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These are the sounds and smells of machines, the machines that fueled by petroleum and are ubiquitous in the urban landscape, seemingly indispensible and unavoidable to the maintenance of urban ecosystem services.\u00a0 The smallest patches of lawn are mown by gasoline powered mowers, the grass is blown aside by gas powered blowers, hedges are trimmed with gas powered trimmers and gasoline fueled vehicles carry the laborers from site to site so they can deploy the machines to trim, cut, mow and tidy up yards, gardens and parks of all sizes and shapes.<\/p>\n
There is little to no accounting for the impacts of these activities, not only for their contributions to criteria air pollutants and greenhouse gasses (GHGs), but also for the ways in which they impact the health of yard care workers, and residents.\u00a0 The noise associated with this work is never discussed: the invasive and pervasive sounds of motors whose decibel levels are poorly (if at all) regulated.\u00a0 The senses are assaulted by the banal and routine activities involved in \u201cmaintaining\u201d our urban green space, ensuring it is orderly and well tended, controlled and clean.<\/p>\n
EPA estimates that gas mowers represent 5% of U.S. air pollution<\/a>, using 800 million gallons of gas per year.\u00a0 A new gas powered lawn mower operating for one hour produces as much volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides as 8 new cars each being driven for one hour at 55 mph<\/a>.<\/p>\n EPA also estimates that over 17 million gallons of fuel<\/a>, mostly gasoline, are spilled while refueling lawn equipment each year\u2014more than all of the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in the Gulf of Alaska.\u00a0 One gas mower spews 88 lbs of CO2 and 34 lbs of other pollutants <\/a>into the air every year. \u00a0And these numbers do not account for the fuel necessary to create nitrogen fertilizer and the impacts of the use of that fertilizer on water quality and soils in cities.\u00a0 It has been estimated that more nitrogen fertilizer is used in cities than for agriculture in the U.S..<\/p>\n The perception of what constitutes the proper nature in cities certainly contributes to this sensory landscape.\u00a0 We are accustomed to an urban nature that is manicured and orderly, contained in both size and shape\u2014no overhanging bushes or vines that could intrude on passageways\u2014pruned up trees so trucks and cars can whiz along.\u00a0 Things are rectilinear and symmetrical.<\/p>\n Now, this is probably an over generalization, but nature in the city is contained and restrained so that it does not interfere with the free flow of commerce and movement, thus neither invasive or over bearing, nor wild or feral, except in reserved and controlled spaces. \u00a0Lawns serve as out-of-doors wall-to-wall carpeting, ensuring cleanliness, covering soil\u2014dirt\u2014creating a sanitized green covering of what might have been originally the substrate for a mixed flora and the home of insects, microbes, birds, mammals and amphibians.\u00a0 Now instead there is turf, grown at turf farms, cut out and laid upon soil, then watered, fertilized, poisoned so no weeds will grow, nor any potentially destructive insects can live, and tended by poorly paid labor using machines that require petrochemical inputs. \u00a0Critics of this system (Robbins 2007<\/a>, among others) have pointed out the power of the lawn care industry (and the chemical industry) in creating societal norms about landscape. \u00a0Change is occurring, but slowly as it involves not only an aesthetic leap, but also requires new knowledge, new plant availability, and new landscaping practices.<\/p>\n Our conceptual imagination is still challenged by what climate and ecosystem appropriate urban landscapes might look like.\u00a0 One of the issues is that urban landscaping is rather similar across cities, as Maria Ignatieva<\/a> wrote in this space.\u00a0 Lawns and big trees in parks, lawns in front yards (and often in back too), easy to grow and maintain hedges, a few roses perhaps, and shade trees.\u00a0 But if we were to replace these with more climate appropriate landscapes in cities across the world, the variety and complexity of these landscapes would be extraordinary.\u00a0 We marvel at the differences in architecture in historic cities, architecture that has been often designed to be climate appropriate.\u00a0 White, tight cities along the Mediterranean, to reflect the sun\u2019s intensity and to create shaded alleys for human circulation, and cisterns to capture scarce rainfall.\u00a0 Darker surfaced, less dense cities in the north, with slate roofs, for example, and drainage systems to evacuate rainfall and snow.\u00a0 With increased interest in vegetation and parks in cities, what would the landscapes look like if they too reflected their biogeography and climate?<\/p>\n For the region I know, California and Southern California, a Mediterranean climate region<\/a>, urban landscapes would be shubbier, browner in the summer with exposed soil between the plants.\u00a0 Oaks might punctuate those landscapes, and the palate of flowering bushes, shrubs and ground covers would be not only diverse in size and types of flowers, but profoundly fragrant.\u00a0 We would have many sages, penstamons, bunch grasses, poppies, ceanothus and arctostaphylus among other wonderful plants. \u00a0In the Northwest the landscape would be more mesic, with green full vegetation, azaleas and rhododendrons, and maybe turf grass. \u00a0Trees would include firs, maples, madrones.\u00a0 Imagine the urban landscapes for Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta or Boston.