Suffolk Closeup: Putting PEP into conservation
With roots in Panama, the Perfect Earth Project (PEP), based on the East End, seeks to promote safe, green ways of living with the land.
As PEP declares on its website: “The Perfect Earth Project promotes toxin-free land management for the benefit of human health and the environment. We help people understand the dangers of synthetic lawn and landscape chemicals, especially for children and pets.”
Further, “we educate homeowners and landscape professionals on how to use PEP practices to achieve great results, at no additional cost.”
The Perfect Earth Project is headed by Edwina von Gal, a renowned landscape designer whose firm was based in New York City, while she has also spent many years living on the East End.
PEP got its start when Ms. von Gal went to Panama in 2002 to design a park for Panama’s BioMuseo. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute had a key role in creating it as a museum celebrating the biodiversity of Panama.
Ms. von Gal’s landscape design complemented the architecture of the museum which, the Smithsonian Institute’s website says, includes “scarlet, blue and yellow cantilevered roofs like wings of a scarlet macaw.”
Ms. von Gal says in working with Smithsonian scientists she became “totally immersed” in environmental issues in Panama. She felt that it was “the right place to pursue reforestation and alternative land management concepts which did not include chemicals … The cost of chemicals was becoming prohibitive for people in Panama. Insects were becoming resistant to the chemical pesticides that were being used, land was being destroyed and peoples’ health affected.”
In this “very biodiverse and very degraded place,” Ms. von Gal bought a home and land and began projects to help bring about green practices.
Meanwhile, she thought about a similar focus back home in the United States. That vision crystalized — “hit me,” she recalls — in, of all places,“my dentist’s office.”
She was undergoing root canal treatment at the Southampton office of oral surgeon Dr. Robert Iovino. As she sat in the dentist’s chair, “Dr. Iovino said, ‘By the way, I have a piece of land near the water and I’m concerned about the amount of chemicals I’m putting on the land.’ He knew about my being a landscape designer.”
She provided Dr. Iovino with information and from that encounter ultimately grew the founding in 2013 of the non-profit PEP in Springs.
Ms. von Gal and her staff are committed to educating people about and promoting poison-free growing practices. PEP’s website is perfectearthproject.org and is loaded with hard facts and highly helpful recommendations.
For example, there’s the page headed: “Soft, lush, gorgeously green. Perfect for a game, a picnic, or a nap. How perfect? Perfectly toxic.” The text states: “America’s 40 million acres of lawns are doused with approximately 250 million pounds of pesticides yearly. Landscape pesticides can cause cancer, Parkinson’s disease, nervous disorders, asthma and hormone disruption. The chemical lawn is especially harmful to children and pets and anyone who sits, play, entertains, or occasionally nibbles on it. And, get this, lawn chemicals are totally unnecessary.”
That is a central emphasis of Ms. von Gal and PEP, that the chemicals being dumped on the land in massive amounts are just not needed. “The notion that you can’t have a lawn without chemicals is completely not true,” she stresses. “You can have a better-looking landscape without them.”
Various alternatives are suggested rather than toxic pesticides. As to lawn fertilizers — major contributors of nitrates to Island waterways and resulting problems including brown and red tides — PEP counsels the use of slow-release organic fertilizers. There is advice to water heavily but not often, letting grass grow 3 1/2 inches to 4 inches to develop longer roots, and recommendations on a myriad of other subjects.
PEP does educational outreach, which includes working with Peconic Land Trust and Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk, for which it has written a manual.
Members of its Board of Advisors include Stephen Pacala, professor of ecology at Princeton; Scott Muri, curator of botany at New York Botanical Garden; artist and architect Maya Lin; noted ornithologist Robert Ridgeley, honorary president of the World Land Trust-US; trend expert Faith Popcorn; and Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Project at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
Ms. von Gal believes that Long Island can be a “model” of practices in harmony with nature — for the United States and “everywhere.”
