Ruin a shoreline in four steps

I keep seeing this happening around retention ponds, canals, and lakes in Florida, and it is a real shame. I didn't have room to show a fifth step, but if I did would be: "5. Remain oblivious to the importance of plant cover for erosion prevention and instead spend a lot of money on a artificial 'solution' like rocks or sandbags."



Even the apartment complex I live in does this border spraying thing, sadly, so we have an eroding ring of bare dirt around our otherwise nice looking retention pond.



It would be so easy for them to just NOT spray. The lawn grass would grow downslope and cover some of the bare, and the wetland plants would creep upslope and cover the rest of it, stopping the erosion. Just mowing to the edge of the marsh would set a tidy boundary between lawn and nature but noooo, they have to spray it and make the eroding dead zone. After scratching my head about why they don't do what seems so logical to me, I've decided it's an issue of big companies and contractors just having a "one size fits all" mindset for making the properties they manage look like they think owners and investors want them to look. The mindset is based on mass-market aesthetics, not science, and it involves having just one species at a time in little compartments separated by bare areas. The aesthetic is like that of a prison cafeteria tray. The more environmentally friendly approach, of course, would be to allow diversity and mixing like in a fancy salad.


I've tried to get my apartment managers to change how they do the pond border, but there are about five levels uncaring bureaucracy between residents like me and anyone high enough on the totem pole to make a sensible change. I'll keep trying.