By Kathy Litchfield
East Hampton, NY
While
perched in her dentist’s chair one morning five years ago, Edwina von Gal
realized she didn’t know of a landscaper offering chemical free lawn care to
suggest to her dentist, who was concerned about toxins from his waterfront lawn
sinking into Long Island sound.
“I had been a landscape designer for
a zillion years and I had always been an organic gardener in my own place. I was
gravitating through the years towards more and more natural gardening for my
clients too,” said the 67-year-old founder of The Perfect Earth Project (PRFCT
Earth PRJCT), a two-year-old non-profit educational organization promoting
toxin-free landscape management based in East Hampton, Long Island.
“My
basic design concept was always to get people to stop and look at the natural
beauty of intrinsic things, like the bark of a tree. But it was always a bit of
subtext. Now times have changed and I realized then, that this is a message I
could fully embrace. I soon found that more people were asking for chemical free
lawns and I needed to learn more about this,” said the Brewster, NY native who
grew up in dairy farm country running around outdoors unsupervised and gaining
a love and comfort of nature that has been a constant thread throughout her
life.
Edwina
von Gal asked her some of her clients if they would agree to allowing her to
manage their lawns without any toxins. She found that many clients weren’t even
aware of how their lawns and landscapes were being managed - whether or not
they were being sprayed, how often and with what - by the people they hired,
although their vegetable gardens were organic.
“Honestly
I never paid much attention to lawn, it wasn’t high on my list of interesting
things,” laughed von Gal, “but what we realized is that after a year or so, it
really worked. Nobody really noticed a difference and everybody was happy to
try it, and when I told them what we were getting rid of, they were ecstatic.”
Sean
O’Neill, director of education and outreach for The Perfect Earth Project, put
it this way: “It doesn’t make much sense to walk across a chemical lawn to get
to your organic tomato garden.”
O’Neill,
native to Farmingville, Long Island, grew up fishing with his grandfather every
Sunday at Blue Point, became an avid fisherman, and holds a master’s of science
in environmental and natural resource economics from the University of Rhode Island
(2006) and a bachelor’s of science in natural resource management from the
University of Delaware (2004).
He
worked for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as a
pesticide control specialist where he witnessed firsthand the dangers of
synthetic pesticides and fertilizers as he visited properties to enforce
pesticide laws. While at NYSDEC, Sean created the 2011 Long Island Golf Course
Initiative which lead to the successful diversion of thousands of pounds of
illegally manufactured “knock off” pesticides products from entering Long
Island, and served as a technical adviser on the Long Island Pesticide Use
Management Plan focusing on improved human health and water quality in response
to the pesticide contamination of Long Island’s vulnerable sole source drinking
water aquifer.
Coupled with a personal desire to protect the
environment, he jumped at the opportunity to work with von Gal and joined the
team in April of 2014.
The
goals of The Perfect Earth Project are to promote toxin-free land management
for the benefit of human health and the environment, by helping people to
understand the dangers of synthetic lawn and landscape chemicals especially for
children and pets, and by educating homeowners and landscape professionals on
how to use ‘PRFCT’ practices to achieve great results at no additional cost.
They
accomplish this by offering low-cost seminars ($10 to $25) open to professionals,
homeowners and community members interested in learning about non-toxic ways to
manage land. The first seminar was held in February 2015 and attracted over 150
people, two-thirds of whom were professional landscapers and designers and the
other third of whom were homeowners, said O’Neill.
“When
people learn that they are affected by what others are putting into the
environment we share, they get engaged on a personal level,” he said. “Part of
our success to date has been that personal touch where we can really show how
this affects everybody. It’s not a polar bear on an iceberg far away. It’s
right here in our communities.”
Opening
conversations with people, sharing information, educating people and
encouraging them to engage in trading stories are really important basic
principles for von Gal and O’Neill.
“We’re
here to help people, to provide people with resources to create their own
awareness and share it with others. We very much encourage people not to fire
the people they’re working with, but to convert them,” she said. “We want our
seminars to be pilot programs that can serve as models for anyone who wants to
create their own training program. We hope to build a network of experts around
the United States that people could call within their own communities, for help
in choosing a non-toxic landscape.”
Edwina Von Gal’s work has been published in
major publications and her book “Fresh Cuts” won the Quill and Trowel award for
garden writing in 1998. She has served on boards and committees for a number of
horticultural organizations, and is currently on the board of “What Is Missing,”
Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity. She went
to Panama in 2002 to design the park for the Biomuseo, the Frank Gehry
designed museum of biodiversity under construction in Panama City, bought some
land and stayed on to found the Azuero Earth Project
with like-minded friends and scientists.
“The
process convinced her to extend the toxin-free message to the United States,
and Perfect Earth was launched in 2013 to promote toxin-free landscapes
everywhere,” she wrote on the organization’s website.
Since
2014, von Gal and O’Neill have engaged Paul Wagner, of the NY Soil Food Web, to
serve as expert and as a speaker at their seminars. They are working collaboratively
with the NOFA Organic Land Care Program to promote accredited professionals
(see www.perfectearthproject.org/toxin-free-landscaper-list)
as well as Long Island landscapers offering non-toxic methods.
They’re
partnering with the Peconic Land Trust to address private horticultural
management and to train future gardeners in least toxic methods. They have
received a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant and are working with Cornell
Cooperative Extension to publish two versions of their landscape manual – one
geared to landscape professionals and one to homeowners - already available as
a text version on their website, www.perfectearthproject.org/.
They
are also working not only with individual property owners, but with hospitals,
college campuses, real estate developers and municipal parks and lands, to
educate all involved about how possible it is to have a “perfectly
aesthetically pleasing lawn and landscape without the use of cancer causing
chemicals, or fertilizers that pollute our waterways and estuaries,” said O’Neill,
adding that on a personal note, he is thrilled that many of the landscapers he
worked with over the years in his previous job are becoming interested in
learning how to provide the services their clients are requesting.
“From
a purely business standpoint, it’s becoming imperative that landscapers learn
how to do these things in order to make a living in the future.”
Edwina
von Gal emphasized that The Perfect Earth Project isn’t working to reinvent
something, but to “engage the existing infrastructure and create a big demand
among the population of decision makers and land owners to insist on toxin-free
maintenance and to understand that it doesn’t need to cost more and that it is
possible.”
“We’re
not doing advocacy,” she said. “We feel we can meet our goals simply by
creating a consciousness among people who are doing their own lawns or hiring
someone to do their landscape.”
Underway
is the “PRFCT Places” program, a registration service that recognizes and
promotes toxin-free properties by listing them on an interactive map and
directory on the website. Von Gal encourages anyone who knows of a toxin-free
property that would qualify to get in touch with her. The same goes for
professional landscapers interested in registering their businesses as “PRFCT”
to promote their services and products.
“We
promote the idea and they can use our brand to promote their projects,” she
said. “Since we ourselves cannot be in every community serving the United
States, we feel t his is our job, to create materials and packages that we can
turn into easily replicable models that others can provide to their
communities,” she said, encouraging land care professionals to contact her and
share info on the challenges they face and how the Perfect Earth Project could help
them. “We would love to create a whole army of ambassadors.”
Von
Gal was appointed as a master teacher at the Conway School of Landscape Design
for 2015-2016 and looks forward to further building awareness of eliminating
toxins from maintenance programs and community projects.
For more information, visit www.perfectearthproject.org, or engage in social media on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
