TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603330.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.5 KB | 155 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 63

Can Lawns Be Justified?


Awash in fertilizers and pesticides, they may be a hazard to
homeowners -- and children, pets and neighbors

By JOHN SKOW -- Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York and Joyce
Leviton/Atlanta


    Lawn is the curse of suburban man, his bizarre fetish,
the great green god he sprays to. Lawn must be barbered to the
satisfaction of one's neighbors, or it earns their dirty looks
and, in some tightly strung communities, a summons from city
hall. The ideal lawn is featureless, a living imitation of
Astroturf. Striving to achieve it soaks up water, money and
weekend goof-off time in fantastic quantities.

    Never mind that trying to grow grass in hot, cold or arid
regions is almost as silly as trying to grow kelp. Americans
have belawned 25 million to 30 million acres, an area larger
than Virginia. Lawn is our connection to the English manor
houses to which most of us cannot trace our ancestors; it is the
decent, respectably dull necktie we knot around our houses.

    Now -- is this really a surprise? -- lawn owners are
hearing from environmental activists what common sense has been
telling them for some time. The herbicides and insecticides they
spread on their lawns are poisons. They can be deadly, the
charge goes, not only to the noxious bugs and broad-leaf weeds
they are supposed to kill but also to useful bugs, to the
earthworms that aerate the soil and to pets and people.
Do-it-yourselfers don't read warning labels or take precautions
to protect themselves, and they use up to six times as much
pesticide per acre as farmers do. Runoff of fertilizers from
farmlands has tainted water supplies, and though industry
experts say it doesn't happen, critics fear similar troubles
from suburban lawn runoff.

    Children are especially vulnerable to the junk that your
neighbor's lawn service fogs around or to the "completely safe
for humans" stuff that you bought at the hardware store. Lawn
poisons can cause headaches, dizziness, eye problems, mental
disorientation and lasting damage to the nervous system. Cancer
is also a possibility, since some pesticides contain known
carcinogens. Of course, your lawn looks great.

    So the testimony, much of it bitter, went this month
before the Senate environment and public-works subcommittee on
toxic substances. Dallas petroleum consultant Tom Latimer, 36,
testified that he used the widely sold insecticide diazinon six
years ago to control grubs eating grass roots at the same time
that he was taking the drug Tagamet to control warts. Neither
chemical came with a warning of dangerous interaction, but the
impact of diazinon, an organophosphate that inhibits nerve
action, was apparently magnified by the Tagamet. Today his
eyesight remains severely damaged; he has constant headaches;
his memory, concentration and mental acuity are dulled.

    Proving legal responsibility and collecting damages in
such cases are difficult, and Latimer has had no luck. Nor, so
far, has Christina Locek, 42, of River Grove, Ill., a onetime
professional ice skater and pianist who says her health was
destroyed in 1985 when a lawn-care service sprayed her
neighbor's yard. Her cat and dog died the same day, she says,
and she continues to suffer partial paralysis, substantial
vision loss, headaches and blood disorders. Another woman told
the Senate subcommittee that she sometimes slept in her car to
avoid lawn spraying in her neighborhood.

    Such people can seem distraught to the point of
crankiness, but extreme sensitivity to chemicals is not a rare
condition. How much regulation the multibillion-dollar lawn-care
industry should have was the main issue before the subcommittee.
Neighborhood warnings before pesticide dousings and signs on
treated lawns afterward were proposed. ChemLawn, the big
lawn-care outfit with headquarters in Columbus does not oppose
such measures, though a spokesperson said last week that a study
of 100 employees who applied lawn chemicals showed "no long-term
health effects."

    Until now, government supervision of lawn pesticides has
been notably drowsy. The Environmental Protection Agency is
required to review the dangers of pesticides that were in use
before 1972, when more stringent regulations went into effect,
but so far has completely cleared only two of the 34 most used
chemical agents. While the EPA deliberates, all of them continue
to be used on lawns. According to the National Coalition Against
the Misuse of Pesticides, an advocacy group critical of the
lawn-care industry, nine of the pesticides may be carcinogenic,
10 may cause birth defects, three can affect reproduction, nine
can damage the liver or kidneys, 20 attack the nervous system,
and 29 cause rashes or skin disease. Pesticides, says NCAMP
national coordinator Jay Feldman, are defined "as acceptable
poisons. But nothing out there is safe."

    In a political climate that favors market forces, not
regulation, the EPA has been unwilling to crack down. Noting
that geese had been dying from ingesting diazinon, the pesticide
that gave Latimer so much trouble, the agency did ban the
chemical for use on sod farms and golf courses. What it failed
to do, perhaps fearing the wrath of the pesticide industry, was
ban diazinon's much more extensive use on home lawns. Those
fellows at the hardware store will still sell you as much as you
want.

    Tom Adamczyk, EPA deputy branch chief of herbicides, says
it did not seem likely that geese would be landing on suburban
lawns (though ornithologists have known for several years that
lawn-care pesticides are killing songbirds). Adamczyk went on to
note that the EPA has banned the pesticides chlordane, 2,4,5-T
and Silvex from the market. He says quicker re-evaluation would
be desirable "in the ideal world" but the agency has not had the
money or personnel to speed up the process. "You can't just yank
a product off the market without incontrovertible proof that
it's harmful."

    Pesticides, it seems, are innocent until proved guilty.
Tom Watschke, a turf-grass scientist at Penn State University,
derides pesticide critics for "saying that until the EPA can
prove that any chemical for sale in a garden center is safe, it
shouldn't be available. That's ridiculous. The real risk is the
person who has no knowledge of agronomic principles and thinks
if a certain dose of pesticide is good, then double is better."
Worry about fertilizers and pesticides running off into lakes,
rivers and groundwater and causing fish kills and algal blooms,
Watschke insists, "is just propaganda that unfortunately is
scaring the public unnecessarily."

    Maybe, but why take the risk? Brain tumors must be
excised, if possible, but dandelions don't really do any harm.
In fact, they are pretty, enthusiastic, nutritious in salads and
excellent for wine making. Of course, if they ever became
popular, the lawn-care megacorporations would sell us patent
medicine to encourage them by killing the grass. In the
meantime, California may be the waterless wave of the future.
In Los Angeles, Robin Thomas is trying to revive his dried
yellow grass with organic products, not chemicals, because "I
have children, and they play on the lawn." In Oakland, Rachel
Blau's lawn is green because it rained recently. But if there's
no rain, "we let it go," she says, bravely adding the unsayable
"I don't care how it looks."