Save our lawns

Today we burn a half billion gallons of gas a year powering rotary mowers - John Lienhard

Lawns are lovely. I love lawns. Lawns are useful in hundreds of ways, lovely to the eye, beautiful in vistas, and healthy for the air.

I am against the enthusiasts who want to get rid of lawns. Where can children play and clothes dry in the fresh air?

But we must also save our oil resources! Save our carbon emissions!

But caring for lawns need to add to the world's noise and carbon emissions and waste of fossil fuel.

MOST suburban lawns do not need the great enormous waste of power mowers.

"Lawns reflect a 200-year-old Romantic dream of fusing ourselves with nature. Yet that very dream now poses a major threat to the nature it so lovingly celebrates."

Everyone with a pocket-handkerchief of a lawn thinks they need their own several-hundred-dollar noise-making polluting neighbor-annoying petrol-mower. Why?

A gardening magazine had a feature about ride-on mowers. I sent a letter about hand-mowers, which then cost under $80. It was not published.

But Australian lawns need not look like English lawns. Australian lawns can be mostly green flat-weeds with flowers of yellow dandelions and white daisies; a bit too tussocky for cricket pitches and tennis but fine for other amateur sports and play, children, children's play gear, lounging, picnicking and barbecues, and parking extra cars. They can go brown and waterless in summer because they don't get watered.

Modern lawns and lawnmowers are a classic example of unnecessary waste.

The power-mower is an extremely useful invention, and where would we be without it? Even in 1950 it took long lines of crawling Japanese women with scissors to cut the lawns of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. Nineteen- century cricket pitches used to be scythed then rolled with horse-drawn rollers.

But the manual rotary-bladed lawn-mower has never been seen by today's young.

The power mower is a producer of carbon emissions in its production, consumption of fuel, polluting exhausts, and even in its short life and final disposal. Yet despite its cost, it is routinely used to mow almost every suburban Australian lawn regardless of size. Gardening shows and magazines, including Choice, feature every variety, including ride-ons – but never to my knowledge, the manual mower. Particularly about manual lawnmowers made by Australian-owned companies in Australia. People with small or flat lawns could re-think how they could be getting their exercise and reducing pollutions and saving money without power mowers.

Push your manual lawnmower with correct erect posture, to trim your waist and body-build your arms. If you bend, bend from the hips with back straight and tummy in. (The first time you try this exercise, go as carefully as with a new exercise in a gym. Don't try to get rid of your flab in one go; I am not advocating hernias or heart-attacks. Build up to Olympic competition status gradually over months.)

I can mow my front lawn in the time it takes to get a petrol-mower running, using a manual lawnmower 40 years old, made in Australia, a Flymo 33 model and I am 88 years old – too frail to use a power mower. Yet, as an aged female, I can run over my suburban lawn with a modern light Australian-made manual mower in the time it takes to get out a heavy petrol mower and get it going to annoy the neighbors with noise. In time of drought the manual mower even has the advantage that it does not shave the grass as low.

Children can run as they push this lawn-mower. What matter if a few weed-heads bend rather than get cut. There's always scissors for the left-overs – if you want to.

If you have a large or bumpy lawn, you may still run over it with your handy little hand-mower, and borrow a power-mower for the times when it needs the equivalent of spring-cleaning.

Support local light manufacturing before it disappears altogether, by buying an Australian manual mower. Save the time you used to spend on repairs and maintenance of a power-mower.

Economically, would hundreds of jobs and businesses collapse in manufacture of power mowers, sales, maintenance, spare parts, fuel sales, even in advertising? Economically Australia and Australians would save money as well as carbon emissions by producing and buying manual mowers for small lawns, and as a complement machine for larger ones. Even exporting them.

And how much would be saved in water, petrol, fertilizer and time!