Comment by fredrikholm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredrikholm | Hacker News Reader

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It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction.

The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like:

  * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned
  * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood
  * Burning or spraying down all weeds
  * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks
  * Aggressively cutting down bushes

Every year the soil gets drier, compacts and washes away when rainfall comes in the spring and turns our parks into giant mudslides.

Next year they spend hundreds of thousands trying to replant and reseed, only to lose it again in the words of 'maintenance'.

Meanwhile, our smaller community decided to do the complete opposite:

  * Faux-compost everything (grass cuttings, leaves, twigs, weeds) by literally just throwing it into a pile and forgetting about it
  * Mulch everything with said compost
  * Let (non-invasive) weeds take over areas that were previously barren
  * Not trim down bushes before winter

In nearly two seasons now, we've gone from watching a slow depressing death of what used to be a wonderful garden before the droughts started in ~2018, to a garden that is even more impressive and seems to grow stronger every year. We now have more birds than ever, as insects have started to bounce back.

We're doing 1/10th of the work as our neighboring communities, and we're getting as good if not better results.

I wish more people approached gardening/landscaping with this water-harvesting, nature mimicking way. It's cheap, takes extremely little resources and demonstrates how incredibly strong an ecosystem can be if you just work with it rather than against it, even on a small scale.

Here's a fun bit of chemistry I learned some time ago: the breakdown of cellulose and lignin produces water as one of the byproducts. Which stands to reason since photosynthesis consumes a good deal of water in the first place.

Those saprophytic fungi, which enjoy a nice wet environment to work in, are producing some of the water they need to work. When you burn this material instead, you send all of that humidity up the chimney with the rest of the gasses (and a little extra from the surroundings due to evaporation from the heat).

The absolute amount of effort we spend fighting nature instead of just guiding and living with it is frightening.

Illusion of Control. We need group therapy and nobody who has successfully accomplished that at such scales has any formal training in the subject.

If you don't manage it (fight it) you get the buried and re-discovered pyramids of southern Mexico (and Cambodia). Yes, there is a balance, however, the other extreme is also not viable for habitation.

Yea but we're so far on the extreme of slash and burn and pouring chemicals on lawns that it's not even worth considering at this point concerns of habitation. It's just not even on the radar in terms of things that we need to bother caring about for the foreseeable future (100+ years minimum).

I agree that we can find better solutions than what lawns provide, however, weeds, nature and plants will take over an unmanaged property pretty quickly... maybe 20 years. In 100 places are near unrecognizable. The abandoned areas of Detroit did not take 100 years to become overtaken by nature. And that's a continental climate. In Tropical climates the rate will be quicker.

Sure, but in the context of this discussion unmanaged property simply isn't an issue, in my view. It's too much management that's causing problems.

OP is thinking of protecting property value

Pouring chemicals? Maybe a few do but I only apply one application of pre-emergent a year and then one application of fertilizer in the fall. That's not really pouring chemicals. In fact nature seems to thrive in our lawn.

From my time in the suburbs, people spray weed killer and similar chemicals throughout the spring and summer and into the fall. Of course each individual is different. We never sprayed and just let them grow and mowed them down and then pulled them out of flower beds.

You can also verify that these are used extensively by looking at the number of products sold for this purpose at national hardware retailers.

But this is just one issue among many. Lawns are de facto desert areas.

There are so many products because people are ignorant and just want an easy fix. It's pure laziness and has nothing to do with having a healthy lawn. There's a lot of money in laziness :)

A healthy lawn really doesn't require that much from a chemical standpoint, but it take effort to figure out what it needs and you have to do things at the right time. In fact, the healthier the lawn the less weed killers you need because a thick lawn is a poor environment for weeds.

Lots of people blanket apply fertilizers too. But in reality a quick test of the soil can tell you exactly what is out of balance and if you need that fertilizer application at all.

I definitely agree with you there, but even a healthy lawn is still a lawn, which is still a bit of a problem. Outside of insects in the ground not much can live there. You need a variety of bushes, trees, herbs, flowers, and other types of plants to create a healthy ecosystem there. A lawn simply can't provide that.

that’s the historical point of a lawn. no one wants pests near their home.

Yea but now we can see the ecological impact of tens (hundreds?) of millions of people doing that and it doesn’t work.

