on mowing lawns and climate catastrophe

A few months after moving into our current home, we found ourselves needing to buy our own lawnmower for the first time. We learned that electric lawnmowers were a thing and figured that taking that route might be the most responsible thing to do from an environmental perspective, especially once we realized we could buy a string trimmer from the same company and use the same batteries for both. Both purchases have served us well, but our first battery didn’t last as long as we’d hoped, and with a second one currently on the fritz, I’m starting to suspect that the amount of e-waste that we’ve generated so far is outweighing any environmental benefit that we’ve created by not using gasoline to mow our lawns.

All of this is serving as a kind of object lesson for something that’s been emphasized in a few books I’ve read in the past six months that emphasize that electric cars aren’t a sufficient solution for our climate woes. To be clear, I’m not repeating a bad faith right-wing argument that electric cars don’t really make a difference and so they aren’t worth supporting. Rather, while electric cars are in most ways a clear improvement over gasoline-powered cars, they (like my lawnmower) have environmental costs of their own that need to be taken into consideration. I can’t say that I know what the right answer to the climate catastrophe is in terms of mowing my lawn (and I’m desperately hoping that our current set of batteries survive long enough that I don’t have to do the research any time soon), but my jaunt around the yard this morning gets me thinking that for all of my commitment to bike commuting, there’s still a lot I need to do to work toward a future where there are fewer cars on the road, not just fewer gasoline-burning ones.

• electric cars
• climate change
• climate catastrophe
• degrowth
• cars
• public transit
• bike commuting