Fremantle Environmental Resource Network

Lawns are not useless : they produce lawn clippings - a great source of compost materials. Apart from that, they are worse than useless
I don't believe this is solely the fault of beaurocrats and developers. Look at the average garden in p-earth : little if any food producing plants, not that many natives, little organic matter in soils, heaps of lawn - hardly the fault of govt or developers.
How many people pay directly through rubbish dump fees or indirectly thru council rates and gardening contractors charges to get rid of compostable resources? How many of these people then buy (from corporate role models such as Bunnings) for compost, water soluble fertilisers, mulch, chemicals and seedlings, and of course buy their food from our magnaminous supermarkets? ANSWER : Most.
From a bio-regional economic point of view this is economic irrationalism.

Solutions :

As u say we have huge amounts of lawn on private property and government (local, sate, federal) land and we can convert much of that to productive land. Anyone who wants a copy of the paper I wrote on using verges to both re-establish native vegetation and produce cost-effective healthy food from under-utilised resources such as land, compostables, people and grey water can email me at haywoodfarm@yahoo.com

Where you criticise urban planners and developers, the solutions will only come with initiative and demand from community members. This would require a huge change in human conciousness as areas such as verges are regarded as sacred cows upon which anything other than weeds such as lawn are akin to a religous/cultural travesty. In our society we deal with things such as waste management, composting, grey water, energy generation at 2 levels, both of which are inefficient. Firstly, at the household level we see local govt selling a couple of dollars of ugly looking plastic to their ratepayers at supposedly bargain discount prices for compost bins and worm farms. However, most householders in today's modern society have neither the time, knowledge or commitment to use them properly. At the other end of the scale, we have municipal and combined municipal models with noisy greenhouse gas producing trucks creating profits for often overseas shareholders by un-necessarily trucking compostables and recyclables around the metropolitan area. In between these 2 scales of operation (as the Bhuddists would say, the middle path) is the local precinct or community level. Tackling these issues at this level has many advantages and I have done designs that do so based on the area surrounded by 4 streets (the block) - where I am living this is 30 properties. This level keeps ownership of the problem at the local level where it belongs whilst not unrealistically relying on the individual property occupant. It also keeps the benefits in the community as well, along with the many associated economic, social and environmental benefits. Consider solar energy - the govts provide rebates for individual properties (not tenants of rentals) to put in solar voltaic systems. Consider how much more viable it is to have a system that provides power to 30 houses - going beyond that brings in the well documented problems of large scale centralised generation and distribution systems. The volume of compostables generated at this level is far more viable for composting than at the individual property level and doesn't need noisy polluting trucks at all. Grey water : again we have 2 levels of operation : individual property and municipal. In the traditional rectangular block (comprising say 30 houses) consider the efficiencies with 1 collection pipe running down the back fences, 1 small scale treatment plant and 1 dispersal pipe down the back fences. This means no crossing footpaths and roads with infrastructure and no pumping it around the metro area. This scale of thinking needs to be incorporated into our urban planning and property developments, whether in new developments or retrofitting existing ones.

Climate change and land degradation are not the major challenges in our society(s) - they are impacts of the components that make up the 3rd level of our challenge to survive on the planet. The over-riding challenge is collective human conciousness or awareness, as this determines our individual and collective actions, which determine the second level of our challenge : total ecological footprint (individual, regional, national, global). Things such as energy consumption, water use, land use, etc are components of footprint. Sustainability is a form of conciousness as it means simultaneous and equal consideration of economic, social and environmental factors in all of our thinking, decision making and actions. All levels of our global society are still a long way from achieving that awareness.

Our society tends to look as all of its components separately - just as wee need to integrate the components of sustainability (livability), so do we need to integrate the components of our society. As a practical example, I have designed a composting process that deals with compostable resources, uses under-utilised land, accomodates use of grey water, utilises direct solar energy, produces warm water (consider energy savings) as a by product, and directly feeds solid and liquid compost into organic food production. I have integrated this process into a sustainable property development mode. I believe it can be a basis for future sustainable living and will freely share this info with anyone interested in a similar way that freeware applies to the computer industry.

You can view a dry, tongue in cheek movie version of the infrastructure concept for passive heating and cooling communities (rather than individual buildings) in "The silent blue and green yarn" (I am a member of WA Bush Poets and Yarn Spinners) at my You Tube site http://www.youtube.com/haywoodfarm or by requesting info via haywoodfarm@yahoo.com

Consider : when I was a Grade A biodynamic farmer, I had to work my butt off to get materials for making compost - in the city, people pay to get rid of those resources,
Community gardens are a great step forward - to be sustainable, our society needs to become a community garden.

Also, the segmentation of society into urban and rural is a mis-perception : 200 years ago, Australia was all country, and underneath the constructed settlements it still is. Why do we expect rural land owners to maintain a level of landcare that we will not commit to in our settlements? especially when most consumers will not pay a price at the supermarket that enables sustainable land management.