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Not just the bees, all bugs in North America have seen a 75% die off in the last 20 years.
Big shocker that songbirds, which eat those bugs, have also seen a massive die off.
Despite those deniers that still blame housecats, the true culprit is almost certainly pollution and pesticides.
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Despite those deniers that still blame housecats
Both things can be true. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Also we have less pollution and pesticide use than we did in the 60s and 70s. Why is it just becoming a problem now?
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I bet that while we have less general pollution and less dumping trash in the environment kinda things, we have developed much more potent insecticides. And if those insecticides do not degrade within a few weeks they will accumulate in the earth and the water.
Edit: Wikipedia about one type of modern pesticides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid
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To put that in perspective, let's say I drink water contaminated with chemicals for decades. Then, "suddenly", me and half the people i know are sick with cancer and various side effects decades later...
That's how environmental toxins work. They accumulate throughout the water cycle and through the food web, and if its less than acute (short term) in effect it statistically hurts a population, such as lowering reproduction or creating birth defects that lower the fitness. Then, once concentrations pass LD thresholds (lethal dose, meaning LD50 will kill half of the individuals of a species on average, LD10 would kill 1 in 10) you start getting mass die offs
Every water table, all of the soil, every living being is riddled with non-naturally occurring substances. Even though we released more damaging toxins in the 80s, the rate of pollution doesn't matter - the concentration in various parts of the ecosystem is what matters, and that's a slow process
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House cats are making it worse too
Both things are true
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Housecats were actually keeping the bird population healthy for decades by eliminating the weak. Of course now that habitat destruction and toxins made entire populations weak it is a problem.
But removing housecats to solve it is akin to drinking out of paper straws to solve plastic pollution. It helps, but it doesn't do anything substantial.
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I'd say and cars just think about how many bug splatters you see on an average decent trip on the highway now multiply that by the millions of cars on the road daily. It's not the root cause but it certainly didn't help
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Oh certainly can't help. But we know that the pesticides and herbicides have carryon effects to unintended species. Ones that the parent companies that invented them didn't report on because they don't kill those species. Ones that don't necessarily kill them, but lead to things like the white nose fungus running amock in bats, or lead to Colony Collapse Disorder or other infections in bee colonies.
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My car used to look terrible after a drive to the local wilderness area, now I'll be lucky to see one smack my window per trip.
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Same in Europe
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Im gonna dig a pit in my backyard and make a pond. Its gonna be a lot of work but it will all be worth it when i sit out on my patio in the morning sipping coffee to the sound croaking frogs, buzzing bugs, and chirping birds.
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You will want to be careful doing that. It needs to be big enough to have differential temperature so the water moves, therefore aerating it. Without air in the water nothing but mosquitos can live or breed in it. Also, depending on the soil and whether you are above the water line, you may not be able to keep enough water in it between rainfalls.
I'm sure you can look up how to do one properly, I just want to to be aware it's not as simple as dig a hole and fill it with water, because that will do more damage than good.
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“it’s your neighbors fault for having a lawn!”
meanwhile monsanto……
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I find grass so useless. Every boomer parent I've known is just obsessed with it, too. They think that not having a green, green monoculture lawn means you've failed morally or something, and that it's how they show the neighborhood how responsible they are. One GF's dad came over to our random Winconsin lawn of grass and weeds and strawberries and was "I WOULD JUST PULL THIS ALL UP AND START OVER". Uh.... no?
Then I had an across the street neighbor (guy with a bumper sticker "I've never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW") who would mow his lawn every single day with a riding mower. You couldn't even tell what part he had done yet. I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn. I left my backyard just go and it was awesome... after a few years, birds started nesting in the middle of the prairie, and I had flowers growing I'd never seen anywhere else.
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They all seem obsessed with plastic grass now which is even worse.
My garden is mostly weeds. Haven't cut it in 15 years. I pretend to be a trendsetting wild gardener, but really I'm just a lazy bastard.
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Did you sue? I'd have been livid enough to try to sue. IANAL, but at a minimum I would hope that would be trespassing.
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I doubt that I could have demonstrated real harm, or even proved that he did it. I got back into town a week later and my brother, who had been watching the house, said "huh, the guy across the street mowed the front yard".
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By the letter of the law it probably is, but if they hadn't expressly been told not to it won't go anywhere.
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I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn.
This happened to me too.
are so violently obsessed with inch-high fuzzy green rectangles of obedience that they'll sometimes invade your property to make more of them, overriding any of their own pretenses about the sanctity of private property in the process.-
I think he thought he was doing me a favor, but really was just jerking off his lawn obsession. Same guy told me one time "HEY i saw a bear in your driveway and I was gonna come run it off so it didn't mess with your garbage but it left!" I was uh, okay... no, please don't come confront a bear in my driveway. Dude drank light beer all day.
