Lawn Care Products Are Endangering Our Health

We have to look at all systems as social entities, historical products as well as ecological matrix systems.  Reality is very complex.  Humans are, by nature, both complex and simple at the same time. This is due to our brains being of several different layers which evolved in different time frames and under different social conditions.  The NYT ran a story today about how lawn care and anti-weed chemicals are poisoning our environment.  This is one of many causes of cancers which now plague us since we have eliminated most other forms of plague thanks to modern medicine and vaccinations.  Our solutions to other ‘problems’ are now killing us instead of enriching our lives.

Hurricane Bill’s outermost arms are passing over where I live in Berlin, NY.

.

This is a multi-level debate being conducted across the entire planet: in our quest to kill unwanted life forms, are we endangering ourselves?  Previous to the beginning of the 21st century, poisoning the environment was OK because the longevity of the population at large was improving rapidly.  That is, more people were living much longer lives.  In the 19th century, few people reached their sixties.  Today, this is common in first world countries.  In my own youth, people rarely reached 85 years of age.  Now, it is much more common.  In Japan, very common.

.

But the stresses on the environment due to chemical and systematic triumphs of modern technology are beginning to accumulate.  Chemicals we create and spread don’t vanish magically.  They sift through the environment in various ways.  And collect at important points, one being our hydraulic systems.  That is, we are poisoning our own water we use to stay alive.  And this might kill us or deform our babies.

.

Debating Just How Much Atrazine Is Safe in Your Water Glass – Series – NYTimes.com

For decades, farmers, lawn care workers and professional green thumbs have relied on the popular weed killer atrazine to protect their crops, golf courses and manicured lawns. But atrazine often washes into water supplies and has become among the most common contaminants in American reservoirs and other sources of drinking water. .

Now, new research suggests that atrazine may be dangerous at lower concentrations than previously thought. Recent studies suggest that, even at concentrations meeting current federal standards, the chemical may be associated with birth defects, low birth weights and menstrual problems.

.

If we click on the NYT maps, we can see that Kansas is the most polluted with this substance.  Kansas also happens to be a very conservative state that hates the concept of Federal controls, for example.  Kansas is the Heartland in many ways which is why it has become addicted to using various chemical and medicinal shortcuts.  Kansas embodies the deep contradictions of the US public.  Basically, Kansas wants to have its cake and eat it too.  That is, use poisons on other life forms but not believe this is affecting human life forms.

.

I will also note that the NYT maps show Phoenix, Arizona, as one of the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of weed poison!  I lived there when I was a child.  We lived right smack dab in the middle of the agricultural systems there.  That is, early suburbia was being built right on top of the best agricultural  lands.  The irrigation system was part of our own back yard.  That is, when they flooded the orchards around us, our yard flooded.  I loved this as a child and would swim in it.  God knows how many toxins I was exposed to, while doing this!

.

Modern civilization exposes us to many, many toxins.  This is because humans want nature to fit our own ideals.  For example, the main reason Phoenix has this anti-weed chemical in profusion is due to golf courses.  In the middle of a very dry desert, we have golf courses because golfers want to play golf all the time.  Golf courses were invented in one of the wettest climates on earth.  The natural rolling grasses grazed by herds of sheep was the genesis of golf courses.  Since the desires of millions of golfers is in complete contravention with reality, we have fake rolling greens in deserts where it is not only unsustainable, but illogical.

.

Humans are illogical.  We have wishes and fears.  What we fear and what we wish can be one and the same.  For example, we want to live forever.  And we want to play golf while living forever.  But to play golf, we have to poison the environment which means, we poison ourselves.  I used to have a herd of sheep.  They sheered the grass on my mountain so that it was nearly weedless.  That is, all weeds were eaten to the roots and nearly only grass grew!  But golf courses are not grazed by sheep.  They are cut by lawn mowers.

.

Lawn mowers don’t select and eat all the weeds to the roots.  So when we mow, weeds proliferate.  When I lived in New Jersey, one of the most noxious things was when the ‘lawn care’ people did their summer toxic spraying.  We had to keep the dogs and cats away from this.  I tore out my own front lawn and replaced it with trees, rocks and flower beds.  But my neighbors used poisons to kill weeds.  And again, I had to shut the windows when this was going on.

.

But this stuff flows into the water table during rain storms and winter snowmelts.  All poisons used to kill insects and weeds end up inside our own bodies via the air and water systems we share with all living things.  Understanding how nature works is important.  Golf courses should be forced, BY LAW, to use only sheep for mowing, for example.  The sheep also fertilize these lawns, incidentally.  No need for fertilizers which are also wrecking our water systems.  People who imagine that a system of chaos will protect us from poisons are deluded.

