Why Houses of Worship Should Practice Organic Lawn Care

Today, just in time for Earth Day, an inspiring guest post from Katherine Abbott, whose faith-based environmental work with her Catholic community and interfaith groups in New Jersey is a model of thoughtful, spiritual eco-activism. Read on for Kathy's persuasive insights, and you'll be moved to make the land on which you worship into fertile ground indeed.

Organic Lawn Care: What God Intended for Houses of Worship
By Katherine Abbott

That houses of worship should use organic lawn care should be a foregone conclusion. But it is not for most people. Why? Because herbicides and insecticides, commonly grouped together under one term—pesticides, are largely invisible, are legal, and have no immediate adverse human health effects. Yet there is much unadvertised scientific evidence that these poisons bioaccumulate and harm people, especially children, in the long run.

I have great hope that people of faith, who are accustomed to learning about the powerful, invisible presence of the spiritual world, will come to understand that the hard-to-see presence of pesticides on their outdoor spaces work contrary to our physical health and the health of the interconnected life systems God made.

The main thing to know is that pesticides disrupt the cycles of renewal that are part of God’s elegant, waste-free design for nature. In an organic lawn, the soil is alive. The dirt is teeming with micro-organisms (again, the invisible) and insects such as worms, beetles and centipedes, that make the soil fertile for plant life. Micro-organisms and soil-dwelling insects eat organic matter, such as mulched up leaves, or organic fertilizer pellets, and then they excrete nitrogen and other nutrients that the grass needs to grow.

What conventional weed killers and insecticides do, besides killing their target weeds and problem insects such as grubs, is kill or reduce the organisms in the soil. Those benevolent organisms don’t get a chance to make their natural fertilizer, and so the natural cycle is broken. In its place, marketers have substituted a cycle of synthetics. As long as someone buys and applies synthetic fertilizer, the grass still grows, but the lawn is no longer non-toxic or self-renewing.

The pesticide/synthetic fertilizer cycle spreads waste and toxins near and far from our individual lawns:

1. Synthetic fertilizer is made from petroleum, so it has a large carbon and pollution footprint.

2. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides tend to run off into storm water and contaminate the local drinking water. Just read your local water company’s water quality report. “Pesticides” and “Nutrients,” are two of the contaminant categories they have to check for, though not all pesticides are tested for.

As for direct effects on people, scientific studies have linked long-term, low-dose exposures of pesticides to childhood cancers, adult cancers, fertility dysfunction, brain growth abnormalities and learning disabilities. Herbicides, such as 2-4 D, the chemical most commonly found in Weed and Feed, commonly work by interrupting hormonal cycles in weeds. Our hormones have similarities to hormones in plants. Many herbicides act as estrogen mimics. Insecticides, the first of which were developed from wartime nerve gas products, generally attack the nervous system of insects. For technical studies of pesticides and health, a good place to begin is www.beyondpesticides.org

Precise causality of health effects of pesticides is always hard to prove without a doubt, because pesticide body burden accumulates in small doses over months and years. To illustrate, some pesticides are labeled “carcinogenic” in Europe but only “probable” carcinogens in the U.S. Only absolute proof gets a product taken off the market. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, working lower on the food chain, has had an easier time proving that pesticide pollution in waterways causes fish and amphibian malformation or infertility than the Environmental Protection Agency has had in proving that pesticides hurt humans.

Since we know that God made our bodies from the biblical “clay” of the earth--the same carbon, water and other matter of the biosphere--red flags should go up when we encounter evidence that pesticides unnecessarily poison any of life’s systems. Though most of us are not using lab equipment to scrutinize how synthetic pesticides or fertilizers affect human cell structure or blood chemistry, we can certainly realize that God set our normally imperceptible body workings in delicate, mysterious balance.

Organic lawn care is available to us as a way to tap into God’s clean, complex, and practically invisible presence in the sustenance of grass and people. What house of worship would knowingly accept anything as overly simplistic and full of collateral damage to us creatures and creation as lawn pesticides?

Katherine Abbott is a mother and environmental activist. She was one of the founders of the NJ Catholic Coalition for Environmental Justice (NJCCEJ) and chaired its 2003 and 2005 NJCCEJ statewide interfaith conferences on the environment. She also served for six years on the Board of GreenFaith. Currently she is Vice Chair of the Chatham Township Environmental Commission, Chair of the Environmental Stewardship Committee at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Chatham, and a member of the NJDEP Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Last year she renovated her home with “green” building features.