[permaculture] easy way each of us can reduce pesticide use by the ton

J Kolenovsky garden at hal-pc.org
Tue Aug 21 23:56:00 EDT 2007


Let's teach people the benefits of having no or a tiny bit of lawn. If they
don't want to, tell them about the impending (year tba) oil crash Armageddon
and that they'll have to or live miserably, if not hungry as the rest of
their friends will grow food on their lands.
------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:14:07 -0700
From: "paul wheaton" <paul at richsoil.com>
Subject: [permaculture] easy way each of us can reduce pesticide use
	by the	ton
To: permaculture <permaculture at lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID:
	<22d4eb790708161014g7933ef57p9d8d6b65a05bc4b5 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I wrote an article in 1994 called "Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and
Lazy."  I was trying to persuade folks to drop the chemical army in one of
the biggest places chemicals are consumed:  Lawns. In 1995 I put it on the
web.  There wasn't much on the web then, and there were loads of search
engines, so it got lots of traffic. Years passed.  When searching for "lawn
care" on google, my article was the first link for years.  Then in the top
three.  Then google changed their algorithms and I moved to page two.

I used to get thousands of visitors.  I would get lots of email from people
saying that they had dropped all chemical use.  At one point I did a bunch
of math and figured that my little article may have eliminated hundreds of
tons of pesticides.  Plus at least that much in chemical fertilizers.  Maybe
a few hundred gas mowers too. When I google "lawn care" now, I see:  1)
pesticides, 2) gas mowers, 3)pesticides, 4) IPM pesticides, 5)
pesticide/organic neutral, 6) pesticides, 7) pesticides, 8) pesticides, 9)
"Natural" (advocating IPM, corn gluten
products and, well, lots of products), 10) pesticides.I'm at number 16.
"Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy" http://www.richsoil.com/lawn
Number 9 is okay.
There's a pretty good one at number 15 called simply "Organic lawn care
guide" http://www.organiclawncaretips.com I have done some research in the
last few weeks on how google ranks stuff.There are lots of factors, but the
most important factor is .... links. Each link from a decent site counts as
one vote.  Each link from an icky site (determined by google to be spam-ish)
is a negative vote.   Each link
from a large, well respected site is considered to be worth, say, 100 votes.
Many links from one site is zero or negative votes. Right now, my page
apparently has about 19 votes (google "link: www.richsoil.com/lawn"). I
guess what I'm asking for is ... votes.  If not for my article, then for
another organic lawn care site that you like that is pretty close to the
top. Everybody can vote.  If you have a web site or blog, voting is already
easy.  Just make a link.  If you don't, just start a thread about lawn care
in your favorite forum and make a link.  The main thing I'm suggesting is
that when folks go looking for how to take care of their lawn, they see an
organic choice.  Hopefully something persuasive.  And we can all help make
that happen.  In turn, this step could have a very large impact on the
amount of pesticides consumed.

Please?
--
J. Kolenovsky, habitat environmentalist  
preservation of habitat / natural resources
Peak Oil and Co2 is changing your life-
style. Can & will you change with it?
http://www.energybulletin.net/.
http://www.theoildrum.com/.  



More information about the permaculture mailing list