.

We have to have sane rules and regulations to prevent shortcuts like we see with golf courses.   That is, instead of running these systems the way they first evolved, people who want to profit from running a golf course are using poisons and machines to replicate what sheep do, naturally and with no disruption to the environment.  We humans are very prone to wanting shortcuts.  The organic movement arose in contravention to the chemical short cut system because people are reasonably afraid of pollution.

.

We are bathed in pollutions!  I use a plural here.  In the Middle Ages, people lived with pollutions!  That is, sanitary problems coupled with the use of various manufacturing systems such as ironwork, leather dying and curing, etc. were all dumped straight into rivers and fields.  Third world nations do this all the time, today.

.

Only in recent years, starting in my grandfather’s time, was there any attempt at controlling this pollution.  Proper sewage systems are a recent invention.  The capturing and cleaning of waste water was begun during my own lifetime.  But this is all futile if we continue to increase using unnecessary chemicals so we can have the illusion of various ecosystems like golf courses without sheep grazing them.  The use of weed killer in suburban gardening is particularly stupid.  It is used to kill ‘weeds’ like dandelions.

.

Dandelions can be eaten and turned into other useable things as well as having pretty flowers.  Yet, we poison ourselves in order to kill these pretty plants if they dare to grow in the middle of lawns we want to look as if sheep are grazing.  Dandelions don’t proliferate where there are sheep for the simple reason, sheep think dandelions are delicious!  They hunt them down and eat them up!

.

The reason golf courses and public parks use no sheep is simple: you need either a shepherd with dogs or considerable fences to keep the sheep in.  A graveyard recently made the news because they tried using sheep to keep the graveyard looking sweet.  Our modern graveyards are based on the British ones that were mowed by herds of sheep because wool was England’s most important export product during the Middle Ages.  Mowing around gravestones is difficult.  Sheep naturally mow around them.  But people objected to lambs walking on graves, for some bizarre cultural reason.

.

So the experiment was terminated. People were more comfortable with pollution-belching, noisy, noxious machines rolling over graves with a scythe swishing loudly.  Bizarre, isn’t this?  Human minds are queer things.  I would think the imagery of soft, wooly sheep quietly grazing or maybe, baa-ing, would generate images of peace and love.  But no, the machine that can chop off the mower’s feet if they are careless: this was preferred only because this is considered ‘normal’.

.

Our idea of ‘normality’ is based on a petro-chemical culture that totally surrounds us and has become so common, we can’t imagine other systems.  Just as gas lawnmowers replaced the hand push mowers which replaced the sheep, chemicals have replaced natural methods of removing ‘weeds’.  And weeds are things we don’t want to see growing.  There is no bad ‘weed’ as far as Mother Nature is concerned!

.

Or even sheep are concerned!  Goats eat everything in their path so they think there is no such thing as weeds.  Everything is ‘food’.  We have to have some sort of ideal society inside of our own heads so we can strive for this.  Living in harmony with Nature and with other humans is the ideal.  We might not achieve this but we have to have this as an ideal.

.

The appearance of the ideal, when this is achieved via dumping toxins and poisons into the air and water and soil is a great evil.  This gives the illusion of lush nature but it actually killing nature and thus, ourselves.  We have to decide: can we coexist with ‘weeds’ or are we willing to kill ourselves in order to eliminate other life forms?

.

This is like the MAD nuclear bomb business: instead of eliminating nuclear bombs, we want to have them in reserve and then hope no one would be crazy enough to use them in warfare.  This is stupid because humans are crazy.  When given a choice, we often take the short cut.  This is why nukes were invented: the US wanted to end WWII quickly.  We were tired of it.  Nuking civilians was a great tool.  Only it lingers on as a greater and greater danger to us, ourselves.  We ended WWII very abruptly.  But we created the possibility of WWIII ending equally abruptly, the same way.  Only, there would not be two nukes dropped on cities but thousands of them, all over all the cities.

.

Sometimes, retreating from some sort of modern system is wiser than pressing forwards.  In the case of anti-weed systems, returning to the old crop rotation/sheep grazing systems is wiser than pushing for more exotic chemical and machine solutions to ancient natural systems.

Email:

emeinel@fairpoint.net

MAILING ADDRESS:

EMS NEWS

P.O. BOX 483

BERLIN, NY 12022

Make checks out to ‘Elaine Supkis’

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THIS WEBSITE