Hey Kids! Get off my lawn!

Everyone during there childhood had the neighbor who despised kids treading on his perfectly manicured lawn. We would dare each other to run on the lawn to see if we would get caught. The last two years I have slowly transitioned off of the steroid induced lawn to a more organically fed lawn. What I have realized in this process is that the neighbor's perfectly manicured lawn that has that perfect shade of green throughout the entire summer is a lawn that I would tell my children to stay off. Not because the person will run out and yell at my kids tarnishing the family name. It is because that lawn has a variety of lawn chemicals that could harm my children's health. Of the 30 commonly used pesticides on lawns, 19 are linked with cancer and carcinogenicity, 13 are linked with birth defects, 21 with reproductive effects, 26 with liver and kidney damage, 15 with neurotoxicity, and 11 with disruption of endocrine (hormonal) system. See http://www.beyondpesticides.org/lawn/factsheets/30health.pdf. The concern is that these chemicals that we treat our lawns can seep into the groundwater and contaminate our streams and rivers. And in many instances, it is popping up in our drinking water. This does not mean that our population is going to be wiped off the planet by lawn fertilizer; however, it is changing the environment we live in by polluting our streams and rivers, which in turn is impacting the wild life of these waterways. Therefore, we should all stop and think when we pick up that bag of fertilizer in an effort to obtain the perfect lawn and consider whether our pursuit of the our own suburban oasis is destroying the real oasis, Earth.