotts promises visits to your home by its team of “professionals” who are “trained” by Scotts LawnService Training Institute. The “professionals” will analyze and diagnose your lawn’s “problems” and then recommend a course of chemical therapy. “No common, agricultural fertilizers are ever used,” the flyer notes. “We apply Scotts professional slow-release fertilizer—the same ones [sic] developed, tested, and used on tens of thousands of lawns.” A basic regimen might include regular applications of Scotts® slow-release fertilizers, plus Scotts® Halts® Crabgrass Preventer, Ortho® Weed B Gon® Pro™ Dandelion & Weed Control, and Ortho Max® Pro™ Guaranteed Season-Long Insect Control. A Plus package gets you all that plus Scotts® GruEx® Guaranteed Season Long GrubControl and some “core aeration,” which means a guy pushes a roller around your yard, punching holes in it. The Complete package gets you all this plus some lime for pH balancing and some extra grass seed.
Even grass seed, nowadays, comes coated with chemicals. A bag of Scotts grass seed is labeled “Pure Premium,” as if it’s a cut of good beef. A closer look reveals that the seed has been treated with Apron XL LS fungicide, whose scientific name is, and I quote, (R)-Z-([2,6-dimethylphenyl]-methoxyacetylamino)-propionic acid methyl ester. Perhaps because of the double parenthetical, the bag helpfully notes that the fungicide is “commonly known as Mefenoxam or Metalaxyl-M.” That does help. The bag also requests, in bold black type, that it be kept out of the reach of children, and that anyone using the seeds “wear long-sleeved shirt, long pants, shoes, socks and waterproof gloves,” and that the gardener “remove contaminated clothing and wash before reuse.” The bag also provides a phone number for “emergencies” related to the fungicide: call Syngenta Crop Protection, 1-800-888-8372.
Did you know that grass seed could contaminate your clothes?
Anxiety about the toxicity of lawn chemicals has presented companies with a significant public-relations challenge. In Baltimore, Scotts ends a radio commercial with the request that home owners “remember to sweep fertilizer off your driveway to keep drinking water clean.” This gesture seems disingenuous at best; sweeping chemicals from a driveway back onto a lawn would prevent a fraction of the treatment from washing away during heavy rains. And as Jerry Kauffman would be quick to point out, all of this stuff ends up, one way or another, in our water supply.
As the use of chemicals has become more and more widespread, chemical companies have realized an unexpected source of profits. Herbicides like 2,4-D preserve grass but kill clover; that’s why people buy them. But clover, unlike grass, can pull nitrogen out of the air and “fix” it in the soil. Without clover, soil becomes nitrogen-poor. So what did the chemical companies do? They offered to replace the depleted nitrogen, which home owners used to get for free, with synthetic nitrogen, for which they have to pay.
And pay. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, as in watersheds all over the United States, nitrogen runoff is considered among the worst problems for water quality. There are 3 million acres of turf grass in the Chesapeake watershed, most of it fertilized with synthetic fertilizer. Since synthetic fertilizers are water-soluble, a good bit of it will run off your lawn after a rain—which is a waste of your money and creates genuine problems in river water once your fertilizer mixes with the runoff fertilizer of thousands of other homes. This is because fertilizer doesn’t just feed the grass on your lawn; it also feeds plants that grow in the water. Doused with chemical fertilizers, underwater algae can grow exponentially, creating “algae blooms” that—as they die and decay—suck most of the oxygen out of a lake or a bay. Some estimates say that each pound of phosphorous (which also comes from things like conventional laundry detergents) entering the water produces twenty pounds of algae; the cost of removing twenty pounds of algae is roughly $200. Now start multiplying.
River-protection groups talk about pollution “loads” that build up from the rain running off farms, roads, and households. The thousands of pounds of fertilizing chemicals then create massive “dead zones,” in which nothing—not fish, not plants, nothing—can grow. This is as true in the Gulf of Mexico as it is in the Chesapeake. In 2007, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation offered its annual report card on the bay’s health, and the intertwined threats show just how much trouble chemicals can pose. The bay got an F for nitrogen pollution, a D minus for phosphorous, an F for water quality, an F for dissolved oxygen, and a D for toxics. All told, on a scale of 100, the bay’s health was rated at a 28.
In California, scientists are discovering something even more haunting. Algae blooms off the coast are not only removing oxygen from the water, they are releasing a toxin that appears to be causing sea lions to go into epileptic seizures. The toxin, domoic acid, enters the food chain when sardines and herring eat algae, then moves into the amniotic fluid of sea lions who eat the fish. If the sea lion happens to be pregnant, her fetus can be contaminated by the toxin and, years later, develop epileptic seizures. Documentary footage of a sea lion in seizure is something you need to see only once.
And it’s not like Americans enjoy manicured lawns only at home. They also create them in order to play that most chemical-dependent of all pastimes: golf. By 2004, there were just under 15,000 golf courses in United States—all told, a patchwork of chemically treated turf the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. A 1990 survey of 52 golf courses on Long Island, conducted by the New York attorney general’s office, found the courses covered with 50,000 pounds of active ingredients—about 18 pounds per acre per year, or six times what was needed to control weeds. “If you scraped a golf green and tested it, you’d have to cart it away to a hazardous waste facility,” said Joseph Okoniewski, a biologist with New York’s Environmental Department of Conservation.