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It seems like people used to suburbs see that as the pinnacle of life but of course that's not true.
In my experience rural areas get it because they are farmers and beekeepers with an understanding that working with nature is the way to go
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I get it as a dog owner with only a courtyard. But he goes on long hikes in the bush and big walks a few times a week. It'd be nice to give the little fella a patch to hang on while I'm at work. And I mean a patch—I hate mowing and any yard work motivation in me is for citrus, chilli, and grapes.
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My yard was very low with ground cover. I actually did mow the front, I just didn't care if it was grass or a bunch of random other plants. I had a dog when my gf lived with me, but at this point, didn't. There were so many rabbits and deer I actually just grew my vegetable garden on the front porch in containers.
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i never understood why american front yards dont have fences. just a barren wasteland of green from the curb to the front windows. fence your garden in!
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Many do, but it really depends on the area.
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That guy was an asshole for doing that to you. I wonder if that might be considered trespassing. Dunno if you can have any civil remedy served to you, or if it's even worth it, but still sucks.
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How tall did the grass get? Did it pollinate, and if so, was it noticable for allergies? Were you still able to walk through it?
I'm wondering what sort of plant you could let grow where you could still walk through easily. Maybe clover?
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Low height ground cover type plants grew naturally there. Clover, alfalfa, strawberries, unknown other plants, with an occasional thistle. Larger plants (whatever they were) would grow on the periphery. When he mowed my lawn it was maybe about a foot high.
We were surrounded by acres of forest where plants grew wild, so if there was a problem with pollen, it wasn't the .4 acres of my front lawn. Myt front lawn, I did mow occasionally. The back I let grow wild and yes, one could still walk through it.
One of the lame things about lawn is that people don't let them go to seed. If grass goes to seed, it not only regenerates itself, but also provides food for birds and squirrels. I was on an acre and a half across the street from this guy, and bounded by 30 feet of trees on ones side and 200 feet of forest on the other.
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do you have kids? they love playing outside. barefoot. and a nice lawn is a paradise for bare feet. not to mention the actual process of mowing (electric mower) is very peaceful and good for my mental health. super therapeutic.
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Is there a nolawns community here?
Weirdly enough, it's small on reddit, and the biggest are on Facebook ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Facebook users typically skew older, so people that are more likely to have established careers, larger spaces and yards to work on. I feel like a lot of Redditors and Lemmings are young and live with parents or in apartments, and are thus less likely to have a yard to care for.
That being said, anyone with a deck or porch can pot a plant or two to try and help local pollinators.
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I started doing clover in my yard a year ago and there are so many bees and butterflies now. My neighbor was like “why are you doing that yo your grass??? The previous owners took so long to make that yard look nice”
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“Why are you destroying your yard with an abundance of bees and butterflies? This isn’t fantasy land we need nothing but grass here to look nice”
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When I moved in the grass was pretty close to the picture in the meme. I liked it at first but then I realized how expensive it was going to be to upkeep and how bad it is for the local ecosystem. I have successfully undone most of that work literally just by planting clover and not mowing down to the bone.
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what do you do about weeds? does the clover stand up to traffic and dogs?
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I dont really do anything about weeds anymore. I let the dandelions do their things. I have some patches of crab grass but it doesnt bother me. The clover doesnt grow very high but when it is full bloom you can tell when it is walked on in high traffic. We have wild turkeys too and they will roost on the clover and it leaves imprints in the ground but it springs back after a day or so.
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We have a chemical free yard that I also plant clover in. The high traffic areas are more clover than grass, which makes me think it holds up better. The clover also turns green earlier in the spring and stays green longer of we're having a dry spell in the summer. Clover helps keep the grass happy and the pair seem to do a decent job keeping dandelions down, but we have them in our yard too. They don't bother me at all personally and our kids like them. Thistles are not that common in our yard, but when they pop up I'll spot treat them since they're painful to walk on.
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I want to make a short film / animation where aliens are approaching earth, the only thing we know about the aliens is that they plan to destroy all life and replace it with their own twisted creation. A few minutes of typical story follows, heroes assemble, go to fight, etc. The heroes lose and the ending scene shows that the aliens have succeeded and replaced all the diverse life on Earth with a perfectly manicured lawn that covers the entire planet. A biological wasteland.
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Commence high pitched screeching
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So is this like a whole movie with the premise of "the cage" from star trek?
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I will admit there is something very pleasing about looking at a well trimmed yard. That said, the percent of the earth's land surface covered by manicured lawns is tiny. The ag industry would love for you to believe your lawn is the problem. It isn't. The problem is the monoculture farm land. Acres of fields with only one type of crop. And probably other things like pollution and such. But industries love to play the "you are the problem" card to divert from themsleves.
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Yes, but also: Every little bit of help, well... helps.
