lawns

Lawns occupy about 40 million acres of the United States: 2% of all available land. According to one estimate reported by NASA, lawns take up three times as much land as irrigated corn, and you can’t even eat them!

“Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
— Michael Pollan, in a 1989 New York Times Magazine essay

Lawns are time, labor, capital, and carbon-intensive

• In most parts of the country, turf grass doesn’t naturally grow, requiring the expenditure of water and fertilizer that could be used toward more productive ends. The areas where lawns require frequent irrigation like the western US are already prone to water shortages that will only get worse as climate change accelerates. And fertilizer can be harmful to birds, as well as fish when it runs off into local watersheds.
• Lawn maintenance costs you time and money: hoses, sprinklers, lawnmowers and weed trimmers, or more if you pay someone else to do it for you.
• While grass (like all plants) sequesters carbon, it’s not enough to offset the carbon cost of maintenance. Counter-intuitively, the smaller 2-stroke engines used in weed trimmers and leaf blowers are wildly less efficient than larger engines. One astounding study found that “the two-stroke engine emitted nearly 299 times the hydrocarbons of the pickup truck and 93 times the hydrocarbons of the sedan”. And grass is only carbon-negative if you leave the clippings to decompose on your lawn or in a compose pile. If they’re disposed of in landfills or another anaerobic environment, they’ll be converted to methane, a greenhouse gas.
• And in addition to carbon dioxide, lawn maintenance equipment contributes to air pollution as well, with EPA data showing that lawnmowers alone account for 5% of all air pollution.

Lawns have an uncomfortable history

• Historically, lawns emerged in the 17th century as a status symbol demonstrating one’s ability to conspicuously waste both land and human toil: “Before lawnmowers, only the rich could afford to hire the many hands needed to scythe and weed the grass, so a lawn was a mark of wealth and status.”
• In Cold-War America, lawns were seen as a crucial part of the high-maintenance single-family ideal home made popular by developers and enforced by homeowners’ associations as a tool of social control to prevent the spread of communism. William Levitt, who architected America’s first “Levittown” suburbs, said “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.”

What can you do about it?

• If you absolutely love having a lawn, using electric tools to maintain it will reduce the carbon and pollution impact.
• Consider an ecolawn a blend of species that’s ecologically stable and less water- and labor-intensive.
• If you like large, open green space, you can replace your grass lawn with native, slow-growing groundcover—slow-growing for less maintenance and native because plants adapted to your conditions will need much less if any supplementary watering.
• I got thinking about this from the book Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable Alternatives for Your Yard which is full of inspiration and practical solutions for reducing and even eliminating your grass lawn. There’s a whole spectrum, from replacing grass with lower-maintenance, native groundcover to designing useful, beautiful spaces with trees and beds instead of low-lying plants.
• And you can always go full-permaculture by replacing your lawn with a garden or food forest to not only save you time and money but provide you and your community with food.