A former colleague of mine, an avid golfer and a cigar aficionado, once told me that he would never rest his cigar on the turf when he set up to hit the ball. He said he knew a man who claimed to have gotten mouth cancer from pesticides on the golf course. What I found striking about this story was that this man, a lifelong journalist and professor, was more worried about pesticides (about which the science is considered “inconclusive”) than he was about smoking (about which the science is anything but).
Which brings me, inevitably, to the story of the Irish golfer who (how do I say this delicately?) liked to lick his balls. In 1997, doctors in Ireland reported the strange case of a sixty-five-year-old retired consultant engineer from Dublin who went to see doctors complaining of chronic lethargy, ink-dark urine, and acute abdominal pain. The doctors diagnosed hepatitis. After ruling out such other causes as drug or alcohol “indiscretions,” the doctors came to a startling discovery. The man said he was a widower who played golf every day, and had developed a peculiar (if apparently not uncommon) habit: whenever he lined up to putt, he would clean his balls with his tongue. This despite signs on the course expressly warning against “licking balls,” because of recent applications of 2,4-D. Once the doctors advised against licking, the report said, the man “ceased his habit, and within two months his liver function tests had returned to normal and he felt well.”
Four months later, however, the patient returned for more liver tests. He was sick again. He told his doctors that he had grown skeptical of their diagnosis and, just to prove them wrong, had “resumed licking his golf ball.” Once again, his tests showed hepatitis. Convinced at last, the man accepted a diagnosis of “golf liver,” and now, the researchers reported, he plays golf regularly, carries a damp cloth to clean his golf ball, and “remains well.”
Paul Tukey knows a thing or two about pesticides; the man who invented 2,4-D was a distant cousin. When Tukey was a kid in the late 1960s, his grandfather would hire a biplane a couple of times a year to spray his 300 acres of fields in Bradford, Maine. The fields were mostly planted with feed for a herd of 260 cows, not with crops intended for human consumption. The presumption, apparently, was that pesticides sprayed on the feed crops would not enter the human food chain—despite the fact that the cows were milk cows and Paul drank their milk. But none of this was on Paul Tukey’s mind as he and his grandfather drove out to watch the airplanes. Spraying day was, for a young boy on a farm, a thrill.
“My grandfather would go out in the field, dressed in his wool underwear and thick heavy pants, and wave the biplane over his field,” Tukey recalled. “They’d drop this white powder, and he’d get back in the truck looking like Frosty the Snowman. Then we’d drive to the next field, and he’d do it again. My grandfather was getting doused twenty times a day, but he would never let me out of the truck. I would beghim. I always wondered why I couldn’t go out and get dusted.”
Tukey’s grandfather died of a brain tumor at the age of sixty.
Now tall and athletic, with sun-bleached hair, Tukey combines the easy charisma of a ski instructor with the ardor of an evangelist. And like any convert, his road to enlightenment was not exactly straight and narrow. Tukey followed the family’s agricultural tradition but charted his own way through central Maine’s growing suburbs. For years, he operated one of the region’s largest landscaping services, tending the lawns of more than eight hundred customers. He considered his job ideal. He worked sixteen hours a day, but he worked outside, in shorts and sandals. He never bothered with protective gear.
Then one day in 1993, he started getting nosebleeds. His vision became blurry. But that spring, with business booming and a new baby boy, Tukey was too busy to worry about his health.
As his business grew, Tukey took a job tending the grounds of a hospital in Portland. He had hired a group of graduate students for the work, and one day, the students’ professor, an eminent horticulturist named Rick Churchill, came by to say hello. In Maine’s gardening circles, Churchill was something of a hero, and Tukey, like many of Churchill’s acolytes, ached for the elder man’s approval. Tukey reached out to greet him.
Churchill’s eyes remained focused on the ground. The weeds, which Tukey and his team had recently doused with synthetic herbicides, had begun to curl up and turn brown. Churchill gave Tukey a dismissive grunt and turned his back. He wouldn’t even shake Tukey’s hand.
“I didn’t mince words,” Churchill said. “I asked him how anyone in good conscience could be applying pesticides on the grounds of a hospital where there were patients being treated for cancers that could be linked to their exposure to pesticides. I asked whether he knew anything about the toxicity ratings of what he was applying, and how dangerous many of these compounds were to an individual compromised by illness. When I left his demeanor had changed.”
Churchill’s words cut deeply. “It was devastating psychologically,” Tukey told me. “In Maine, Rick Churchill is an icon. His approval was a stamp that we all craved. It was especially daunting for me way back then because I had no idea at all how to get rid of those weeds without the chemical weed killers.”
Tukey was stuck. Here he was, with twenty-eight employees, a growing family to feed, and a business that relied fundamentally on toxic chemicals. What was he supposed to do?
