2024 will be remembered for record heat, which hasn’t gone away yet.
As we balance efforts to cope with both record heat and water scarcity, Norm Schilling warns against an increasingly common practice in the Las Vegas Valley.
TRANSCRIPT
I love sharing with people the beauty of desert plants, and how magnificent landscapes in southern Nevada really can be. It’s been a little bit different this year. In fact, it’s been a lot different. It has been shifting for a while now, but this last summer was a seismic shift and a lot of plants are really struggling, and it’s because of the increase in heat. We set records every month. There were 24 records in May and June and more in July. It’s the hottest summer in southern Nevada ever and that’s global warming, that’s the warming of the urban heat island effect.
But there’s a new culprit, and it’s artificial turf, and I want to tell you with great emphasis: this is an existential threat.
Artificial turf is full of chemicals. There are known carcinogens, suspected carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, there’s neurotoxins, there are pulmonary irritants, there are chemicals. It is nasty stuff, and if you put plastic out in the sun in the heat in southern Nevada, it breaks down as all plastic breaks down and when it does, it releases microplastics - little tiny bits you can’t even see you’re not aware, but they’re there.
When the guy comes to blow the leaves off the lawn out into the street they go airborne, and as you walk your dog you breathe those in on your skin. You absorb it and worse when it rains it washes that into the gutter and out into our lake.
There is an explosion of artificial turf in this valley and it’s bad, but it’s bad in another way. They say they’re making it cooler now, better quality turf, and it doesn’t get as hot. Well, maybe that’s true because I don’t know how hot it used to be, but I just now measured the heat of artificial turf.
The air temperature is about probably about 104 right now. I measured the concrete and it was about 145. The asphalt was 155. I went to the artificial turf - it’s 184°. It burns us it heats your environment. It heats the city and it heats up all the plants that are already struggling, and as those plants get heated up, guess what? They need more water. So it’s counterproductive in that, but more so it is damaging and killing our trees, young trees, middle-aged trees, our heritage trees, and it is the plants that make such a difference in helping this environment in our hot city already challenged to keep it cool, especially those big old trees. They are the stalwart guardians of our environment.
I also measured the temperature on a Lantana and it was 102°. It is actually cooler than the outside - providing our living plants shade. It’s much cooler because of the tree, and I’m standing in the yard right now with artificial turf all around and there’s this old tree. It was beautiful two years ago, and it is struggling and it is now diseased, and we’re going to try to save it.
The reason this happened is because of the artificial turf - they took out the grass, which was providing this tree a lot of water. We’re going to fertilize, we’re going to return the water, we’re going to plant plants, we’re going to give it organic mulch. Maybe we can save her, but maybe we can’t, and it should never have happened in the first place. A friend of mine said to me, “Artificial turf is the new asbestos,” I couldn’t put it better myself.
This is Norm Schilling, your desert gardener.