The Sobering Truth

Have you seen the movie An Inconvenient Truth ? I finished watching it about seven hours ago, at about 9 p.m., and I haven't slept for a moment since. If you did the math, that makes it 4 a.m., but in my mind it's high noon.

Most people on the street these days are asking, "Have you seen Al Gore's movie?" Having seen the movie, I now feel that question is unfortunate. Calling Inconvenient Truth "Al Gore's movie" immediately politicizes the question. Forever a polarizing figure in American politics, Gore is, of course, a Democrat. That means all the chest-thumping Republicans in the United States immediately MUST denounce Inconvenient Truth as, well, uncomfortable rhetoric. It's a Democrat's movie, right? To a Republican, it must be full of Bush bashing hyperbole.

If the movie had a flaw, it's probably due to the fact that reminders of Gore's loss of the 2000 election in the Supreme Court were littered throughout the film. During his lectures on global warming upon which the movie is based, Gore does make a few snide comments about "This Administration," which drew sneers from the Bush bashers in the audience.

For Democrats, those were enjoyable moments that added some levity to a film that otherwise punches you in the gut. For Republicans, though, Gore's anti-Bush quips make it easy to dismiss the overriding, unassailable message of the film: WE ARE IN BIG TROUBLE. All of us. Democrats. Republicans. Americans. Chinese. Africans. Everyone.

If we don't change our greenhouse gas emissions -- in the way we drive our cars, heat our homes, power our factories and, yes, care for our lawns and gardens -- millions of people will likely perish. Not in hundreds of years, but in as few as 20 to 50 years. I've never seen a TV show or movie, or read another article, that lays out the danger more clearly than Inconvenient Truth .

I came home angry on many levels. I'm mad at our current president for ignoring and probably even misleading people about global warming. I'm mad at Gore for not making this case better and sooner so that the 2000 election wasn't even close. I'm mad at John Kerry for not even making the issue of global warming a talking point in the 2004 election.

I'm neither Republican or Democrat in my mind when I go to vote. A registered Independent, I've always been for Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins here in Maine, but I've always been sad that Maine Democrat George Mitchell never made a serious run for the presidency.

The point is that -- with the issue of global warming -- your politics shouldn't even matter. Even if a tenth of what Inconvenient Truth portrays is true, how can anyone sit back and stand for it? Weather related tragedies will happen again and again and again and some people will still denounce the reality of global warming, or worse still, they'll accept the reality and not change their behavior.

As adult gardeners, we know global warming is true. How can we not? Our lilacs bloom, on average, a week earlier than they did when we were children. Our insect infestations start sooner and bird migrations happen later.

Do you know that the largest winter industry in Maine 100 years ago was ice harvesting on our lakes and rivers that froze to a depth of several feet? Many winters now, these same lakes and rivers barely freeze.

Most everyone, in fact, does accept that the earth is getting warmer. The debate centers around humans' role in that process. The naysayers would have us believe the warming trend is part of a natural global cycle. Inconvenient Truth spells it out for us, however. The intensity of the warming in just the past 20 years is anything but natural. The explosion of human population -- and our requisite demands on the planet's resources -- make it impossible to conclude that humans don't have an impact. We're killing the planet and ultimately ourselves; we're robbing the futures of our children and grandchildren.

"How can we let this happen?" I wondered aloud to my wife in the parking lot after the movie. I didn't expect an answer after my question hung in the warm summer air for a while.

"Religion . . . ," she said. "Our religion makes us want to believe that we're going to go to heaven anyway, so what happens here on earth isn't really our problem."

It was a quiet ride home.

My first inclination after I see a thought-provoking movie these days is to jump on the Internet and learn more about the subject. After Walk the Line , I devoured everything I could learn about Johnny Cash. After Capote , I set out to re-read In Cold Blood and google everything about Truman Capote. Last night I bolted through the door of my house and dashed for my laptop to read scientific reviews of Inconvenient Truth . In article after article, the movie's conclusion was validated. National Geographic , for example, checked in with Eric Steig, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who saw Inconvenient Truth at a preview screening.

"I was looking for errors," he said. "But nothing much struck me as overblown or wrong."
The magazine cited a study published in Nature in 2004 predicted that climate change could drive more than a million species toward extinction by 2050.

"Climate change now represents at least as great a threat to the number of species surviving on Earth as habitat destruction and modification," said the lead author of that study, Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

With a passion that was lacking in his 2000 election campaign, Al Gore concluded his sobering movie with a profoundly upbeat and empowering message: "We have the tools at hand to fix the problem!" We can do it, he says, in our lifetimes. All we have to do is act, and act NOW. The movie ended with a list of action items, simple things we can all do to make a difference in global warming. We've landed on the moon, he said, and we've wiped certain diseases off the planet. We've made progress on healing the ozone layer, and we can fend off global warming, too.