Don't let those industries playing the blame game discourage you from dedicating a part of your yard to a bunch of flowers, because then the problem would get ever so slightly worse.
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Yeah but you could easily have a patch of lush green grass the size of this one in your lawn and also some nice flower beds, bushes, trees and whatever else. Most people want some of that, not just a plain garden with no features. The problem isn't peoples' yards, it's pesticides.
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This is the correct answer, this shit is „your carbon footprint“ all over again
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"Walk to work, ignore corporate consumption, and use only the highest quality refined petroleum products, and go easy on the avocados."
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This + a massive over usage of pesticides
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Could be worse
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I live in the desert (Utah). My yard will look like this soon. It's too expensive to water our lawn so we're going with a xeriscape.
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Looks like it would make a decent buffer in case of wildfire too
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Looks like an example of xeriscaping, or gardening with a minimal need for irrigation. Not the best I've seen, but at least it's water-conserving.
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Is the native landscape a rock garden? If you live in the Mojave: Go nuts, but that black rock is going to bake your house and drive up your carbon dioxide usage. Plants breathe just like animals do and that increases humidity locally, and in dry climates that can be a significant cooling effect. Essentially cheap evaporative cooling.
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I feel like this can still be a native lawn depending on which biome it's in. Seems more desert like than a prairie/forest type "native lawn" you might traditionally think of.
But yeah native can look different depending on location so I might be ok with this
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Remember it's not just about saving honey bees! Honey bees are domesticated, which means that humans will make sure that they have food and shelter and appropriate medicine and care throughout the year to ensure they make honey.
Saving "the bees" moreso means saving wild, native, often times solitary bees like bumblebees or carpenter bees that don't produce honey but that also aren't domesticated - they have no safety net that humans give them.
Those bees along with all other pollinators like bats, birds, and other insects are the ones at risk!
Still, we should all consider growing native yards to return habitat back to these dying species!
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The EU has uncultivated land subsidies. To avoid overproduction of food and overexploitation of the land, the EU pays farmers to keep their land uncultivated. Some countries, like mine, force farmers to uncultivate their land once every N years, and, of course, they get subsidies for this.
In my region, farmers will plant flowers and let weed grow, since they're not putting any pesticide. They let the flowers and weeds die and rot at the end of the season. This way, they dont have to put as much fertilizer the next year. I've always seen these uncultivated fields full of bees and other pollinators in summer.
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That happens in the US too. It’s why there’s New York addresses that own huge “fields” of land that’s usually a wetland. The marginal land is protected and they get a corn subsidy from the government to not farm the land.
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I stopped cutting my grass and now I have rats :(
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I'm not sure where you live but if you can find some native seeds from your area, plant those! It's the perfect time in many northern-hemisphere places for overwintering things like wildflower, clover seeds and more! Fancy lawn grasses are bogus and weak
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Bold to assume we own yards
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Your yard in your summer residence then. Jeez
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I have lived at my current property for nearly 7 years now, and while I cut the main area up against the house once a week, I typically let the rest grow out for a month. Never used sprays other than flea and tick for my dog's yard, and never even pulled weeds.
Still, it's almost all completely homogenous grass. Not sure what species, but it doesn't grow very high. 3-5 inches. No wildflowers have encroached, no other grasses except clover, not even weeds other than dandelion. The only other thing that grows anywhere is some English ivy that's pissing me off all over the house. Every time I pull some out and dig up the root, I find more a few days later.
Still, MUCH higher insect, pollinator, and other wildlife activity vs my previous residence. It's been nice seeing fireflies again, even if it's still nowhere near what it was when I was a kid.
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Our yard is about 3" of top soil on top of basically solid clay. When we moved in a little over a decade ago I tried taking on the dandelions, but I quickly pivoted to planting clover. Now we have tons of the stuff, fewer dandelions despite no chemicals (not that I really mind them anymore), and our yard smells fantastic in mid to late spring when all the clover is in full bloom. Tons and tons of bees, crickets, etc. We re-did a flower bed and intentionally planted swamp milk weed and red crocosmia in it. They look fantastic together and the bees absolutely love it, not to mention the butterflies.
But yeah. About English ivy. Been fighting that stuff for years...
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Switch it for a proper garden.
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I prefer a garden full of grown weeds than a clean grass cutted one. If a weed can grow and prosper without me watering it once a day, I think they deserve the right to be there more than anything my father ever planted on his yard that would die without getting water for 3 days or too much rain water.
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Are you actually growing native plants or do you just not care that you’re growing a massive amount of invasive on what we would call marginal lands?
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uhhhh most weeds provide almost zero food for pollinators. literally just as bad as grass.
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We keep the front mowed for the HOA.
The backyard can grow until we worry about snakes affecting our pups.
We have a front garden that gets no care outside HOA recommendations. It came with the house.