Those few though in total mean your city is pouring more chemicals on per unit area that farmers who "pour chemical" on every acre. Of course farmers are talking about thousands of acres and so chemical prices add up, while the individual is only talking about 1/10th an acre or less, so the costs add up a lot slower. Thus the farmer has incentive to put on only what is needed, and not let it run away. (not that farmers do a good job here, but they are aware of the problem unlike city residents)

You would be astounded if you looked more deeply in to this. I have tried in vain to get my landlord to stop paying a lawncare company to regularly (every month or two) dousing the patchy, dry, awful grass patches some call a lawn with fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.

There is a huge business around doing this as well, you may not see it if you don't walk suburbs during working hours when much of this is done.

Oh no I believe it and I am against those practices very much! But I feel like lawns are demonized when they don't need to be if properly done. There are a lot of benefits to lawns that are just being flat out ignored in a large part of these comment sections.

I think the reason for this is as follows, if you'll allow:

Let's pretend that wine is good for cardiovascular health (there were some conflicting studies so it's truthy enough I think for this point).

We're having a discussion and we have a mutual friend who is a raging alcoholic. They drink and drive every night, they get blacked out completely, they can't hold a job. Myself and a few others are like hey friend, you need to go to AA, you need to get help, you need to see a doctor. We find them at bars and take their keys. We tell bartenders to stop serving them. They go to liquor stores and just cannot stop.

And you're like, well ya know wine does have some cardiovascular benefits. And it's a great social lubricant.

Now of course you aren't really dismissing the problem here, which is that our mutual friend is a raging alcoholic. We all can see that undeniably. But you're also not really helping because you're espousing these health benefits but we're trying to keep someone from killing themselves or others. We're working on a gigantic problem with this person and these health benefits just do not enter into the picture at this point.

This maps back to suburban America (and elsewhere) where yea there are well taken care of lawns and sure a few people can have them. But our suburban friend here is a raging alcoholic and no amount of lawn is really good for them regardless of the benefits it may have.

Manage and fight are vastly different - we're getting better at this (example: freeways used to have water runoff go to the storm sewers and now they go into dry holding ponds instead).

I spent some time as a volunteer sandbagging one of the levees in Missouri as high water neared flood stage. While there, I heard a quote attributed to an old-time farmer who was also the president of the Upper Mississippi Valley Drainage Association who also appeared before Congress on damages caused by varying the water level. The quote was along the lines of: "We think we can drain water from certain areas and farm the land next to the river, but that land belongs to the Mississippi. It can take it back any time it wants to."

The eventual disaster at the old river control will show us that someday. Hopefully not soon.

You should go live in a third world village for a few years and then come back here and say that. Life in “nature” sucks. The kids in my dad’s village don’t have to take a boat to school during monsoon season, like he has to do growing up, because they “fought nature” to control flooding.

Not that we, or rather I, mowed our lawn often, at most ince every 3-4 weeks or so. This year, we decided to leave part of it to grow. The amount of insects in there was astounishing, so the patch stayed uncut between June and two weeks ago. The rain transfromed it ibto something less than pretty. Turned out the grass underneath is prettier than before. Next we gonna repeat the same thing with a different patch.

Did this for No-Mow-May. Left some patches unmowed for that month (we got a lot of rain in May this year). Lots of diversity in those patches. It was kind of hard to mow them in June - had to use the weed-eater first. Left a couple of the patches longer into July. Neighbor across the street almost came unhinged. Tried to explain that it was helping polinators... but it was a waste of breath.

Lucky us we don't have of those neighbors, and basically cannot get them. No HOAs or similar shenenigans were we live, even the city leaves large patches in parks unmowed until automn in some places.

All the more desperate considering that 1/10th of the work may be regarded by many as "not good for the economy".

We should take those people and make them dig holes in the ground, and then fill them up again. Plenty of work, great for the economy.

Did you just invent an imaginary group of baddies, assign them an imaginary belief, and then feel concerned because they "exist"?

A book that talks about this at a different level is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka that follows the idea of Do Nothing Farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming

Because I'm extremely lazy, that's what I do with my yard. I let the native plants do what they want, just cutting down the invasive ones.

It's been (slowly) turning into a lovely yard, lots of wildflowers, bees, and critters. No need to ever water it, either.

We need a state of climate emergency to just ban some needlessly destructive practices, ideally globally. Mowing lawns is something we can just decide not to do. Meat and dairy we can just decide not to do.

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