The Lawn is an old fashioned and classist tradition that needs a change.
Imagine a fancy house. It could have a cozy fireplace in the living room accentuated with natural stone to keep you warm on chilly nights. Maybe a wrap-around porch to lounge on and drink cocktails while you gaze at a setting sun (or a rising one if you’re about that). What does the landscaping look like?
Whatever kinds of trees and shrubs are present, it’s pretty much regulation that all well-kept visible property must have some kind of thick, green, low growing mat of grass. Even in places where this kind of planting is an intense battle to keep alive, folks really love the idea of having a cool, full, luxurious lawn.
The grass you saw in this daydream was almost definitely a mono-crop of Kentucky bluegrass, Poa pratensis. This grass is a European perennial introduced to the east coast of North America sometime shortly after the year 1600. It spread by rhizome and seed to become widely accepted as the main component of turf and pasture land. Of course, it didn’t stay in those places alone. In a similar fashion to those who brought it first, Kentucky bluegrass behaves invasively and presents a threat to biodiversity. Now, there are more pressing threats to the existence of native grasslands; the shifting climate, expanding suburbs, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events among them. As the weather begins to change and the atmosphere continues to warm, we should approach each resource intensive practice with a critical eye.
For example, let’s turn back to that pesky P. pratensis. Every year across the United States, lawns require nearly 3 trillion gallons of water, 200 million gallons of lawn mower gas, and 70 million pounds of pesticides. In 2018, more of our drinkable water resources are allocated to watering lawns than the cultivation of corn and wheat combined! Considering landfill space as a resource as well, a full 12% of what is sent to the landfill in 2018 was yard waste — much of which can be attributed to grass clippings (listen to the 03/28/18 episode of a favorite podcast of mine, The Anthropocene Reviewed).
For what purpose? Mostly the pursuit of what, somewhere deep down, we perceive to be luxury.
Like you at the beginning of this post, many European settlers that hopped the pond dreamed of living in opulence and comfort. For centuries before, art — Biblical and otherwise — had portrayed pastoral scenes of well-off folks lounging in the green carpet surrounding their gardened estates. Those whose likeness was worthy of whole canvases did not have to concern themselves with using every acre of land for food production. They could afford to pay peasants to keep their lawns pristine instead of allocating their labor to food prodution (listen to this wonderful episode of 99 Percent Invisible).
During the rise of the suburbs in America, the lawn and its care-taking was marketed to and imposed upon people as a way to stay ahead in the rat race. Once people shifted from the cities to the suburbs, it once again became prudent to convey a sense of wealth and societal comfort using a uniform mat of grass. Having the spare time and resources to create that type of display is a symbol of prosperity, however far removed. This lingering ritual implies that a lawn acts as a reflection of the class of people living behind it.
For example, a “lawn elite” may say that the state of the grass speaks to the lifestyle of those who care for it. A messy, overgrown, and patchy lawn must belong to a person who leads a messy, overgrown, and patchy life. A fear lingers over every property manager that a neighbor’s poorly maintained yard will negatively impact the “sell-ability” factor of a house, causing it to stay on the market for longer and ultimately decreasing the price point. There are entire task forces, rule books with contracts, and community tax dollars that go into policing lawns. Many neighborhood associations and city councils have laws that restrict grass height. Community members may be notified, written up, or ticketed for having a lawn that is not compliant.
To balance the prior critiques, it is absolutely worth mentioning that some lawns do serve a greater purpose. Short cut grass is necessary for accessible recreation areas, fields designated for activities and sports, and strips of land that need visibility are prime examples. Keeping a lawn mowed around the house can also prevent indoor pest problems such as ants and fleas. It can be a real challenge to come up with alternatives to the lawn at this late stage — and as a result, a lawn alternative could be very hard to install and maintain. The very real therapeutic effect of having the color green in your field of vision is not to be ignored either.
The lawn is an item that was once considered a luxury, for good reason. Treating it as a common household attribute is unsustainable and serves little greater purpose. One could even say that treating those who cannot or choose not to maintain a lawn with contempt is classist. The presence of an expensive, resource intensive, low value mono-crop in every “green” space needs to be reconsidered. After all, considering the ever-climbing population, the impending food crisis, and the changing climate conditions, every square foot of land that can be dedicated to preserving the valuable resources of food supply and natural habitat should be cared for as such.
In a community where people didn’t feel that lawns were a necessity, they might have more freedom to use their front yard as a place to expand their garden and grow their own food. Parts of turf grass could be replaced with a native, biodiverse seed mix that would expand local habitats, support pollinators, require minimal watering, and never need mowed. Plus, a native lawn has the potential to sequester many times more carbon from the atmosphere than a Kentucky bluegrass lawn could ever dream of.
If water resources are scarce in the area, people could convert their yards into gardens with plants that have low water requirements, or just replace the grass with stones and gravel. Folks that would rather just keep their Kentucky bluegrass would be under significantly less pressure to mow the entirety of their lawns, and maybe just those spots where visibility and “lounging area” is desired.
Though replacing lawns is not a silver bullet for a more sustainable future, plenty of other work could and should happen alongside changing this assumption. More thought and options should be given to those who do not dictate what happens to their lawn — i.e. renters. And since lawns are a vestige of the way the wealthy wanted to be perceived when first arriving in North America, lawns must also end in part with those who have property rights and the ability to change the way it is maintained.
