Anti-Grassroots

What's Going On?

It's time to destroy America's Green Monster. Not Fenway Park — rather, the monster that guzzles three trillion gallons of water, 200 million gallons of gas, and 70 million pounds of pesticides each year and covers three times as much land as corn (the country's largest irrigated crop). We're talking about the ecological McDonald's, the monoculture on which the US spends more than foreign aid each year (around $50 billion) — lawns.

What's Wrong With Lawns?

In addition to being fuel-hungry and massive consumers of water, your typical lawn doesn't provide any environmental benefits. The turf grasses that make up lawns are not native to America, and constitute a barren habitat for crucial pollinating insects and other animals. Rainwater runoff carries artificial fertilizer through sewers into bodies of water (damaging aquatic ecosystems), and Americans collectively spill around 17 million gallons of gasoline onto their lawns every year — roughly equivalent to the Exxon-Valdez calamity.

The lawn typifies the American relationship with the environment. It takes no account of what might thrive an area — rather than working with the landscape it imposes its oversimplified will, annihilating all sense of locality and place.

How Did Lawns Become A Thing?

In short, the lawn's ubiquity is the product of suburbanization. In post-Renaissance England wealthy landowners maintained well-manicured grass on their estates as a status symbol — a way for Mr. Darcy to display that he was quite wealthy enough to forgo growing food on his land and could afford peasants to manually scythe-crop the grass on a regular basis.

Andrew Jackson Downing, the father of American landscape architecture, viewed lawns as a way of establishing order and culture. The invention of the lawnmower served to democratize these plots of grass as America spread outward into the "borderlands" of early suburbia, and Downing's puritanical protege Frank J. Scott spread the gospel, exhorting Americans to "Let your lawn be your home’s velvet robe, and your flowers its not-too-promiscuous decoration." The concept of lawn as patriotic symbol of collective "American-ness" continued to grow over the decades, and, like much of the country, eventually became cheap, efficient, and mass-produced.

What Should I Do Instead?

There are plenty of options and so much potential! And you don't have to tear it up all at once. Above all, take your surrounding environment into account. Add some native plants or cover an area with wildflowers. Plant a tree or two, along with some shade-loving shrubs. Grow a garden — which, as Wendell Berry says, involves "reclaiming responsibility for one's own part in the food economy." Make some compost with your food scraps and use that instead of pesticides and fertilizer. If you live in a drought-prone area, you could convert your lawn into xeriscaped rock.

Some states even have incentives for people that decide to go the no-lawn route. California has several turf-replacement rebates and Minnesota is planning to kick off a program in 2020 that pays homeowners to replace their lawns with pollinator-friendly alternatives.