I've seen various flying insects more than a hundred miles out to sea but I accept that not all insects fly.
Not just dumb: as far as biological life goes those trimmed lawns are pretty close to dead useless land.
Now, you don't even need the bags of flower seeds though it helps. Just mow your lawn + remove biomass only twice a year. At max 3, if you've been using fertilizer in the past, or down to 1 if the soil has gotten rid of most nutritients: by cutting grass and removing it you remove nutritients so the fast-growing plants (grasses, nettles, ...) get less of a chance while the slower growing ones (amongst which a lot of wild flowers are, as wel as plants which used to be common before mass-scale agricultuter but are now rare because they don't get a chance mostly due to the abdundance of nitrogen deposition) will florish. For maximum ecological results you'll also leave certain pieces untouched for a year (some butterflies/files/spiders need long grass to survive winter). Do this for a couple of years and your once neatly trimmed green piece of land will turn into an actually valuable piece of colourful nature. I realize this is not for everyone, e.g. it's not an ideal place to play football or teach your kids how to ride their bike, but if you have the chance it's worth giving it a shot.
An ideal tool for applying the above principle is the scythe. It has several advantages over machines like mowers and weedwackers: you learn how to use a nice tool which does not burn fossil fuel, makes no noise except from a satisfying 'swoosh', is relatively cheap yet will likely outlive you. Depending on how you use it it can be a tai-chi-like moment of peace to start the day, or you gan go full-on and treat it as your work-out instead of going to the gym. And in the end it is less work than keeping grass trimmed throughout the growing season (unless you have a robotic mower, or vast amounts of land): mowing/raking for a couple of hours twice a year doesn't even come close to the amount of time I see my neighbours running around with all their mowing devices bi-weekly even though I have more grass to cut than they have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukZA4Y7usQk
But in all seriousness, yes.. lawns are evil. Created in Victorian Britain to demonstrate wealth.. "look at me, I can afford to have un-productive land". I try to minimise them as much as possible on my 1.5 acre lot. Veggie gardens, mushroom logs, wetland and lots of dead wood as in the video
That all said, I keep a couple of hives, this might be the last year. For the last couple of year my otherwise very healthy hives have collapsed around this very time of year, I just noticed one wasn't doing well all of a sudden.
Roughly when everyone is putting stuff on their lawns for winter, especially the golf course a 1/4 mile away. I know correlation is not causation but it's an unusual time for hives to fail, they've been working all summer building up and it is this point that they are their strongest.
Frankly, my feeling has been for a while that we, as a species, are at the end of our golden age.
In all seriousness, if anyone tells you you can't have a thriving eco system in your yard, fight them on every level. Manicured lawns should be outlawed, not encouraged.
FTFY.
And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number.
So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions.
https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S...
http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...
A suburb of Portlad OR is far more likely to have a bylaw or HOA reg about grass height or some other nit picky thing than the suburb of Portland ME because the OR suburb is wealthier and wealthy people have the time to care about these things, care about what the standards should be and care about how to enforce them.
Yes, many Americans live somewhere one or more rules/laws that control what they do on/with their own residential property. The Americans who are most represented here likely have far many laws/HOA rules with which they much comply.
Someone said it's "somewhat common in the US" to be restricted from growing eco-friendly laws. You "fixed" that statement by adjusting it to "somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN".
The initial statement was true, there was nothing to fix. It might be "very common" among HN readers (though I'll bet they skew more urban than you're suggesting), but it really is "somewhat common" nationwide.
And the distinction isn't irrelevant, because this isn't just a parochial HN-reader concern - turf covers roughly 2% of US land. Not all of that is lawns, and not all of those lawns are legally constrained, but as I tried to demonstrate, the total amount is significant. I'm not objecting to the point that this situation has heavy demographic skew, I'm objecting to the implication that it isn't widespread.
Sometimes those can be even worse. I lived in a town of 300 growing up, and we often had to deal with the mayor's wife and occasionally the mayor himself coming to our door to tell us we were in violation of some lawn ordinance or another. This is particularly obnoxious considering that the only way to even look up town ordinances is to go to the other side of the county to view the documents at the county office.
Edit: Context: He's a permaculture farmer (one of the first), and has a really compelling solution to modern agriculture, in my opinion.
This isn't SV specific DC, NYC or pretty much any other large city has a slow drip exodus of upper middle class people from it's suburbs to the less stifling suburbs of some other city with similar results.
That said, since the drought, there are thousands of dead lawns, and I've never seen these laws enforced.
I'll still want some lawn to play ball and such, but I'm all for keeping some wilder areas in the corners, let whichever flowers want to grow, grow there.
Of course later we drove by as they were all dying, not quite as dazzling a display lol That noted, I am all for this!