Discovery News - Greenest Grass Grows on the Mall 10/26
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Sprig.com - Meet an Expert - Green Lawn Guy
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Being Good To Your Yard And To The Planet
In mid-March, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article covering the basics of organic lawn care. SafeLawns and a local chapter of the National Coalition for Pesticide Free Lawns provided much of the material for the piece, which included a number of statistics that every homeowner should keep as a mantra so they can resist the four-color madness of the four-step programs bombarding them from the TV and home improvement.
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SafeLawns Archived Articles
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What We Can Learn From Canada and Connecticut
At the time scarcely anyone in the United States noticed. In May of 1991 the small town of Hudson, Quebec, located just west of Montreal, adopted a law restricting the use of lawn pesticides on all property, privately held or municipally owned, within town limits. The news barely made a ripple a year later when two lawn care companies, Chemlawn and Spraytech, were hit with a fine of three hundred Canadian dollars for spraying pesticides in the town. [read article]

Federal Judge Halts Trials of GM Grass In a decision broadly affecting field trials of genetically engineered crops a federal district judge ruled Feb. 6, 2007 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must halt approval of all new field trials until more rigorous environmental reviews are conducted. Citing potential threats to the environment, Judge Harold Kennedy found in favor of the Center for Food Safety that USDA's past approvals of field trials of herbicide tolerant, genetically engineered bentgrass were illegal. [read more]

Web Site Tracks State Legislation There is a great new web tool created by the group Environmental Commons that provides a central listing of state laws nationwide the impact local control over agriculture.
This is important because the ag and landscape chemical lobby – and their allies in government – have worked for years to limit the rights of towns and counties to control use of their products within local jurisdictions. This applies directly to legislation about lawn chemical use around schools that has been introduced in various jurisdictions around the country.
This "legislation tracker" provides up-to-date information on agricultural-based state legislation that impacts local government and community decision-making.

In response to communities and local governments passing policies to protect sustainable farming systems and environmental health – including the impacts from genetically modified organisms – legislators allied with the biotechnology industry and the Farm Bureau have introduced "preemption" bills prohibiting local decision-making regarding various aspects of farming including the planting of seeds and the passage of health ordinances.

To check on your own state, visit:  http://environmentalcommons.org/gmo-tracker.html