“Right away that set up a good-versus-evil dynamic that is still inherent today in the industry,” Tukey said. “By that, I mean that landscapers like me had to do bad things to the environment or health to get the good result that our customers demanded. It’s not easy. Landscapers are stuck with a quandary: put down poisons or displease the customer.”
Tukey started doing some research. What he found was troubling: Pediatric cancers in Los Angeles had been linked to parental exposure to pesticides during pregnancy. In Denver, kids whose yards were treated with pesticides were found to be four times more likely to have soft-tissue cancers than kids whose yards were not. Elsewhere, links had been found between brain tumors in children and the use of pest strips, lindane-containing lice shampoos, flea collars, and weed killers.
Tukey also learned that exposure to lawn chemicals was particularly alarming for people—like him—who sprayed lawn chemicals for a living. One study showed a threefold increase in lung cancer among lawn-care workers who used 2,4-D; another found a higher rate of birth defects among the children of chemical appliers. Tukey, who had been literally wading in synthetic chemicals for nearly two decades, had never given much thought to the impact these chemicals might be having on his own health, let alone his family’s. When his chronic skin rashes and deteriorating eyesight finally landed him in a doctor’s office, he learned that he had developed multiple chemical sensitivity. Not only this, but his son—who had been conceived in 1992, during the height of Tukey’s use of synthetic chemicals—had just been diagnosed with one of the worst cases of ADHD his doctor had ever seen. Tukey remembers this diagnosis as “a sledgehammer in the gut.”
“All the evidence indicates that you don’t want pregnant women around these products, but I was walking into the house every single night with my legs coated with pesticides from the knees down,” he said. “Even when my son was a year or two old and would greet me at the door at night by grabbing me around the legs. He was getting pesticides on his hands and probably his face, too.”
And then it happened, the evangelical moment.
Tukey was driving around in his truck when he noticed a sign: a local department store was having a two-for-one sale on Scotts Turf Builder. Tukey made a beeline to the store. He was going to buy the store’s entire stock. Once inside, he had little trouble finding what he was looking for; as he has said, a blind man can find the lawn chemical section in any store. The stuff is volatilizing right there in the aisle.
Walking toward the smell, Tukey noticed a young woman standing by a display of lawn chemicals. At her feet, a little girl was making sand castles from what had spilled from a broken bag of pesticides. Suddenly, in Tukey’s head, everything changed. The DDT squirting from planes over his grandfather’s fields, the chemicals he’d been spraying outside the hospital, and now a child playing in a pile of pesticides. Something in Tukey burst.
“I said, ‘Ma’am, you really shouldn’t let your child play with that stuff. It’s not safe,’ ” Tukey told me. “I’m fundamentally shy, but this just came out of me.”
The woman looked at Tukey, sizing him up. Here was this tall, grass-stained man, with several days of beard sprouting from his chin, glowering at her with a fire that seemed somehow too intense for someone hanging around the lawn-care section. The woman looked Tukey in the eye.
The store wouldn’t sell the stuff if it wasn’t safe, she said. She gathered up her child and walked away.
A store manager came up to Tukey and asked him if there was a problem. Tukey said indeed there was.
“You have the problem,” he told the manager. “You have broken bags of poison on the floor. All those bags say, ‘Keep out of reach of children’!”
The manager looked at Tukey dismissively. Those bags have those labels because of some government formality, the man said. The stuff in there isn’t really dangerous. Our store wouldn’t carry something that wasn’t safe.
“That really was the stake in the heart of my chemical career,” Tukey said. “By then, I had already made myself sick. I had already been questioned by Rick Churchill, and I had the gnawing guilt of having my employees applying the same pesticides that had made me sick. When I saw that little girl making sand castles out of the pesticides was just a sudden gut-level reaction that I couldn’t have anticipated. I’m a mellow guy, but I found myself getting angry at the store manager because of his ignorance. I was shaking when I left the store. Literally shaking.”
Tukey drove back to his company and issued a decree. It was time to start weaning the company—and the customers—off synthetic chemicals. The company was going organic. He wrote to his customers. Most of them seemed fine with his decision, with two provisions: You can do whatever you want, they told Tukey. Just as long as it doesn’t cost any more, and as long as our lawns continue to look the same.
“What gets me, though, is this,” Tukey said. “Many of the same people who gasp audibly when they hear the story of the girl playing with the pesticides actually use those same exact products on their own yards, or condone the use of those products around schools.”
Quitting an addiction to toxic chemicals, in other words, was not as simple as giving them up himself, Tukey found. He also had to convince his customers, who had been saturated by chemical lawn-care advertising for decades. True, in recent years chemical lawn care had been held under the microscope, not least for marketing products in a way that seemed intended to dismiss any worries about toxicity. As early as the 1980s, New York’s attorney general’s office had sued the ChemLawn company for false advertising; at issue were ads claiming a child “would have to swallow the amount of pesticide found in almost 10 cups of treated lawn clippings to equal the toxicity of one baby aspirin.” A few years later, the same office forced Chevron, which makes Ortho products, to stop using television ads showing barefoot children playing on lawns being treated with pesticides—all while a voice-over said, “Sure, I care about this yard, but I care about my family using it, too.” Chevron paid a $50,000 fine, but admitted no wrongdoing.
