The Weed Problem

People don’t like plants growing in unauthorized places. They label them as “weeds” and set about poisoning them with herbicide or cutting them down on the side of the roadways with Bush Hogs (large rotary mowers).

I’ve seen many people spraying herbicide without even using masks and city workers pacing along spraying herbicide in every crack in the sidewalk.

I’m not sure if people understand that poison sometimes causes problems that we don’t even know about until years later. We live in such a complex system of interacting things that it is difficult to prove that something is safe. Often times the corporation making the product doesn’t really want a good answer about the problems that might happen when using it. They spend a lot of money funding studies and lobbying for things that they may internally know cause problems.

We’ve seen this happen in the cigarette industry and other large companies. It can take many years to get to the truth, especially if people don’t really want to hear about the problems associated with things that are saving them labor or giving them some form of pleasure.

The Decline of the Eagles

Years ago people used DDT very freely, everyone thought it was perfectly safe. I heard they even powdered their noses with it. It worked really well on getting ride of the pests it was designed to kill.

It wasn’t until years later that we found out the the eagles were having problems with their shells becoming so thin that the mother eagles would crush them trying to incubate the eggs. The concentration of DDT in the eagles was really high because they were on the top of the food chain.

Removing DDT from the market helped the eagles go from the brink of extinction to a much better population now.

Issues with Herbicide

It is hard to say what something that is designed to kill one form of life will do if it is spread around and widely used in the ecosystem. I have heard that Parkinson’s disease is very high in farm workers in theory because of the use of welding machines and exposure to herbicide.

Many types of bees are in decline. U.S. honey is contaminated with the glyphosate weed killer Roundup. The whole system of agriculture requires pollination for food production that is highly dependent on bees.
http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/epa-finally-admits-what-has-been-killing-bees-for-decades/

Seafood is becoming more and more contaminated with toxins that are concentrated in the meat of fish that are on the top of the food chain. Much of this is heavy metal and other environmental toxins. Additional contamination from lawn care products certainly can’t help the situation any.
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/may/22-seafood-toxins-causing-als-alzheimers-parkinsons

Most of the runoff from yards goes straight into the Puget Sound without any treatment around here. The salmon runs and orca populations have been threatened by the urban pollution. Run off of nitrogen fertilizer and toxins cause algae blooms and red tides that are reducing oxygen levels and the food the fish feed on. We are seeing a dead zone in the sea water around urban areas that is visible on satellite photos.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44677

Agent Orange (a powerful herbicide using in the Vietnam War) has caused many health problems in the veterans that were exposed to it including evidence for increased chance of prostate cancer. We now know it is not a safe thing to be using.
http://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/agentorange/conditions/prostate_cancer.asp
http://www.yourdictionary.com/agent-orange

I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a monarch butterfly in anything but a picture. Their food supply has been greatly reduced by the use of herbicide that has been killing the milkweed plants that they eat.

A Beautiful Yard

I like my yard, it has some weeds. You can see them growing on the sidewalk and in among the heather. I try to keep a handle on it and pick them when I can but they don’t seem to bubble up very high on my priority list. The neighbors are probably thinking they should offer to come on over and help spray the yard down with poison; kind of a neighborly thing to do I guess. ;)

All joking aside, I don’t mean to offend anyone or poke fun at their life style choices. I believe we all do the best we can based on information that we find relevant and beliefs that we hold.

There are many edible things growing in my yard and when I do pull weeds there are many worms in the ground underneath them. The snails love the garden a bit too much. I’ve got to plant extra to keep them all feed.

I try to keep things looking nice but my grass is a mixture of many different plants, moss, mushrooms, daisies, clover, and things that don’t mind being mowed over once a week or so. (I use a push mower, it doesn’t do as good a job but it is cheaper than an athletic club membership)

My yard is much different from the nearest park which looks like a large homogeneous field of Kentucky bluegrass. I figure we could end our youth unemployment problem if we made power mowers illegal and made everyone use a push mower and pick weeds by hand. My guess is that no one would want to do it and we would just get much more tolerant of peoples yards being in a more natural state.

I’ve often gone hiking around here and viewed the wildflowers thinking, wow I wish my yard looked like that.

Possible Future Solutions

I’ve noticed a new product that looks like a little robot that goes around the house vacuuming the rug. I’ve not tried it but the idea is intriguing.

I wonder if something like that could be designed to go around the yard cutting down everything that grows higher than a certain height. If it operated for long hours it could work at a slow pace using quietly operating scissors.

Using computer vision it could identify the plants that you don’t want it to harm and use a small magnifying glass to burn up and discourage the growth of the plants that you want to remove. (It rains around here so there is not much fire danger but this could be a problem if not programmed correctly)

Teams of these robots could operate by the side of roadways and run off solar power that was provided by generation on the road surface.
http://www.solarroadways.com/

Simpler solutions like vertical farming and greenhouse growing could greatly reduce the need for herbicide.

It would be really nice to not have to use herbicide to control weeds, I hope someday soon we won’t need to. It is really up to us to make changes from the bottom up. We can vote with our dollars and decide not to support the type of things that we think could be causing issues in the environment. Purchasing locally grown foods from producers that are trying to make a difference is one way of “voting” with your dollars.

Many things have open ended answers, we can spend time and effort researching them or we can look at physical evidence and make the best choices we can for ourselves. It is debatable whether herbicide causes cancer, some say it does, others say it does not and there are big dollar interests distorting the answer to the question. How much evidence do we need to make a small shift in our desire for a nicely manicured green lawn?

I think these are things we are all answering collectively right now. What we see in the world is the reflection of individual and collective choices that we make and have made for many years.

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All photos taken by me. I found the rat scull out in the yard; I did say I had a problem with rats didn’t I? (They’re cute as long as they are not in my crawlspace)

Thanks for reading!