I'd like to conclude for now, I guess, by re-issuing my gardeners' call to arms that I first published a few months ago. In the heat of the summer, it's information worth reviewing. I'm gratified to know that more than 20 other publications or Internet sites have picked up this article. In some small way, it makes me feel like People, Places & Plants magazine is helping:

With the price of gasoline and natural gas on the rise, most are looking for ways to cut their costs and save energy. If you have a lawn or garden, you may not realize just how much fossil fuels you are using. By knowing where these are used, you can look for ways to reduce consumption. This will reduce your costs, and help the environment.

Each year, a family with a one-third acre lawn will on average:

Consume five gallons of gas for mowing and trimming;

Apply the equivalent of seven gallons for fertilizing;

Burn up to five gallons for watering;

Consume an additional gallon for cleanup.

That's 18 gallons of fuel per household. With 120 million U.S. households, that's the equivalent of almost 2.2 billion gallons of fuel used just for lawn care each year. This does not count other landscaping activities. So just how do we use so much?

Yale University has estimated that the United States uses more than 600 million gallons of gas to mow and trim lawns each year -- about two gallons of gas for every man, woman and child, or five gallons per household. Mowers also consume engine oil in their crankcases, and two-stroke mowers consume oil in their fuel.

In addition to fuel consumption, mowers and outdoor power equipment contribute heavily to air pollution. Operating a typical (4 HP) gasoline-powered lawnmower for one hour produces as much smog-forming hydrocarbons as driving an average car between 100 and 200 miles under average conditions. Gasoline-powered string trimmers are actually more polluting than many lawn mowers. One estimate (mindfully.org) states that "the 20,000,000 small engines sold in the U.S. each year contribute about one tenth of the total U.S. mobile source hydrocarbon emissions, and are the largest single contributor to these non-road emissions." These include power blowers, rakes, and brooms.

Creating synthetic nitrogen for fertilizers requires the heating of natural gas to combine atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. The amount of natural gas required to make approximately 200 bags of lawn fertilizer would heat your home for a year. Each 40-pound bag contains the fossil-fuel equivalent of approximately 2.5 gallons of gasoline. Transporting these bags of fertilizer from the factory and to your home requires additional fuel.

According to a California study, in many areas -- especially in the West, where water must be moved great distances from reservoirs -- the amount of fuel needed to pump the water is at least equal to the fuel used in mowing.

So what can you do? Here are ten tips to have a "fuel-efficient" landscape.

USE an electric or non-powered push mower. An electric mower maintaining one-third of an acre for a season consumes only $3 of electricity on average. Electric mowers are 75 percent quieter than gas mowers. Push mowers, of course, consume no fuel and make little noise.

SIMILARLY, use traditional hand rakes and brooms instead of power ones and blowers to save fuel, and at the same time reduce air and noise pollution. If you employ a landscape maintenance firm, encourage their use of these too. Minimize the need for string trimmers. Mulch along walks and around structures such as lamp posts to avoid having to trim weeds in these areas.

IF YOU HAVE an old mower, consider replacing it. Newer small engines run much cleaner. EPA emission standards for such engines, to be in effect by 2007, are expected to reduce ground-level ozone emissions by 70 percent or 350,000 tons each year.

REDUCE the area mowed through use of groundcovers. This is especially true in areas with water shortages. Allow parts of large areas to grow, only mowing once or twice a season, creating a natural meadow. You can still mow areas near drives and homes to maintain the more formal manicured effects in such highly visible and high traffic areas.

SAVE rainwater and gray water. Gray water is that water from home use, except from toilets, and can make up from 50 to 80 percent of home waste water. It comes from sinks, showers, and laundry and can be used for irrigating landscapes and lawns.

WATER deeply once per week on average, rather than frequently. Drip irrigation and mulches also conserve water. Using less water saves on energy use, whether you're buying water that has to be pumped, or are paying an electric bill to pump your own.

USE natural, organic fertilizers not derived from fossil fuels.

RECYCLE grass clippings, mow higher and mix 5 percent clover into your lawn seed. All these help recycle nutrients back into the soil. Mulching-type mowers allow you to leave grass clippings on the lawn. If you don't have such a mower, and remove the clippings, add them to compost or use them to mulch gardens.

COMPOST all yard wastes, except for diseased plants and plant parts. They can go into compost piles, saving gasoline hauling such to landfills and recycle centers. If your landscape generates many twigs and other brush, consider buying or renting a home-size brush chipper.

FINALLY, consider landscaping to reduce up to 25 percent of home energy consumption. Foundation plantings can lessen heat loss from buildings. Evergreen windbreaks can reduce heating costs in winter in windy areas. Deciduous shade trees can reduce energy needs for cooling in summer. As Al Gore's movie stated at the end: "Plant trees, plant lots of trees."

I'll add one more pointer . . . go see An Inconvenient Truth , then let me know what you think...

-Paul Tukey: July 30, 2006.