Pls plant trees to reduce flooding and help with climate change

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07/20/2019 09:31

Subject: Re:Pls plant trees to reduce flooding and help with climate change

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

I just talked to my husband about this and he knows more than I do for sure. He mentioned that the worst are the kinds of lawns that use chemicals on them and also do not keep the lawn clippings there to rot both of which produce richer soil. There are fewer insects and worms to enrich the soil as well (basically the ecosystem is totally disrupted). Lawns where chemicals are not used have grass and yes, weeds, with much longer root systems. He mentioned that a lawn that is chemically treated has grass with maybe one inch roots, but untreated you can get grass with 10 inch roots. Obviously this will soak up much more water in a rain. Another thing we do is to cut the lawn, but not too short. A lot of people cut their grass too short.

Before about the 1960's nobody put this stuff on their lawns. It became a "thing" after that.

Interesting article just published on the history of lawns in this country, which represent a $40 billion industry. I thought the following stats, particularly the last paragraph, were particularly enlightening:

The following is a list of some things the industry does not want you to know.

Between 1994 and 2004, an estimated average of 75,884 Americans per year were injured using lawn mowers or roughly the same number of people injured by firearms.
Using a gas-powered leaf blower for half an hour creates as many polluting hydrocarbon emissions as driving a car seventy-seven hundred miles at a speed of thirty miles per hour.
Nearly half of the households sampled in one study failed to carefully read and follow the label directions when using pesticides and fertilizer.
Approximately seven million birds die each year because of lawn-care pesticides.
In the process of refueling their lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and other garden equipment, Americans spill about seventeen million gallons of gasoline every summer, or about 50 percent more oil than marred the Alaskan coast during the notorious Exxon Valdez disaster.
A single golf course in Tampa, Florida — a state that leads the nation with over a thousand of these emerald green creations — uses 178,800 gallons of water per day, enough to meet the daily water needs of more than twenty-two hundred Americans.
Suburban households and lawn-care operators apply more herbicides per acre on lawns than most farmers spread to grow crops.
Of the approximately sixty thousand landscape workers in California subject to leaf-blower noise every day, less than one in ten is likely to be wearing hearing protection.
Diazinon, for decades a widely used lawn-care pesticide similar in chemical composition to nerve gas but touted as safe, was finally banned by the E.P. A. in 2000, and yet a loophole allowed retailers to go right on selling it as late as 2002.
Lawn chemicals are commonly tracked into the home, where they build up in the carpet, thus placing small children, whose developing bodies are far more vulnerable to toxins, at risk of chronic exposure.

https://longreads.com/2019/07/18/american-green/?utm_source=Longreads+Newsletters&utm_campaign=044139d801-Longreads_Top_5_July_19_2019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd2ad42066-044139d801-241367381&mc_cid=044139d801&mc_eid=4c51e00c88