And several of them were/are issues in "non-capitalist" countries like the USSR and China. (Though, to be fair, those are still state capitalist.)

I don't think your first statement is true. Most people I know or places I've lived in or been have a mixed, lived‑in garden where the lawn is one component of a wider ecosystem. Most don't look like the green on a golf course.

A lawn with clover, moss, daisies, micro‑wild patches, little plants I can't even name that drift in on the wind, and healthy soil full of ants and worms and beetles and spiders and things I need to photograph and identify is not a monoculture. It’s a low meadow kept short that hosts plenty of life.

Go take a look in any real garden or lawn for 10 minutes. You'll find life.

Do people... water lawns? Well obviously don't grow them there then. You leave a patch of ground completely alone around here and much of what ends up growing there is still various types of grass, some of which we also use in our lawn seed mixes.

And what's a natural alternative that's nice to walk on barefoot in the summer?

Well, turns out that you can actually prepare for that, since we know it's coming. Upgrading the flood defenses started decades ago.

River floods are much more risky than sealevel rise, since Germany is lagging hugely with providing water retention for the rivers, and getting people to move out of the way is kinda complex in such a densely populated country.

The problem: you need those pesky people to maintain and harvest complex biodiverse systems, and they want livable wages! Best call them savages and uncivilized, drive them away in the name of progess and force everyone to use your machines, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery and fuels.

Yeah, you can pretty much only do polyculture by hand, that's true. Are you suggesting we go back to unmechanized farming?

That would be super great for the planet, as it would cause the deaths by starvation of roughly 90% of the population, with the majority of the remaining humans forced into subsistence farming.

Neither corpses not subsistence farmers would cause much pollution. It might be somewhat hard to get volunteers for it though.

On the other hand, you can absolutely maintain a biodiverse landscape AND use mechanized monoculture fields. You just need to give nature time and space too, and that's something most farmers refuse to do. Which is why they should be forced to. I don't see why a factory gets banned from destroying biodiversity, but it's fine when farmers do it.

Gigantic Catapults.