\u00a0 What wonder we would experience going to those cities and feeling \u201cin place\u201d due to the urban gardens and parks reflecting their regions.<\/p>\n This transformation will be difficult for a number of reasons.\u00a0 One is the hesitancy individuals feel to change their landscaping when their neighbors have not. \u00a0Another is lack of knowledge about different plants and their maintenance.\u00a0 Finally there is the issue of cost, which I partially address below.\u00a0 Landscapes are not inexpensive to change, and funding for this effort remains episodic and requires access to knowledge.<\/p>\n Redesigning the landscape of urban ecosystems fundamentally also requires addressing how they are maintained, and by whom.\u00a0 Today urban ecosystems are by and large anthropogenic\u2014chosen by people and placed in cities regardless of native ecosystems.\u00a0 They are in that way novel ecosystems, almost entirely the artifact of human choice (putting aside the constraints of climate).\u00a0 They are chosen for their ease of management and maintenance, for their characteristics of greenness and homogeneity, consistency and predictability, across neighborhoods and parks, and for their responsiveness to mowing, blowing, pruning and trimming by easily available machines. \u00a0They are seen as a matter of course today, and only starting to be questioned. \u00a0Routinization of maintenance tasks, is important to reduce labor time, and one can even think of these landscapes as nearly Taylorized in their arrangements to be efficiently tended.<\/p>\n In Los Angeles, for example, the Mayor has pledged to open up to 50 new small parks<\/a>, a good thing.\u00a0 One of the main criteria for the park landscapes was ease of maintenance\u2014the ability of crews to come in and mow quickly and to move to the next park.\u00a0 A codified approach to park furniture was also developed to facilitate maintenance. \u00a0Thus another important issue in considering urban nature is the question of labor costs and skills involved in landscape maintenance.<\/p>\n For private garden crews, the ability to make a living depends on the number of gardens they can mow and blow in a day.\u00a0 Machines make that task easier\u2014it is faster to mow with a machine than a push mower, faster to blow leaves and debris than to rake and to sweep.\u00a0 Machines are also easier on the body\u2014except that the emissions are toxic.\u00a0 The trade-off is between biomechanical injuries and cancer.<\/p>\n While there is growing recognition of the potential environmental improvements that could be provided by new landscapes that include trees, infiltration zones, climate appropriate plants and so forth, paying for the requisite transformation of the urban fabric and for its subsequent maintenance is a challenge. \u00a0Not only are traditional city services like tree trimming being reduced, but the implementation of new approaches that use ecosystem services may need innovative new public\/private partnerships to come to fruition.<\/p>\n Perhaps there are other ways to fund the transition away from the petrochemical, water and input intensive current system.\u00a0 Many urban residents today use gardening services to maintain their yards, the mowers, blowers and fertilizer administrators tending to the grass and flowerbeds. \u00a0Depending on the amount of labor and the region, fees for such services vary, but residents from single family homes to multiple family apartments with outdoor vegetation commonly hire gardening services for routine garden work.\u00a0 This expenditure of private funds for a private service offers a tremendous opportunity to create neighborhood benefits through the establishment of neighborhood improvement districts, similar to business improvement districts.\u00a0 Such a program could capture the individual private expenditures to implement neighborhood nature\u2019s services infrastructure.\u00a0 Street trees could be planted and maintained for individual and neighborhood benefit, infiltration zones could be created that would capture stormwater and runoff for groundwater recharge or irrigation purposes, benefiting the individual property and the neighborhood, and climate appropriate vegetation could be planted to better reflect local and regional rainfall constraints.<\/p>\n Not only would the individual property receive the environmental benefits, but if implemented at a neighborhood level, the sum of these benefits would be significantly greater than if implemented in a scattershot way at the individual level: consistent shade along the streets, less flooding or waste of water, reduction water-use and mitigation of potential water shortages, reduction of the use of fossil fuel inputs to mow and fertilize plantings, less pollution and impacts to public health. \u00a0Neighborhood associations could be encouraged to develop these districts.\u00a0 The use of existing Home Owner Associations is an obvious path, but not all neighborhoods have HOA\u2019s, particularly in neighborhoods of renters.\u00a0 Alternatively, there might be the possibility of integrating the maintenance of neighborhood-scale ecosystem services in existing landscape and lighting districts that already collect parcel-based fees for local benefit. Non fossil fuel dependent urban ecosystems maintained by neighborhood-pooled resources could be a new and powerful addition to transitioning urban vegetation away from the need to be so intensively maintained.<\/p>\n Using reoriented and pooled private gardening services thus has the potential to provide significant neighborhood level benefits that include:<\/p>\n![\"Photo:](\"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/2013-06-01-10.57.45-266x200.jpg\")
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