Exhibit one.
Glycophosphate 360 (360 ml of active per litre). Five litres of the stuff. Administered by watering can and spray at a rate of 15ml per litre of water. I applied 4.5 litres to roughly 500 square meters of “lawn”. Said “lawn” was a mixture of couch grass and some broad leaved weeds. First application was on 1st June. Two weeks later the lawn was dying off. I started planting some of it then, and resprayed half of it. 2 weeks after that the couch is pretty much dead.
I ummed and ahhed about this for several months beforehand. I really did not want to spray chemical toxins on the garden. In the end I did it for several reasons (these are my excuses):
1. Couch grass is an exotic species in Australia. It is highly invasive. I’ve worked a lot of gardens in which couch is running wild and it’s a bastard to weed without damaging the root systems of the plants I want to thrive (WA natives). It also has a nasty habit of taking over low shrubs and groundcovers.
2. I could have killed the couch of by smothering. Except I didn’t start early enough. We moved in in June and this is the ideal time to plant. To smother the couch to death, I should probably have started last October. So, it’s my own fault because I’m in a hurry.
3. I talked to quite a few experienced gardeners, and when I said I wasn’t going to spray, but try and smother while planting they told me I was going to be creating long-term problems with couch invading the native plantings. Time and again the advice was: do a one off spray, then smother what’s left and hand weed any outbreaks.
So, I did it. And I’m so glad I did. I’ve been digging out the residual roots to prepare sites for planting. Because most of the couch is dead, it is coming out very easily. One or two patches got missed and they are much harder to weed.
And, I know that it’s not going to be the end of couch grass. There are still some survivors and the neighbour’s lawn will inevitably find it’s way in. But I feel confident I can deal with these much smaller areas by hand.
So do the ends justify the means? On the one hand, I’m still uncomfortable about using a herbicide and on the other I feel it was the right thing to do. And in future, I’d plan ahead so I could avoid it.
Mandurah Native Gardens 
The truth is, humanity is in a catch-22 situation in a number of areas. Look at energy. The more fossil fuels we consume, the more we damage the planet. But eliminating or even curtailing our use of them would involve such an enormous amount of work and time that it’s practically unthinkable. Our whole approach to living would have to change. Same with agriculture. Can we eliminate chemical fertilizers and factory farms? Not if we’re going to continue to have cheap, plentiful food for billions of people. The alternative, again, would be a great deal more work and a drastic lifestyle change.So, while I understand having personal misgivings about one’s own contribution to the planet’s destruction, I always try to remember that I am not entirely in control of my situation. I live in a world and a culture that is designed to operate a certain way. I can’t readily alter my mode of living to conform to what I deem best for the planet and remain a tumbling cog in the current socio-economic machine. Yes, non-conformist, individual action can often spur necessary change. But usually that happens in the political and social arena, where the change needed is more a change in attitude than any real adjustment in mode of living (e.g., civil rights). But questions about food and energy are matters of survival. Individual action is not going to change our basic approaches to energy usage and food production. It will require widespread societal agreement and an impelling need for action (e.g. catastrophe or collapse). In the meantime, I try to be responsible and judicious, while recognizing that until the rest of the world gets in line, there are certain sacrifices that I am not going to be able (or willing) to make because it would just involve too much extra time that I don’t have and too much extra work that I’m too exhausted to do.
Hi, thanks for your comment. Interesting. I agree with you: “consumer capitalism” is very hard, if not impossible, to disengage from.
I suppose it’s a question of living as honestly as I can.
I recall reading somewhere, possibly “Prosperity without Growth” by Tim Jackson, that the cost of totally changing from our current economy to a “sustainable” one, or at least one that is much closer to sustainable, would only be something like 3 or 4% of global GDP; and that compared to probable costs of not doing anything, is remarkably cheap.
The “problem” of course, is that the whole world would need to be committed to the process…so unlikely!
Anyway, “interesting times” and all that.
Thanks again for your comment.