In 2003, TruGreen ChemLawn tried a new approach: the company mailed flyers to children around the country, offering financial support for youth soccer programs if their parents signed up for lawn-care service. Whatever business the promotion drummed up, it also generated significant controversy. “It’s sick,” said a spokesman for the Toxics Action Center, a Boston environmental group. “They market through your kids, and by spraying your lawn with this stuff you are putting your kids at risk.”
Even Long Island, the site of the original Levittown, has begun confronting its lawn legacy. One day in the mid-1990s, a woman named Nicole Hudson was working in her backyard while her baby was upstairs in a crib with the window open. She looked over and saw a company spraying in the next yard, then heard her baby crying. When she went upstairs, she found a pesticide mist in the room. Five days later, when she had the room tested, residue was still present on the windowsill, so she sued the contractor in small claims court and won several hundred dollars.
“The lawns out here may look good, but they are unhealthy,” said Neal M. Lewis, the director of the Long Island Neighborhood Network, an environmental group. “It’s steroid turf, all pumped up with drugs. People are growing chemically dependent lawns, and the chemicals are by definition poisons, designed to kill.” After nine years of lobbying, a local protest gathered so much steam that New York became the first state in the country to pass Neighbor Notification legislation. Twenty other states quickly followed suit. Suddenly, it seemed, the lawn’s “family value” was beginning to trade a bit lower.
To Paul Tukey, this new ambivalence about toxic lawn chemicals presented an opportunity. In 2007, he founded SafeLawns.org, a coalition of both non- and for-profit organizations that has become one of the country’s leading advocates of environmentally responsible lawn care. The group’s mission reflects the passion of its founder, to “effect a quantum change in consumer and industry behavior.” That same year he published The Organic Lawn Care Manual, which has become something of a call to arms for people seeking to buck the chemical lawn-care trend.
Tukey, a tireless advocate with a feisty demeanor, seems to relish the fight against the Lawn-Industrial Complex. A recent annual report from Scotts said the company planned to spend $175 million on advertising alone—more than enough to make Tukey feel like David battling Goliath.
“Is it only lawn chemicals? Of course not,” Tukey said. “But there are so many environmental contaminants out there that we have no control over. Car fumes, paint fumes, all the rest. How are you going to control all that? There are very few parts of that soup that you can control without extraordinary effort and expense. But you can control lawn chemicals. That’s what my mission is all about. Changing the world really happens one conversation at a time—one wife changing one husband’s mind, one neighbor talking to another.”
Among many other projects, Tukey has produced A Chemical Reaction, a documentary film about Hudson, a small town in Canada that in 1991 became the first in North America to ban all lawn chemicals. Giant lawn-care companies fought the ban all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost. Twenty years later, there are more than fifty municipalities in Canada that have banned pesticides, especially on public spaces like school yards and ball fields. In 2003, Toronto began a gradual ban of nearly all lawn chemicals, including 2,4-D. Five years later, the leading lobbyist for the lawn chemical industry admitted that they’d “basically lost Canada.”
It’s not just Canada, either. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have all banned 2,4-D. In January 2009, the European Union passed new pesticide laws than ban twenty-two synthetic chemicals that can cause cancer or disrupt human hormones or reproduction. Over the next five years, pesticide use will be restricted near public spaces like schools, parks, and hospitals. Wholesale aerial spraying is prohibited. (Yet the rhetorical battle continues. The chairman of the British Carrot Growers Association said that the new law would “wipe us out.” Environmental groups counter that banning just 22 out of 400 harmful substances is “barely a start.”)
In the United States today, some 60 million people live in communities that ban people from hanging laundry. How many communities ban the use of pesticides on lawns? Not nearly as many, it seems, as those that require them. A friend of mine lives in a Baltimore neighborhood that prohibits her from turning away the community’s lawn-care company, even though they spray, and even though she has young children. If a neighbor can appeal to a community board to force you to take down your laundry line, can you appeal to have your neighbor stop spreading toxic chemicals on their lawn? Which is more unsettling to a community, sheets hanging out to dry or the prospect of children developing a lymphoma and women having miscarriages?
Although a few American towns—Camden, Maine; Hebron, Connecticut; Marblehead, Massachusetts—have banned spraying on public grounds, the lawn-care industry still has a stranglehold on the United States. The year they lost the Hudson battle, a group of lawn chemical companies formed a lobbying group called RISE—Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment—to represent producers and suppliers of pesticides and fertilizers in legislative fights. The group’s website, PestFacts.org, states plainly that “synthetic chemicals are not a cause of cancer”; that there is “no link between spraying and asthma”; and that efforts to limit phosphorous from choking water supplies “are not based on sound science.”
The website also boasts that RISE “has an excellent working relationship with the EPA and is a resource for the Agency.” This, to Tukey’s mind, is precisely the problem. RISE has “the express goal of not allowing what happened in Canada to happen in the United States,” he said. “They can’t let that happen. They were talking about building a $2 million war chest to beat back people like me.”
