The colour of our lawns is deceiving: lawns are all but green.
The nicer they look, the worse they are!
They are a monoculture (a no-no as any farmer will tell you), they require ever increasing amounts of care to stay healthy, many of us use pesticides on them preferring to kill us all in the process of trying but keep the grass alive, the fertilizer we use is derived from oil and, last but not the least, they consume water that was produced and purified to become of drinking quality.
All together a complete waste of time, water, oil and energy. Our obsession with the green lawns need to be addressed and cured: another suburbanite disease.
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It's bigger than just lawns! What about leaves?
Here's a humourous (...but not funny) story about mulching leaves.http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EcoTips/message/58
Eric
I've been thinking a bit more about lawns.
They are really just artificial systems needing continuous "life support" in order to survive. Kind of like a prop marketed to us by the retailers. We need to continue to pour water, fertilizers, pesticides on lawns in order for them to look "natural" and green. And, they need weekly surgery (ie. cutting) for the entire growing season. We make them so toxic with all those chemicals that worms can't even survive in them.
We need to create a new paradigm... A really natural garden that is self-sustaining. Think of the huge amounts of energy we would conserve over the life of a lawn..... er.. garden.
Well even though I live in the tropics where the number of pests ought to be more than in Canada (because of easier survival conditions) I have never had to use pesticides. For fertilizers I use half composted organic throwaways from my kitchen and commercially available organic fertilizers.
I think it is a question of attitude - here we tolerate, even encourage, lizards, moths, butterflies, snails and many small creatures I can see in the soil of my plants. We only destroy an early colony of honeybees and wasps because the houses I live in are not big enough to maintain distance from being bitten !