Organic lawns: it's easy being green

But lawns also have environmental benefits, these groups point out. For example: Turf saves energy by staying 30 to 40 degrees cooler than bare soil and 50 or more degrees cooler than streets, helping keep homes cool, notes the Better Lawn and Turf Institute, a trade group.

Grass also produces oxygen, with a 50-by-50-feet patch of lawn producing enough for a family of four, the Institute says. One acre of lawn can soak up 100 pounds of sulfur dioxide each year. And a 10,000 square-foot lawn can prevent erosion by sopping up as much as 6,000 gallons of rainwater during a rainstorm.

The coalition between environmentalists and manufacturers of yard and garden products is an attempt to bridge sides. "This [coalition] was a way of gaining consensus between groups traditionally at odds," says Allen James of Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, which represents fertilizer and pesticide companies. But some environmental groups attending the conference disputed the guidelines, which are still under development.

Even defining "organic" remains problematic. "Not all organic care is the same," says Nick Novick, who runs Small Planet Landscaping in Ashland, Mass. "We're at the point in this industry that organic foods were a few years ago. We need standards and government enforcement...."

That seems to be coming. The Northeast Organic Farming Association recently published the first-in-the-nation technical standards for organic yard care.

But the biggest change of all may be the expectations of people like Debora White of Wellesley, Mass., who is in her third year of organic lawn care. She's changed her outlook on what a lawn should be.

Despite living in an affluent community, Ms. White doesn't care anymore if she sees crabgrass here and there - though her husband prefers it "looking like a green carpet." After a transition phase, weeds have been minimal, although a willingness to put up with clover and to use a dandelion fork and pull an occasional weed is part of going natural, too, she says. "My neighbors were recently admiring my lawn, and they had no idea I had dumped the chemical company," she says. "I just thought it was a better way to go. I don't want to be a crusader. I'm just doing what I can do."

• The average American homeowner spends 40 hours per year mowing the lawn.

• Of 103.9 million households with lawns, more than half (58 million) use insecticides; 40 million use herbicides; 14 million use fungicides.

• A one-acre lawn generates almost six tons of grass clippings a year, or nearly 1,000 garbage bags' full.

• The EPA estimates that the amount of pollution emitted by a lawn mower operating for one hour equals the amount of pollution emitted by a car driven for about 20 miles.

Sources: Audubon Science Office; Environmental Protection Agency; Toward a Low Input Lawn by C. Barth (2000) in T.R. Schueler & H.K. Holland (Eds.), "The Practice of Watershed Protection" (Article 130). Ellicott City, Md.: Center for Watershed Protection

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