The group’s lobbyists are pushing for state “preemption” laws, which allow state governments to prohibit cities and towns from passing their own restrictions on chemicals. Like other industries, Big Lawn would prefer to keep regulation at the federal level. Industry says this is for “uniformity”; Tukey says it’s because industry knows federal oversight is utterly lax—and because lobbying a few influential congressmen is a lot easier than trying to herd unruly mayors or state legislators into line.
Tukey’s home state of Maine has exactly one paid state inspector for pesticides, and that, he says, is the way the lawn-care companies like it. But Rick Churchill sees Tukey’s progress, from synthetics to organics, as a harbinger.
“Like me when I was young, he believed much of what the pesticide chemical manufacturers were saying about how safe their products were,” Churchill said. “Who would question Monsanto? Now, of course, many of us know these companies for the dirty deeds that they continue to force on the agricultural community and, ultimately, the consumer. Of course, what I enjoy most is I believe his name is well known by the Monsantos of the world, and they would do anything to keep him quiet!”
For his part, Tukey understands that the struggle is far from over. Even his own father, a bladder cancer survivor, “hasn’t given up his ChemLawn.” The last time Paul went to visit, he peeked in his father’s trash can and saw a handful of signs the sprayers had left, warning people to stay off the lawn. There were sixteen of them.
But rather than struggle with his father’s generation, Tukey devotes his energies to his son’s.
“Did I cause my son’s ADHD? I’ll probably never know for sure,” Tukey said. “But I have to live with the thought that I probably did. The guilt sticks with me every single day. That’s the saddest part of all this. The positive side is that I use my son as motivation to get the word out to others.”
Firing your chemically dependent lawn-care company or replacing it with a less toxic competitor would substantially reduce your family’s—and your neighbors’—exposure to synthetic chemicals. It would also greatly reduce the volume of pollutants—both herbicides and synthetic fertilizers—that you contribute to your watershed. Both are excellent outcomes. But there’s another option, one that goes beyond minimizing threats and gets into the entirely more interesting realm of restoration. There is a way to think of your yard as far more than an onerous burden that needs to be mowed every week, far more than a sponge for soaking up synthetic chemicals. There is a way to think of your yard as transformative—even, dare I say it, magical. And Doug Tallamy can show you how.
When Tallamy, the chair of the entomology department at the University of Delaware, walks around his yard, he sees things most of us would not. He can look at a black cherry tree, for example, and see the larvae of thirteen tiger swallowtail butterflies. He can spot an eastern tailed-blue butterfly depositing its eggs on arrow-wood viburnum. One recent spring afternoon, as he toured me through his Pennsylvania garden, his eyes flashed over my shoulder to catch two robins mating in midnight. Later, he noticed that the leaves on a chestnut oak he had planted on a hillside had become slightly yellow. “Too much magnesium in the soil,” he said. “Maybe I’m trying to force this guy into a place he doesn’t want to be.”
A few years ago, while on his way to give blood, Doug Tallamy stumbled on a handful of red oak acorns scattered across a parking lot. He gathered them up, put them in his lunch box, and tossed them into his backyard. Now he has thirty red oak trees. He has planted scores of other trees in his yard: sweet gums and tulip trees, white oaks and river birches, sugar maples and pignut hickories. There are chokecherries and pawpaws, dogwoods and hornbeams. And the funny thing is, it’s not even trees that Tallamy is most interested in. What he’s really interested in is bugs. And birds. And saving the country from its addiction to chemically saturated lawns.
Tallamy spent his childhood exploring the woods that surrounded a small lake in northern New Jersey. He would creep up to the side of a pond to watch pollywogs turning into toads. He watched them grow legs—rear first, then fore—and watched them hop up into the weeds. He learned their mating calls. Then, one day, he stared, horrified, as a bulldozer barreled over a nearby hill. What followed was a moment of terror that Tallamy still remembers as somehow threatening to himself and his world.
“In an act that has been replicated around the nation millions of times since,” Tallamy wrote in his book Bringing Nature Home, the bulldozer “proceeded to bury the young toads and all of the other living treasures within the pond. I might have been buried too, if I hadn’t given up trying to rescue the toads.”
The young Tallamy saved about ten that day, but for nothing: the pond was gone, leaving nowhere for the toads to breed. As he wrote, “Within two years, a toad was a rare sight near my house; soon they were completely gone, along with the garter snakes, whose main prey they had been, and other members of the food web supported by the life in that pond. I had witnessed the local extinction of a thriving community of animals, sacrificed so that my neighbors-to-be could have an expansive lawn.”
To Tallamy, the buried pond is less a sign of progress than the very symbol of human folly and ecological decay. He feels the same way about car windshields. As a boy growing up near a five-hundred-acre forest, he would see countless inchworms dangling from invisible threads attached to trees. On road trips to his parents’ camp, he remembers the headlights and windshield of the family car arriving utterly splattered with insects. Nowadays, he rarely sees an inchworm, and his car always arrives as clean as it left. To Tallamy, the disappearance of forests, and of the animals and insects they once supported, are signs of an American landscape in the process of ecological collapse. The nice thing is that this is a problem that suburban home owners have the power to reverse.
