Organic Lawncare: Safer, Cheaper, Easier than Chemical

On May 10, 2002 PBS’ “Now with Bill Moyers” ran a report which asked the provocative question “Are We Poisoning Our Children.” While the short answer to question appeared to be “yes,” the details were nonetheless startling. “In my lifetime 75,000 synthetic chemicals and metals have been put to use in America,” Moyers declared, “Chemicals, that, in many cases make our lives easier and better. They kill insects and weeds, clean our clothes and carpets, unclog our drains, create and produce lawns, pretty as a picture.”

An increase in the incidence of childhood cancers was the first trigger for the investigation, which discovered children with home and garden pesticides in their urine, lactating women with termite poison and flame retardants in their breast milk and in Bill Moyer’s personal blood test a veritable witch’s brew including the long banned pesticide DDT, as well as dioxin, PCBs, organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, ad nauseum.

When the Moyer’s reports ran in 2002 I had, perhaps naively, expected the start of a grassroots movement aimed at reducing our and, more importantly, our children’s exposures to chemicals at least in those areas where individuals could make choices, such as whether or not we would put chemicals on the lawns our children played upon.

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While Genetically Modified Foods Quietly Proliferate, Disquieting Questions Remain

The promise of the potential benefits of genetic modified (GMO) plants (and animals and even plant/animal hybrids) is indeed tempting. Imagine combining the genes responsible for drought resistence of, say, sagebrush or yucca, with rice or corn. The result could potentially be the utilization of vast tracts of Nevada, for example, for intensive food production that would have been extremely difficult to impossible given the vast periods of time that would be necessary for selective breeding to accomplish the same goal.

An example of a plant-animal hybrid gene is an anti-freeze gene taken from fish that was added to tobacco and potatoes to avoid frost damage. Genetic engineering can also be used to enhance a plant’s resistence to disease, insects, chemical exposures (such as herbicides) and so on.

The most tauted example of a benefit and apparent success of genetically modified food crops is so-called “golden rice,” a rice variant that is genetically altered, through the addition of daffodil and bacterium genes, to contain high amounts of Vitamin A (Wikipedia – Genetically Modified Food). Another particularly tempting benefit has been the genetic engineering of poplar trees to remove heavy metal contamination from polluted soils.

Are Genetically Modified Foods Safe?

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