Beauty or Brains or Both

I encourage City Council to consider more chemical free land care. Chemical free alternatives not only reduce exposure to disease but also create better lawns. I’m for more practical alternatives that get the job of lawn care done and that also keep people healthy and happy. Part of ensuring that Regina remains a great place to live is by ensuring that lawn care treatment adds to our standard of living, instead of subtracting from it.

Rather than looking at such a shift in lawn care to “land care” as a detriment to lawn care businesses, it’s actually an opportunity to innovate while causing less indirect harm to the community they serve. Let’s try “Protecting Public Health on Home Turf“:

Weeds may be controlled by hand pulling; by using products with ingredients such as corn gluten meal, beet extract or vinegar; and by cutting grass no shorter than 7 cm to shade seedlings. Many companies offer this service, and franchises are now available for entrepreneurs. Canadians are also moving away from monoculture lawns that require a lot of water and energy to turf with a variety of grasses and other species, such as white Dutch clover, for nitrogen fixation and drought resistance, or thyme. Lawns may also be replaced with hardy alternative landscapes, such as native plants.

There are of course tools to make the work easier, and certain domestic animals that will control weeds too. Those methods quoted were written by engineers, chemists, and medical doctors. They may not yet be recognized experts at keeping little yellow flowers out of your lawn, but they are the experts at keeping us healthier for longer, and think their argument carries the most weight. There is no need to trade beautiful lawns for good health, when you can have both with a healthy alternative.

And I’ll close with a cheeky suggestion that the Canadian Cancer Society could very well replace their (daffodil) yellow flower symbol with another yellow flower that better represents the fight against cancer, and the vain folly our elected politicians have continued to embrace.

-Photo by Leo Seta under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.