THE STREAMER NEWSLETTER

Streamer: Spring 1999

Our love affair with green lawns began as early as the Middle Ages in Europe, for many simple reasons.
Lawns are a great place to play croquet, or watch the clouds roll by. They make a great "frame" for our homes, and set off our landscaping. They feel good against bare feet. And they say summer in so many subtle ways.

Like many unexamined affairs, however, ours with lawns is beginning to threaten us in ways both hidden and dangerous. Using potable water to keep our lawns green not only increases our water bills, but also threatens the viability of our drinking water supplies. Most municipalities in the Charles watershed rely on groundwater for drinking water supply, and demand for water increases by 50 percent during the driest summer months when we're watering our yards. Increased water demand taxes municipal water supply systems, and steals what would have been recharge to the Charles and its tributaries, thereby reducing instream flow and threatening habitat.

When it rains, our lawns behave more like green asphalt than open space, sealing off the soil over aquifers that supply us with drinking water. The compacted soils and grasses on our lawns cause water to run quickly off to stormdrains rather than to seep through the soil and back toward our aquifers. And when rainwater runs off our lawns into stormdrains, it carries with it herbicides, pesticides, fertilizer, and animal feces, adding to the stormwater pollution of the Charles and its tributaries. Remember that stormdrains discharge directly to the river. If you live on a street with a stormdrain, runoff from your lawn has the same impact on the river as if you lived on the river's banks.

Each of us can change this. Allowing our lawns to brown in the driest months is natural, and does not kill the grass. With rainfall, the lawn will return, green again. By using small amounts of organic fertilizers, and avoiding herbicides and pesticides, we reduce polluted runoff. Better yet, by installing rain gardens as landscape features in our lawns and using cistern systems to store and use runoff for irrigation, we can dramatically reduce polluted runoff, decrease the use of potable water supplies, and increase aquifer recharge. Planting drought tolerant varieties of grass also will help conserve water during dry spells. In the end, our lawns will look better and we'll save money.

Much of the above information was obtained from Herbert Bormann's book Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony, Yale University Press, 1993.