We Need Fewer Lawns

Many of us first came to Florida on vacation. We were attracted to the natural beauty, to the climate, to the beaches. I first arrived at Southwest Florida International Airport in April 1996, having left the still-cold North for one of our warm Florida spring evenings. As I drove the rental car away from the old terminal, I saw two sandhill cranes feeding along the edge of the wetlands. I remember thinking, "I could live here."

My wife and I bought our first house on a large lot with a lawn planted from corner to corner. All of the native plants—saw palmetto and slash pine, dahoon holly and tick seed—had been bulldozed prior to building the house to make way for large volumes of fill dirt used to raise the elevation of the lot. After our house was built, sod was rolled across the lot, leaving us to plant whatever we preferred. In our neighborhood, there are mostly exotic trees and shrubs. It seems sad to me that once we own a piece of this landscape, we feel the need to change it, to plant lawns and trees just like the ones we had up North. The exotic plants provide little habitat for our native animals. The unnatural lawns aggravate the changes in water flow across the landscape and wash off the excess nutrients and pesticides into our already stressed estuaries.

Grass is the most resource- and energy-intensive crop we grow, requiring water and small amounts of fertilizer. One sure way to kill a lawn is to give it too many nutrients, resulting in an explosion of weeds. The same is true of an estuary. If too many nutrients wash off our lawns, the excess nitrogen and phosphorus stimulate the growth of algae, which fills the water, shades out the sea grasses, washes up in clumps of green slime on the beaches and drives away tourists. Southwest Florida could handle more people, but it needs fewer lawns.

Control Our Water Better

Cypress trees are found where there is standing water through much of the year; slash pines are found where there is not. Water is the single most important environmental resource affecting where non-human species live on our landscape. Small changes in elevation result in longer or shorter periods of standing water, determining which species of plants and animals will survive in a given place.

Historically, much of our landscape filled with water during the rainy season and the water slowly flowed off, providing a moderate amount of freshwater to our estuaries throughout most of the year. The most significant changes we made to this landscape were to first dig ditches to drain the "wasted" swampland, and then to add more and more impervious surfaces (rooftops and roadways). This causes water to rapidly flow off the land during the rainy season, resulting in estuaries with excessively diluted seawater because of the unnaturally large volume of freshwater.

During the dry season, there is no freshwater left in those drained wetlands to recharge our aquifers and continue to feed the estuaries. Both we and the estuaries are starved of fresh water. The estuarine plants and animals, including the snook, spotted seatrout and redfish, are adapted to moderate levels of salinity, but they receive a one-two punch of too much salt in the dry season and too little salt in the rainy season. If we are willing to restore native wetlands, accept more water in our "back yards" and conserve water use, we can return to more natural flows of water and a healthier estuary, even with more people on the land.

Per capita, every day, we use about the same amount of water as five adult elephants. Human per capita water use is determined by dividing the total water used in the region by our population. None of us individually uses that much, but we all share in the regional commercial and irrigation needs. A large portion of that water irrigates golf courses. Individually, we may not be able to change regional water use, but can we reduce our individual water consumption? Do we really need a lawn? Do we really need to wash our car every week?

Consider Other Space and Energy Options

Few of us want urban sprawl, yet the ideal home for many of us is a large house on a large lot, the perfect recipe for urban sprawl. I would prefer to live on five or 10 isolated acres. Yet, if all of us needed five-acre lots, it would take almost four times the area of Lee and Collier counties to support our current population of 850,000 people. If we choose to live in smaller homes, on smaller lots, or even in multiple-resident condominium complexes or apartment buildings, we can fit more people in Southwest Florida. We have to distinguish what we need from what we want.

Ecologists determine maximum sustainable population using the concept "carrying capacity." The carrying capacity for a given species is determined by dividing the available resources by the needs of each individual. There are two reasons why it is difficult to apply this ecological concept to people. Our technology often allows us to expand available resources. When there’s not enough land, we build up. When we’re low on other resources, we recycle them or develop an alternative. The larger problem involves our inability to distinguish between needs and wants. We usually want more than we need, and that lowers the carrying capacity of a given place.

Arguably, we have exceeded our carrying capacity in terms of cars, road space and reasonable travel time. Is this because we have too few roads or because most of us feel we need the freedom of our own vehicles? It is so much easier to drive to the grocery store than to walk or bike there. I resist car-pooling because of the inconvenience of fitting my schedule to that of my co-workers or neighbors. Although it would be healthier to walk or bike, cheaper to take mass transit and maybe more interesting to carpool, each of us "needs" our own car, truck or SUV for every trip.

We don’t have multiple options for mass transit in Southwest Florida. People don’t use them because they’re not readily available. But, of course, we don’t offer options for mass transit, because people don’t use them. Yet, each time we don’t use a car, we reduce the total traffic load on our roads, thereby saving money and minimizing the use of fossil fuels, which helps reduce both pollution and our trade deficit. Maybe we don’t need more roads, just more people who don’t need cars.

Go for Needs—Not All Our Wants

It is easy to blame the challenges created by our rapid growth on our elected officials or to blame those responsible for planning infrastructure for not meeting our growth demands. Many of us feel the solution is to restrict growth, prevent more people from moving here. Often, if we were empowered to do so, we would require people to leave—probably all of those people who arrived since the day after we did. This is both impossible and ultimately selfish. Inevitably, as population density increases, our individual right to "do what we want when we want" diminishes. We cannot do whatever we want in our own back yards when our neighbors are right next door.

The community of Southwest Florida will continue to grow until the quality of life here drives as many people away as it attracts. Land, water or insurance will become too expensive. Traffic or water pollution will become unacceptable. Our ecosystems or climate will degrade to the point where people are no longer attracted to our landscape. The only alternative is to work together to plan for a future that gives all of us what we need, but maybe not all of what we think we want. This has to be done in a way that recognizes our connection to this landscape and our dependence on the ecosystems around us.