The Case for Grass
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Grass is a green plant; green plants soak up natural and pollution-based carbon and produce fresh oxygen that all living creatures breathe. These are facts that any grade schooler can recite with little prompting. Aside from those environmental benefits, grass turf helps retain and drain water efficiently, reducing topsoil erosion and keeping any given plot of land from turning into a desert. They also produce habitats helpful for small insects and wildlife that are trying to thrive in cities otherwise dominated by sidewalks, roads and buildings.
In contrast, none of the benefits of grass turf lawns apply for rock gardens and artificial grass. Rocks and plastic don’t help the environment – they’re inert, preventing the ground under your feet from doing its job helping out Mother Nature.
Environmentalists will point out that rock gardens and artificial grass can make sense for parched parts of the country, like Arizona or inland California, or some desert-like parts of Western Canada, where water is scarce. That’s true. Watering a lawn in a place that gets not much more rain than Death Valley puts a strain on what precious water we have. But if everybody in the Phoenix area replaced their lawns with rock or xeriscape, what would that do to the local climate? Read more below to see the temperature benefits. Lush green grass turf lawns don’t hurt the environment – they help it. It's just a matter making a commitment to use as little water as possible while managing the mowing, trimming, fertilizing and weeding costs.
Watering, laying down fertilizer, aeration and mowing a natural grass turf lawn takes a bit of work. Unfortunately, an increasingly common myth is that the alternatives don’t require any maintenance.
Rock gardens still get weeds – and it can be a real pain spotting and pulling out weeds from among rock and gravel. Organic matter like dead leaves and seeds will eventually find their way in – and then it’s a real chore to get out the weeds when they appear, even with a spade.
As for artificial turf, while it can be a decent option for sports fields in bone-dry places like Arizona, for others it can be a real nightmare. Organic matter breaks down on its own in natural grass turf lawns – but with artificial turf, you’re going to have a terrible time trying to clean off everything from mud and twigs to chewing gum and cigarette butts that can pile up over time thanks to dust storms, wind, dust devils and mother nature just kicking up junk. – unlike natural grass turf, the plastic doesn’t repair itself by growing back.
A healthy and living, growing lawn provides 10 times the benefit of a tree. “Your average 2,000 square foot lawn produces enough oxygen for four people, which is the equivalent of 80 trees.” Even better, it doesn’t take long to produce and maintain a resilient, dense ground cover; a tree takes up to 30 years to provide the same effect.
It has been shown that beautiful landscaping can lower a person’s blood pressure and have an overall positive effect on their mood. Hospitals concentrate on landscaping for just this reason. Sociologists believe that the absence of community parks or clean, healthy environments in inner cities can contribute to the social problems attributed to the areas. Don’t believe it? Take your shoes off and walk bare foot through the grass! Not only does it feel great between your toes, but it also provides a natural cushion for your children at play!
Trees seem to get all the credit for naturally cooling the air because they provide shade, but grass lowers surface temperatures through "evapotranspiration" which is a process similar to that used by old-fashioned evaporative coolers ("swamp coolers") for home air conditioning. On a hot summer day, lawns will typically be 30 degrees cooler than asphalt, 14 degrees cooler than bare soil and a huge 35 degrees cooler than artificial turf! Aside from just creating a comfortable setting, grass also reduces energy demand by lowering the ambient temperature around a home.
