Can Gardening Really Help Save the World?

By Valerie Payn

Babylonstoren Estate. Paarl. An eco-friendly alternative to lawn. Photo credit: Valerie Payn.

People often say to me “What difference does it make how I choose to garden? My garden is such a small piece of land. Surely it’s a huge exaggeration to say the way I garden can help save Earth’s environment?”
 
I think questions along these lines miss the point. The world is faced with big problems, so we think they need big solutions. Most of us are just ordinary Earth citizens with limited means and influence, so we think big problems must be left to experts, governments and big international organizations with big resources to solve them. We forget, or ignore, that most of the problems the world faces today only became big because millions of people choose to act in similar small ways that individually might not make much impact, but collectively have a huge effect.

Lawn, the biggest cultivated crop in America

Take lawns, for instance. NASA, in 2005, estimated that lawns cover about 128,000 square kilometers, or 31 million acres, of the USA’s landmass. That is more land than the USA uses to grow corn. As Cristina Milesi, one of the world’s foremost researchers on the ecological impacts of lawn remarks ‘lawn could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area’. Milesi has calculated that keeping all this lawn at golfing green perfection requires approximately 200 gallons of fresh water per person per day.  http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Lawn/. The average petrol powered lawn mower is 11 times more polluting than a car, per unit of energy used.   Lawns also lack bio-diversity, an essential part of any healthy garden eco-system. 

 Japanese philosopher and natural farmer- gardener Masanabu Fukuoka once commented that, judging from the appearance of the average American garden, it would seem the main American dream is to live in a large country house surrounded by large trees ‘and enjoy a carefully manicured lawn’ (Masanabu Fukuoka. 1992).  He argued that people suffering from ‘lawn culture’ are so stuck on the idea of large immaculate lawns they won’t consider more eco-friendly possibilities for gardening.  The citizens of the USA are not the only ones on Earth who suffer from ‘Lawn Culture’, or a fondness for other unsustainable gardening habits. In my book An Ecological Gardeners Handbook I highlight a number of other unsustainable gardening ‘cultures’ including ‘WANA’, ‘Less is More’, and ‘Exotica’.

 New habits for a new millennium

Of course, individually, what we do in one tiny little pocket garden is hardly likely to make a dent in the state of the global environment.  But if millions of gardeners choose to garden in more sustainable ways it will certainly help transform our urban and suburban environments from polluting, energy and water guzzling environmental wastelands into resource conserving, biologically rich, productive urban ecosystems. Our collective actions have a tremendous impact. Collective action begins with individuals who see a new vision, choose a new path, and forge new ways of being, thinking and doing with other individuals who also buy into that vision.  Turning a small pocket of land into a garden with a healthy ecosystem is as good a place to start as any. As Australian folk musicians ‎Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly sing, ‘From little things, big things grow’.

Valerie is the author of An Ecological Gardeners Handbook; a book that explains how Nature gets plants to grow, without a human in sight, and how gardeners can use those same natural processes to create productive, flourishing, healthy garden eco-systems, wherever they live.