The movement toward safer, more sustainable lawns got a boost from the media this month, as three popular magazines featured articles about lawn chemicals in their June issues. They include Prevention, Readers Digest, and Men’s Health.

The article in Men’s Health is especially eye-opening. Paul Tukey, in his Safe Lawns blog, called it “quite possibly the most extraordinary article ever published by a major U.S. magazine about the state of the lawn chemical debate in the U.S.”

For starters, the article is titled Your Lethal Lawn. And the tagline that follows that unexpected headline reads:

In springtime, a man’s dreams turn to an expanse of weedless, bug-free, manicured grass surrounding his suburban castle.

A multibillion-dollar industry caters to this dream, offering a calibrated poisoning that keeps his world lush yet silently threatens his family, his pets … And him. Is it worth the risk?”

Author Bryan Smith does a good job of voicing the concerns of homeowners, physicians, and scientists, and of backing up these concerns with compelling research.

While I’m not an extreme environmentalist, I do believe that too many of us have bought into exactly what the lawn care industry wants us to believe — that the “perfect” lawn must be a monoculture of only grass, unsullied by clover and violets; and that we must regularly perform a chemical assault upon it to keep it “perfect.” I rejected these ideas a long time ago. What about you?

You can read Your Lethal Lawn online, courtesy of the Men’s Health website. Then let us know what you think, by leaving a comment.

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