Jun
5
Love the lawn you got
Filed Under Green Events
There’s a new exhibit at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum called Lawn Nation. It explores the obsession we Americans have with lawns and offers some startling facts about lawn care’s potential impact on the environment.
Two artists from Chicago got together to build a wall out of empty plastic water bottles. It took them a month, but they glued 1700 of them together.
It represents the equivalent of 250 gallons of water—what the average American uses for a lawn sprinkler system in one hour.
But who actually waters their lawn for an hour? Turns out, more people than I thought. I went around my neighborhood, conducting some casual interviews. My next door neighbor says he waters the grass outside his house every morning, letting the hose run for a good thirty or forty minutes.
And they’re paying people in Las Vegas $1 per square foot of grass they rip out of their lawn and replace with turf. With water shortages growing, this summer’s not gonna be pretty.
So if you had to choose between your lawn and a swimming pool, what would you pick?
Here’s a link to my article that I wrote on it for my journalism class.