Americans maintain an image of their country that is at least a hundred years out of date, Tallamy said. We still imagine that we exist along the frontier, that no matter how many subdivisions or shopping malls we build, there will always be undisturbed land left. But this image is not only obsolete, it has become ecologically dangerous.
“We’re hardwired to be incredibly adaptable, but these traits may no longer be useful,” Tallamy told me. “It used to be if we blew it here, we’d move over there. But now the entire planet is flooded with us. There is no place to move. We have massive populations, and there is no place to go. We’re already at three or four times the earth’s carrying capacity. We can’t behave like we used to.”
When Europeans first got to this country, they looked out on 950 million acres of virgin forest, a wilderness that scared the pants off people coming from a continent largely plowed under for hundreds of years. So what should the new country’s civilized homes look like? The Founding Fathers apparently decided that at least when it came to landscaping ideas, the English had gotten things right.
“Back in Europe, only the rich people had these gardens,” Tallamy said. “Then George Washington and Thomas Jefferson demonstrated their wealth by planting gardens at Monticello and Mount Vernon, and the lawn became a symbol of wealth. Today, people think, ‘If I can get a big lawn, I can display my wealth.’ There are plenty of home-owners’ associations that have lists of plants you can use, and every one of them is an alien ornamental. The crazy thing is that gardens in Europe are using plants from North America, and vice versa. There is a lot of ignorance out there.”
So here’s a question: Let’s say you’ve been using 2,4-D on your lawn for years, and—so far, at least—it has never made you sick. Leaving aside the question of how you can be sure of this, let’s consider something else: How do you feel about using a product that poisons worms, which then poison the songbirds that eat them?
The toll of suburban development has been devastating to bird populations. You may see a lot of birds flying around your house, but look a bit closer: most are probably house sparrows and starlings, which are aggressive invasive species from Europe. Study the population numbers for native birds: the wood thrush is down 48 percent. The bobwhite, down 80 percent. Bobolinks, down 90 percent. Cornell’s David Pimentel estimates that 72 million birds are killed each year by direct exposure to pesticides, a number that does not include baby birds that die because of the loss of a parent killed by pesticides, or birds killed by eating contaminated insects or worms. The actual number of birds killed might be closer to 150 million.
It’s not just lawn chemicals that do them in, of course. Birds are also poisoned by pesticides sprayed on crops in their wintering grounds in places like Latin America, where pesticide use is up 500 percent since the 1980s; a single application can kill seven to twenty-five birds per acre. An additional 100 million are killed every year by cars. Some 100 million on top of that are killed by domestic and feral cats. A billion—a billion!—are killed by crashing into windows, transmission towers, or power lines.
In the last year, surveys done by the government, conservation groups, and citizen volunteers have found that nearly a third of the country’s 800 bird species are endangered, threatened, or in serious decline. Much of this is due to habitat loss caused by suburban sprawl, as well as “a barrage of exotic forest pests and disease.”
And it’s not just birds. As of 2002, Delaware had lost 78 percent of its freshwater mussel species, 34 percent of its dragonflies, 20 percent of its fish species, and 31 percent of its reptiles and amphibians. Up and down the Atlantic seaboard native plant species are threatened or already extinct, as are bird species that depend on forest cover. Neotropical migrants like wood thrushes, warblers, catbirds, hawks, wrens, vireos, flycatchers, kingbirds, nightjars, swallows, tanagers, orioles—species that fly thousands of miles to Central or South America to spend the winter—have declined an average of 1 percent a year since 1966. Overall, that’s 50 percent reduction in just over 50 years.
“It is curious that the news media have drawn our attention to the loss of tropical forests yet have been silent when it comes to how we have devastated our own forests here in the temperate zone,” Tallamy has written. “Only 15 percent of the Amazonian basin has been logged, whereas over 70 percent of the forests along our eastern seaboard are gone. We have reduced the enormous land mass that, over millions of years, created the rich biodiversity we can still see today in this country to tiny island habitats. And therein lies the problem.”
But Tallamy is far more than an academic doomsayer. In mid-Atlantic gardening circles, he has become something of a prophet, his message freighted with both gloom and promise. And it is the latter, the promise of ecological renewal, that Tallamy most wants the lawn mowers of the world to understand.
While the mid-Atlantic may not host the vast national parks of the American West, it could—given the slightest shift in human behavior—return to its status as one of the country’s richest ecosystems. All it will take is a shift in the way we think about our lawns and gardens.
Tallamy’s vision is based on three simple ideas. If you want more birds, you need more native insects. If you want more native insects, you need more native plants. And if you want more native plants, you need to get rid of—or at least shrink—your lawn. Contrary to our received wisdom—reinforced by five decades of marketing from the lawn chemical industry—chemically treated grass is not the apotheosis of suburban living. As strange as it might feel to lure insects into your garden, if your garden is balanced, its overall health will be fine. The bugs will eat only a small percentage of your leaves, and their hunger will be more than compensated for by the number of birds they attract. A garden with no insects is not a sign of perfection. It is a sign of sterility—and thus, most likely, a sign of chemical toxicity. To Doug Tallamy, such an arrangement “is good for the pesticide industry, but little else.”
