Back in 1997, when H. and I both worked at the coal-burning University of Louisville, we found it relatively easy to adopt a relatively green lifestyle—we walked to work and put five or six thousand miles a year on a shared car, mostly in the summer. We all but eliminated lawn surface in favor of trees and perennials and the climate did the watering.
Ironically, after moving to the far more green-talking Silicon Valley, our personal carbon production soared—two cars, driving to work, chauffeuring the youngster to swim lessons and soccer practice, a dozen flights a year back East for lectures and family visits, plenty of flat grass for the aforementioned junior athlete. Much of the change is beyond our control—geography plus a Skype-resistant profession, not to mention a growing family—but it has bothered us.
So last year we agreed to make some changes. The biggest last year was cutting back on lawn surface and switching to a people-powered mower. Most parents have their attention on many things other than the environmental impact of, say, 40 minutes of running a gasoline mower and power trimmer. According to the EPA, the folks at People Powered Machines and The Straight Dope: running a new six-horsepower, four-stroke push lawn mower emits roughly as much nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbon as six cars, and as much carbon dioxide as 10 cars. The average gas mower produces your body weight in pollutants annually. That’s 140 pounds of pollutants every year per push mower including its share of the vapors from the 17 million gallons of fuel spilled filling them. Power mowers cause more casualties than war: up to eighty or ninety thousand injuries a year, sometimes including several hundred fatalities. The two-stroke engine in your power trimmer or leaf blower is an even worse polluter, and a riding mower is about three times as bad as a push model.
Switching to a people-powered reel mower for a single hour is the equivalent of not driving 250 to 400 miles. It’s much safer for your lungs, eyes, ears, thumbs, toes, and those of your children. It’s pretty good exercise. Believe it or not, it can give you better results as well: the updraft-and-chop of the gas mower is less pleasing and neat than the snip of a reel mower. Reel mowers are cheaper and greener to build. They require much less maintenance, especially at the high end, and pay for themselves in gas savings.
There are some excellent choices out there. I use two kinds, a standard reel mower (mine’s from Husqvarna, but there are many better ones out there for its price, about $120) as well as the superb new design by Fiskars, the Momentum (about $200 street price). The Fiskars model offers several key improvements over standard reel mowers, which you can get for as little as one-third of its cost.
Most folks I know who’ve made the switch to reel mowers started with a cheap one, then tried the Momentum, and never looked back. It has vastly superior self-sharpening blades, doesn’t require any adjustment for years of use, and has an enclosed chain drive. Unlike most reel mowers, it can cut relatively high grass—in my experience, even neglected weeds eight inches high. It throws clippings forward, and has a modest-self-mulching effect. The Fiskars, or one like it, should be in the garage of everyone with a lawn—I really only use the Husqvarna to cut lower, when cross-cutting, or narrower.
Reel mowers aren’t perfect. Standard models don’t like high grass, need to be sharpened once or twice a season, and can be tricky to adjust. To get the best results, you’ll want to plan on cross-cutting (think of it as twice the exercise). Again, all pretty much a non-issue with the Fiskars: the only complaint I’ve heard about it is that some reel-mower fanatics want to cut below its lowest setting, of one inch. In support of propagandizing the reel mower, I sometimes cross cut a small section, taking one pass with the Husqvarna at 1/2 inch after one pass with the Fiskars at one inch: Several neighbors have bought reel mowers after seeing the results. One note—heavy, like the Momentum, is good in a reel mower. Light models bounce on modest bumps in the ground, which leads to cross-cutting.
This year our biggest change was that H. and I agreed to bicycle to work (10 miles each way). There have been some really exciting developments in commuter bicycles recently, especially on the upper end of the price range, with chainless belt drives and internal gear hubs that are great in all kinds of weather and grease-free. More next time about our choices in that respect.
