[Southern California Permaculture] TONIGHT the Joy of Lawn Replacement Santa Barbara Thursday October 30th 2014 7-8:30 pm FREE

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

TONIGHT /The Joy of Lawn Replacement Santa Barbara
Thursday October 30th 2014 7-8:30 pm FREE 
Faulkner Gallery, Santa Barbara Public Library

How you can save Santa Barbara and the world by replacing your lawn with natives and/or fruit trees. You can do so much better than grass, and with less water...

Sponsored by SB Water Conservation, Sweetwater collaborative


See inspiring examples; learn how to do much better than grass with less water, time and money.

Lawn is one of Santa Barbara city's biggest water uses. In the case of ornamental lawns, there's especially little to show for all the money, maintenance, water and chemicals sunk into what is basically a landscape fashion from the last millennium.

Get ahead of the curve and learn how to improve--
your and the city's water budget
outdoor living space
water efficiency
water harvesting and infiltration
microclimate improvement
privacy
food production
beauty
ecology
climate effects
biodiversity
See real life examples from audience members, and learn how to apply these principles to clients' and your own yards.
For landscape architects, landscapers, architects, and homeowners.

Background reading

The Problem of Lawns

...Historically, lawns first became popular among the gentry of Western Europe, where they were managed either as pasture or by labor-intensive hand sheering or scything. The modern lawn seems to be a deprecated form of the highly manicured English landscape gardens which became popular among the nobility in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. But wasn't until the 19th century with the invention and mass production of the lawnmower that lawns really took off in North America.
Today, American lawns occupy some 30-40 million acres of land. Lawnmowers to maintain them account for some 5 percent of the nation's air pollution - probably more in urban areas. Each year more than 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled during the refilling of lawn and garden equipment--more than the oil that the Exxon Valdez spilled.
Homeowners spend billions of dollars and typically use 10 times the amount of pesticide and fertilizers per acre on their lawns as farmers do on crops; the majority of these chemicals are wasted due to inappropriate timing and application. These chemicals then runoff and become a major source of water pollution.Last but not least, 30 to 60 percent of urban fresh water is used on lawns. Most of this water is also wasted due to poor timing and application...

American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn

The often-crazed love affair between Americans and their lawns is Ted Steinberg's subject in "American Green." Mr. Steinberg, an environmental historian at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, likens this relationship, and the insane pursuit of lawn perfection, to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and he may very well be right. That would at least explain the behavior of a homeowner who clips her entire front yard with a pair of hand shears, or Richard Widmark's reaction on waking up in the hospital after a severe lawn mower accident in 1990. "The question I asked the doctors was not 'Will I ever act again?' " he later recalled, "but 'Will I ever mow again?' "
How did a plant species ill suited to the United States, and the patrician taste for a rolling expanse of green take root from the shores of the Atlantic to the desiccated terrain of Southern California? The short answer is that it didn't, not until after the Civil War.

Sponsored by City of Santa Barbara Water Conservation Program and the Sweetwater Collaborative
http://oasisdesign.net/education/sb/#lawn