The impulse to rid a landscape of all insects strikes Tallamy as especially pathological. He once fell into a conversation with a biology professor, and the talk turned to bugs—and how best to exterminate them.
All of them.
Tallamy was stunned. As a field scientist, he mourns the loss of field training among his colleagues. To him, learning how to kill insects in a laboratory is akin to learning the physics of bomb making: it may be a useful scientific challenge, but what it fails to consider—the collateral damage to entire ecosystems—is vast. A land without insects may seem like a gardener’s dream. But a land without insects is also a land empty of higher species.
I asked Tallamy about the theory that humans tend to chop down trees and lay out lawns because they remind some ancient part of our brains of open savannahs: we plant lawns so we can see the lions before they see us. Tallamy thinks this idea is reasonable, if terribly outdated. “We humans are obsessed with collecting rare things,” Tallamy told me. “We collect stamps, or the biggest ball of yarn in South Dakota. We want to get the plant that our neighbor doesn’t have. If the plant is common, like a jack-in-the-pulpit, we think, ‘Oh, that’s no good.’ That rules out native plants right from the beginning.”
A couple of years ago, I began to take Tallamy’s argument seriously. I went around looking to buy native plants and put them in my yard. This wasn’t that easy. I’d drive out to garden stores and nurseries and look around. The places were filled with lovely shrubs and trees and flowers, most of which were never meant to grow in Maryland. Japanese maple trees. Forsythia. English ivy. Pachysandra. Native plants are not typically labeled as such, and neither are exotics. Or invasives. I’ve seen purple loosestrife for sale, despite its being an absolute scourge in East Coast river systems. When I asked one nurseryman where he kept his black cherry trees and his elderberries, he looked at me liked I’d asked to buy poison ivy.
“Oh, those are common,” he said. “I don’t know who would carry those.”
That’s when I realized just how challenging this might be. If a plant is “common”—that is to say, easy to find in Maryland—it is, by definition, “undesirable.”
Native trees, Tallamy has since found, support thirty-five times more caterpillar biomass than aliens. In other words, there is thirty-five times more bird food on trees that are native to a place than on trees imported from somewhere else. The trouble is, home owners and real estate developers do not take caterpillars into account when they are buying or building homes. In the sprawling suburbs of the mid-Atlantic states, for example, developers often begin a project by stripping the ground of all vegetation, trees and shrubs alike. They scrape away the topsoil, build their houses, lay down chemically dependent carpets of sod, and plant inexpensive ornamental trees—typically nonnative trees like Bradford pears and Norway maples, which look pretty but have no ecological value whatsoever. Because the grass and the trees evolved somewhere else, insects native to, say, Pennsylvania or Delaware cannot eat their leaves. That might seem like a good thing. But it also means that these numberless acres of lawns and ornamental trees provide no food for birds. What this means for suburban gardens, of course, is that planting exotic ornamental shrubs or trees will virtually ensure that birds stay away. If enough ground is planted this way, birds won’t just stay away. They will starve to death.
By the time you wake up to morning birdsong, Tallamy says, migratory songbirds may have just landed after flying three hundred miles. They have descended into your trees exhausted, desperate for something to eat. What, exactly, do they find? All too frequently, they see ornamental trees that bear none of the insects they need to survive—and acres and acres of chemically treated grass.
“When birds are flying over a vast swath of suburbia, they can’t just say, ‘I’ll just fly another one hundred miles,’ ” Tallamy remarked. “If they land on a patch of Bradford pears, they’re out of luck.” Despite the promising name, Bradford pears bear no true fruit, and are an unsatisfying food source for birds.
Tallamy and his wife, Cindy, used to live near West Chester, Pennsylvania, a bedroom community between Wilmington and Philadelphia. In 2000, longing for more space, they bought ten acres of neglected farmland in rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, in the extreme southeastern corner of the state. A centuries-old cattle farm, the land had been mowed or grazed for years, but for more than a decade it had been left entirely alone. By the time the Tallamys moved in, the place was utterly overgrown with aggressive alien species, most of them now anchored with thick trunks and substantial root stocks. Vines of Oriental bittersweet six inches thick had climbed to the tops of most native trees. The autumn olive trees were growing four feet a year.
When Tallamy looks at a landscape, his eyes take in far more than just plants. He sees relationships: between plants and soil, between plants and bugs, between plants and birds. And what he saw in those early years was striking.
“When we walked around the place in those early years,” he recalled, “we were just like the birds: we looked for leaves that had insect damage. Nothing had been eaten out of the ornamentals. We already know that insects evolve with plants. It takes a long evolutionary time for an insect to switch plants.”
Armed with bow saws and powerful loppers, Doug and Cindy set out to “take the land back.” Fearful of destroying the few native trees and plants that might be hiding under the jungle of invasives, the Tallamys decided not to mow everything down with a brush hog, and they had no interest in mass spraying. Instead, they used a small paintbrush to swipe newly cut exotics with the poison glyphosate, sold by Monsanto as Roundup. Not exactly organic, but, Tallamy says, without a dab of poison, there’s no getting rid of things like ailanthus. Even if you cut the so-called Chinese tree of heaven to the ground, it will return to haunt you year after year after year.