Can't wait until I can OWN a house, but the market (with all the influences upon it) isn't there.
I'm saving, and considering moving to another state, if that helps all the pedantic monsters our there.
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Just quit watering the grass except for in small walkways and start a food forest.
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I only mow at the last possible second to not get a fine, has been working really well for my yard. I have seen flowers, corn, and a beautiful assortment of creepers and clovers start taking over the sterile grass. My neighbors neighbor seems to get butthurt. They take care of my direct neighbors yard whom I share a chain link fence with, she loves my vines with the flowers and strange gourds that wind around the fence. Neither of us planted it but the people who tend her yard destroy it 😭if we just let everything happen naturally some very cool things start to crop up. I've seen some absolutely massive grasshoppers and a bunch of praying mantis as well. My bee hotel never attracts anything but I've seen plenty of bees about which makes me happy.
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Reading all the comments and everyone is like not my yard , its full of flowers but for some reason I don't see any bees or butterfly 🤷♂️
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That's because it's not the only reason. Another big one is pesticides.
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Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !permaculture@lemm.ee
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Good bot!
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great bot
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Mine is an acre of natural meadow.
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if I didn't take care of my lawn, I'd have invasive Bermuda grass getting into everything and it would kill all the other plants. I've also looked into overseeding with mini clover but I've read that it doesn't tolerate traffic well. open to any suggestions as I'm fighting a losing battle with fescue and the damn Bermuda.
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A few options. Cover the entire lawn for an extended period of time with a bunch of tarps or cardboard so no sunlight reaches the grass. Kill the entire thing. Start over with native seeds. Or roto till the entire thing
For me personally Bermuda grass never stood a chance against all the clover, dandelions, cheeseweed, purslane, tall flatsedge, and broadleaf plantain that make up a lot of what used to be the lawn. Some of those are invasive technically but at least rabbits come to eat the dandelions and plantains
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It looked like that for exactly one summer. Not it's mixed again. And the lower half of the property is literal wilderness anyway. A mother deer with two fawns likes it a lot. The other plots are also completely mixed, and so large that we just have sheep on there to avoid mowing. Bonus: They're tame, fluffy, cuddly and warm.
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Few symptoms of old fashioned boomer-standard death cult mentality are as insidious and understated as the obsession with inch-high fuzzy green obedience rectangles and their hatred of viable ecosystems.
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Individual yards are such a wasteful and environmentally destructive concept
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I realize I am not most people but I have 1.5 acres I mow, 3 that are farmed and 4 that are left wild.
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I'm doing my bit for the bees and butterflies, my grass is at least a foot tall.
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I think you mean it is at least two lemmings tall ;)
Edit: Unless, of course, you are talking about penguin feet. See what I mean? You're being ambiguous.
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Is this the Windows 98 background?
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Windows XP was the grassy hill. Windows 98 was just a random shot of some clouds.
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Lol it’s been so long I can’t remember.
What was the Windows 95 background?
Was it that flying pixelated window with the pixelated acid trails?
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i dont have a yard
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See? You're a part of the problem.
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I have an abundance of bees and other insects, and I mow my lawn. But I have gardens.
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Weak
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In those moments I'm as high as fuck and imagine I could own a home, I'd just desert-ify the yard. It's going that way anyway, let's beat the rush. Just sand and rocks and some desert plants. Like us, most yards will die in the water wars.
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…..Because of insecticides from agriculture.
It has literally nothing to do with people mowing their lawns.
If you got rid of all of the lawns you’d still see mass extinction of honey bees.
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No.
Honey bees are dying because of parasites and pests, pathogens, poor nutrition, and sublethal exposure to pesticides.
It's not just one thing. Most of those things on their own won't even kill them. For example, Varroa mites will kill an already weakened hive, but not a healthy one.
Lawns absolutely contribute to poor nutrition, due to habitat loss. Same with all the mowed grass we have everywhere in suburbia. Monocropped agriculture does as well, because bees do best with a variety of flowers.
I've let the back part of my property grow wild the past couple years, and it's currently filled with a ton of goldenrod, chicory, and a bunch of other random flowers. You would not beleive the number of honeybees I've seen back there at once, or how loud the buzz was.
Similarly, there's a reason I see a ton of fireflys in my yard, but I see almost none in my neighbors yards. It's because they're well- manicured green wastelands
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Sure but why add to the problem? Why not carve out your own little slice and help the situation? Probably not going to hurt anything if you stop using pesticides and feed the bees where you can.
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It’s not adding to the problem. As long as farmers are using fuck tons of pesticides and insecticides every day it doesn’t matter what you do to your lawn.
Either way insects are going to die.
You guys love slinging shit but you have no clue where to sling it.
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This just isn't accurate. Your lawn isn't responsible for the death of bees. You also don't need pesticides for a healthy nice looking lawn.
