On hot days, a friend and I often sneak out of the school and hide through the gaps in the fence to the golf course next to the sports field. There, on the neatly trimmed grass, we would roll up our shirts and trouser legs and lie in the sun until we were weak from heatstroke. By the sixth grade, I had grown to bottled sunshine all year round: the irritating foam of the golden can dyed my skin a dazzling bronze color in a matter of minutes. In college, a confused boy pointed out the streaks, and I added my fake tan to the list of items with lost currency outside of Essex.

Last summer, when my neighbor poured concrete on their lawns and unrolled creepy rolls of artificial turf, I withdrew my aversion to falsehood. They crossed the fence and handed us the unnecessary compost bins, happily announcing that they would have no more garden waste. I was shocked that they replaced the complex biological ecosystem with slow-degrading plastic counterfeit materials. These counterfeit plastics will eventually become matte and rough, and spend hundreds of years in landfills to leach toxic chemicals. Substance, or burned into toxic gas. Artificial turf is not only extruded from fossil fuel polymers, but also composed of at least two plastics, so it cannot be recycled.

Artificial turf is booming: by 2023, the global plastic turf market is expected to exceed 4 billion pounds. Like fake tan, fake grass will only deceive you at a distance. Observing it up close, its vividness, uniformity and occasional creases will reveal it. (Although like deliberate flaws on Persian carpets-only Allah's work can be perfect-more upscale brands tend to have some yellow lines.)

The sturdy, all-weather artificial turf is suitable for sports and can save water. Before the pandemic, I played futsal on the 3G Astroturf stadium every week. Even in heavy rain, we can continue to move forward without disturbing the ground with boots. But rolling, swooping, or sliding shovel will wear the skin like a carpet burn, and once you pick up rubber crumbs from the grass, it will cry angrily for days. I try not to think about saliva, blood, food, scabs, nasal mucus, bird droppings and worse things. They will eventually become entangled with the bottom layer and cultivate a large number of rotting bacteria without soil treatment.

Without soil, insects cannot burrow into the ground to lay eggs, birds cannot pull out worms, and roots cannot dig and support the ground to prevent erosion or absorb and store water. As artificial turf and sports fields replace grass, they increase the risk of flooding. Half of the rainfall flows away from the surface of the artificial turf (with microplastics), while the soil under gardens and parks acts as a sponge, absorbing precipitation in urban residential areas and acting as a buffer against flash floods.

Artificial turf can also cause urban heat island problems. Albedo is a measure of how much solar radiation is reflected and how much is absorbed. The albedo of ice is higher than that of sea water, which means that the melting ice cover will not only cause the sea level to rise, but also cause the atmosphere to heat up further. The albedo of grass is 0.25, which is close to the albedo of the entire earth (0.3); the albedo of artificial turf is 0.08: not much better than asphalt (0.05). On hot days, the temperature of fake turf is twice that of real grass. This is bad news for children and pets, and bad news for a heating planet. A report released today by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out that when some of the largest wildfires on record released carbon into the atmosphere, the temperature of the earth’s surface since 1970 has risen faster than any other 50% in the past two years. A thousand years during the year.

The most common grass species in British parks and lawns is ryegrass: a hardy perennial plant that can sprout quickly. It is a plant that was trimmed to a uniform 8 mm at Wimbledon. It is a staple food for many sheep and cattle, and its pollen is one of the main causes of hay fever. Among the leaves of ryegrass are dandelions, moss, clover, daisies, docks, creeping thistles, and buttercups: the flowers of childhood games, and the food sources of pollinators that provide protection for the global food supply.

Like other vegetation, grass can sequester carbon. About one-third of the earth’s land is grassland, but if grazing or mowing is not continued, grass can only serve as a carbon sink. Ranchers in the Midwestern United States are paid for not weeding because heavy polluters seek to offset some of their emissions. But the warming effects of managed grasslands now offset the cooling effects of unmanaged grasslands. This is particularly disturbing because grasslands are less susceptible to wildfires than forests and may represent a more reliable carbon sink for decades to come.

At the same time, there are 40 million acres of land in the United States made up of lawns. Maintaining them requires 800 million gallons of lawn mower fuel and 3 million tons of (carcinogenic, endocrine disrupting) fertilizers each year, and they consume up to 60% of the fresh water in urban areas. In the United Kingdom, a grassland larger than Wales has disappeared since the 1930s, leaving only 3% of the country’s old grassland unmaintained. One proposed solution is to stop the council from mowing because it is as large as Derbyshire. Another possibility is to renovate the golf course into grass. It is estimated that they cover as much land as the houses of 67 million people, but only 1% of people use them.

In addition to golf courses, the impossibility standards for well-maintained lawns also have to do with Oxford Cambridge University, mansions and middle-class communities. They invite and reject; they are a sign of waste, conspicuous leisure and rejection. Virginia Woolf described being driven out of the Cambridge University lawn in "A Room of One's Own": "This is turf; there are paths. Only researchers and scholars are allowed here; the gravel is me The place.

Fake plastic grass is disgusting, but so is the lawn. The most important thing is snobbery. Like counterfeit clothes or fake tans, artificial turf is despised by those who like "natural" and "real" things, and they can define these terms. They are usually lucky, not only have the resources to maintain a charming garden, but also have a social status that is not affected by messy lawns. For others, there is gravel or artificial turf.

Not many green stubbles that are neatly demarcated, densely planted, monocultured, coated with pesticides, and addicted to water are not much "natural". Maintaining an empty land with no food to grow, no animal feed, and no carbon storage is as ridiculous as installing fake plastic grass.

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