The Tallamys ripped out impenetrably deep thickets of multiflora roses and replaced them with native trees and shrubs. Out came the Oriental bittersweet. And the autumn olive. And the Japanese honeysuckle. In went the black cherries and the white oaks, the pignut and mockernut hickories, the poplars and sycamores and native willows. The choices they made were for more than aesthetics. The Tallamys plant oaks because individual trees can support hundreds of species of insects, including moths, butterflies, and inchworms. Ditto for black cherries, which also provide a critical crop of fruit for migrating birds.
This done, they replenished their topsoil. They built bird-houses to attract Carolina wrens. They planted blackberries to draw yellow-breasted chats. For borders with the road and their neighbors, they planted white pines. The results have been startling. A couple of years ago, a blue grosbeak nested on their property, probably for the first time since before the land was first farmed, centuries ago.
The Tallamys’ property is bordered on one side by a huge racehorse training facility and on the other by a private home set on a piece of property about the same size as the Tallamys’. The horse business maintains a half-mile track with an expansive infield the owner—holding with tradition—keeps meticulously mowed. To Tallamy’s eyes, the infield, with a slight attitude adjustment, could be allowed to revert to a native grassland meadow that would provide nesting areas and food for bobwhites, meadowlarks, bobolinks, and grasshopper sparrows—all without hampering the horses in the least. To Tallamy, a small shift like this can have major ecological effects.
On the other side, Tallamy’s neighbor Sam provides what Tallamy called a “counterpoint.” Sam also owns ten acres, but he maintains it “like a golf course, with tractors, commercial lawn mowers, weed whackers, and leaf blowers roaring more days than not.” Sam’s yard is planted almost completely with alien species, a lot of them put in by “professionals.”
When Sam asked Tallamy why he didn’t just mow his meadow, Tallamy was taken aback. The field provided refuge for hundreds of toads; food and nesting cover for indigo buntings, bluebirds, blue grosbeaks, and field, grasshopper, and song sparrows; a courtship arena for woodcocks in the early spring; and a place for foxes and great horned owls to catch rabbits, voles, and mice in the winter. “The unmowed field also keeps the land surface from becoming so compacted by heavy machinery that it cannot absorb the hard rains that recharge our water table before the water runs off to the nearest creek,” Tallamy wrote in Bringing Nature Home. “Realizing that Sam and most of the people in this country, through no fault of their own, are now so divorced from nature in their education and their everyday lives that they do not know what nature is, why we need it, or in what ways it is wonderful left me uncharacteristically tongue-tied.”
Doug Tallamy’s prescription for suburbia is simple in practice but profound in implication. Rip up your lawn. Instead of obsessing over your grass—or, worse, dousing it with chemicals—consider planting native things that will not only look lovely but will also make your garden a haven for caterpillars, butterflies, and birds. In the mid-Atlantic region, this means planting things like swamp milkweed and butterfly weed and buttonbush and joe-pye weed (Eupatorium) and rudbeckia species like black-eyed Susans (not for nothing Maryland’s state flower). Tallamy’s book has a chapter called “What Does Bird Food Look Like?” with eye-popping photos of the caterpillars—and birds—he has discovered on his native shrubs and trees. But Tallamy’s garden is only incidentally beautiful. What he’s really after—and what he wants other suburbanites to understand—is that replacing toxic and barren lawns with native plants is nothing short of “a grassroots solution to the extinction crisis.” We don’t need the government, we don’t need to keep our fingers crossed that conservation organizations will do the work for us. We can do it ourselves.
At the University of Delaware, Tallamy has joined a team planting native species all over the campus—no 2,4-D or mowing required. One of Jerry Kauffman’s graduate students recently ripped up an old storm drain and turned it into a rain garden that helps purify water pouring off a university parking lot. A campus “lepidoptera garden” will consist entirely of native plants that offer food and shelter to native caterpillars, butterflies, and moths, which, like native songbirds, have been in significant decline. Beyond their function as a habitat, the gardens also offer vivid examples of smart landscaping to the countless students and families walking across the campus every day. Instead of looking out over acres of nonnative grass that requires regular doses of petrochemicals, they will see plants and trees that are as native to Delaware as the students themselves. Perhaps, in getting to know their native landscape a bit more intimately, these students will come to find joy in their surroundings, rather than fear.
And me? Last spring, I decided to take Doug Tallamy’s words to heart. I ripped up a good 20 percent of my eighth of an acre and planted two large flower gardens, two substantial sets of flowering shrubs, and seven raised-bed vegetable gardens. The benefits are manifest. My daughter, Annalisa, now five, helps me pick eggplants and tomatillos and okra and Swiss chard. My son, Steedman, now nine, can identify not only monarchs and tiger swallowtails but which plants they like to eat. Why? Because last year the butterflies were not here, and this year they are. Because this year we ripped up the grass, which monarch caterpillars can’t eat, and planted milkweed and butterfly weed, which they can. Simple as that. Toxic herbicides and petrochemical fertilizers? Who needs them? Milkweed and joe-pye weed were born to grow here. All you have to do is plant them, and wait for the butterflies.