Artificial Turf

Plastic Thinking (on Grass)

Home Turf Disadvantage III

by Sarah at ProgressiveKid

plastic adj 5: capable of being deformed continuously and permanently in any direction without rupture
(Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary)

Sometimes when you lose a fight, after giving it your best, you just want a moment to take it in and figure out how to live with it. So it was particularly irritating when the other day Julie and I were reading the enormous signs announcing the installation of two artificial turf fields at our local park and at that exact moment a jogger shouted out, “Isn’t it great?!?” Julie, with admirable restraint and yet sufficient volume to be clearly heard, yelled back, “Actually, it sucks.” And then what really galled me was that the jogger turned out to be the self-declared “scientist” who had been recruited by the turf people to disparage all opponents as being “nonscientists.” What are the chances of that particularly inopportune timing? (It occurred to me that maybe she was hiding behind the blackberries and popping out every time someone stopped to read the sign.)

So of course, I had to repeat to the scientist all my arguments about MRSA and benzopyrene and water contamination (see Home Turf Disadvantage), and what I discovered was that other than saying again that she was a scientist, she really didn’t have any specific counterattacks–at least none that she offered. So to address the only thing she had presented in her defense, I said, “I am not a researcher but I have a master’s degree and I know how to read really well the research that scientists have done,” because even though I don’t think advanced degrees are required for being able to read, I figured she might think so.

We bantered back and forth only briefly about the science–I was ready for a much more detailed fight and I was trying to recall the numbers and the percentages, but the scientist quickly backed off and launched two familiar and flimsy counterarguments:

1. If we don’t put in the fields, our kids won’t be able to play soccer and they’ll play video games instead.
2. If we don’t put the fields here (over already existing sand fields), we’ll have to cut down trees to put them elsewhere.

These represent extremely faulty thinking that is endemic to our American society. People seem to consider them validation for all kinds of hideous behavior. Nonetheless, they are easily shot down. See these examples:

• “If we don’t kill the wolves, they’ll destroy American ranchers.” No they won’t. Actually, what the wolf population does is minimize disease in herds of wild ungulates.
• “If we grow food organically, people won’t be able to afford groceries.” Not true. The more farms that grow organically, the lower the prices of organic food get.
• “If we use cap and trade to respond to climate change, we’ll hurt American businesses.” Not so. What will happen is that businesses will become more efficient.
• “If we don’t ban gay marriage, then straight marriage will be jeopardized.” Are you kidding me? No it won’t. Besides how well is that straight marriage going?
• “If we don’t invade Iraq, we will be imperiling our own security.” In fact, invading Iraq more likely put us a greater risk.
• “If we don’t torture the prisoners, we’ll miss the chance to stop impending terrorist attacks.” False. No such information was yielded through torture.
• “If we don’t put in more highways, we will aggravate our traffic situation.” Lie. The traffic situation is already terrible. Putting in more highways will actually lead to increased traffic.
• “If we let women vote, they will be ‘unsexed’ and ‘degraded.’” Let’s not even bother with these actual arguments once used to keep women from voting in this country.
  

The problem with such arguments is that they trick people into thinking that they must be thoughtfully argued against when, in fact, they should be waived aside, eliminated swiftly as the buffoonery that they are, and the fight should resume around the substantive issues such as “Will artificial turf lead to greater incidence of MRSA as research indicates it will?”

Let’s go back to the scientist’s two main arguments and examine how easily they fall apart:

1. If we don’t put in the fields, our kids won’t be able to play soccer and they’ll play video games instead.

Somehow our kids are playing soccer even without the fields, so this is patently untrue. (Besides, Pelé played on dirt fields as a kid, and he seemed to turn out all right from a soccer standpoint.) But there are two faulty assumptions buried within the sentence:

• There are only two choices for our kids: play soccer or play video games.
• Parents have absolutely no impact and cannot influence how their children spend their time.

The problem is that when we hear this argument we turf opponents immediately become defensive and we think, “I must find another solution besides artificial turf to the problem of kids sitting still.” And then we waste all kinds of time coming up with other ways kids can play soccer. But it is a mere distraction. It is much more effective to say, “No they won’t” or “My kid won’t.” That way, the turf proponents are in the position of having to prove that soccer is the only alternative to video games and that children are robots who mindlessly whirr in the direction of either one or the other.

2. If we don’t put the fields here (over already existing sand fields), we’ll have to cut down trees to put them elsewhere.

If people decide they must cut down trees to make way for fields, it is because they value soccer fields more than forests. It is not because turf opponents are unreasonable and hate trees. This argument again puts turf opponents on the defensive and weirdly aligns them with antienvironmentalists. The faulty assumption here is that

• Soccer fields absolutely have to be built and soccer is the number one priority for all of us.

What I discovered is that by saying, “Not true” to the scientist, she was left with no arguments. When she said, “I’d hate to cut down more trees,” I said, “Me too. Let’s not.” When she said, “I don’t want kids playing video games,” I said, “My kid likes to play outside. How about yours?”

In our battles, we must all learn to stop and think about what the opposition is really saying. And we must address the actual, underlying issue, the cake, and ignore the whip cream showily sprayed all over the top. Although we lost our turf battle, I’m hoping that some of what we learned can help others in their own fights against turf and other dangerous nonsense that people, scientists and nonscientists alike, tend to unthinkingly toss about. Plastic can be a problem in so many ways.

©2009 ProgressiveKid

Image by Alan Levine, 2008, Creative Commons license.