Steve Simkins

Kill Your Lawn

Yup, that’s right. Your manicured suburban signal of prosperity is killing ecosystems and wasting precious resources and time. If you have the time, I would highly recommend watching the entertaining video below.

Don’t have time to watch the video right now? Here’s some highlights:

Environmental & Ecological Harm

  • Lawns destroy habitat for native wildlife that evolved alongside native plants, not imported grass like Kentucky Bluegrass (which is from Europe)
  • They’re a monoculture that reduces biodiversity and makes ecosystems more vulnerable to invasive species
  • Invasive species already account for about 40% of endangered species loss in the US

Resource Waste

  • Lawns consume 3.3 trillion gallons of water annually
  • They use 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline for maintenance
  • Lawn equipment produces 5% of US air pollution
  • They use 10x more pesticides per acre than farmland
  • Fertilizer runoff pollutes water supplies

Opportunity Cost

  • Grass covers 2% of the continental US — more land than Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, or Michigan combined
  • That land could theoretically triple US fruit and vegetable production
  • It’s wasted carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and healthy soil potential

Breaking Natural Relationships

  • Native species depend on each other in deeply interconnected ways (monarch butterflies need milkweed, hummingbirds need specific flowers)
  • Lawns sever these relationships; Western monarch populations crashed from ~10 million to under 2,000 largely due to milkweed loss

Why Native Plants Are Better

  • Deep root systems improve soil health, water drainage, and carbon storage
  • They support entire food webs of insects, birds, and mammals
  • Once established, they largely take care of themselves

Now What?

On board? Not sure where to start? Here’s some resources

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.