Replace lawns with native plants
On a whim, I Googled “The American Lawn and Sociology,” just to see what would turn up. I found an eruption of academic and other commentary on why and how Americans care for their individual plots of grass. It ranged from a compendium of commentary published in a Polish academic journal written by a team of authors from, respectively, Nanjing University (China), Michigan State and Auburn, among other institutions, to a New York Times Magazine essay by Michael Pollan in 1989, before he started writing his books on cooking. The best of them may be a term paper in an anthropology class written in 2003, “The American Lawn — The Ultimate Monoculture.” More on that term paper later.
As this search demonstrated, Americans’ care of and commitment to their lawns has been the subject of bemused commentary by many over many years. Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York City’s Central Park, started it all in 1868 when he and others came up with “Riverside,” outside Chicago, apparently the first planned suburban development. As Pollan described it in his 1989 essay, “In Riverside, each owner would maintain one or two trees and a lawn that would flow seamlessly into his neighbors,’ creating the impression that all lived together in a single park.”
From those early days the American lawn has gobbled up a good chunk of the lower 48 states. The lead author of a 2005 NASA-supported study reported that, “lawns — including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc. — could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area covering about 128,000 square kilometers” (in fact, three times the amount of land dedicated to irrigated corn). That approximates to 49,000 square miles, an area greater than the entire state of Mississippi (48,432 sq. mi). A recent report states that, in order to maintain the nation’s lawns — public and private — in 2024 Americans will spend almost $59 billion.
Among those billions, we buy, and apply, 90 million pounds of pesticides on our lawns and gardens. Despite assurances to the contrary, most of these chemical compounds are dangerous to some degree. For example, neonicotinoids attack unwanted insects. An advertisement recently stated the compound affects “the target insect’s central nervous system, binding to nerve cells and causing overstimulation and disruption” which results in “spasming and loss of control with bodily functions, paralysis and then eventually death.”
Neonicotinoids are so toxic that in 2018 the European Union banned their three primary forms from all outdoor use. Several cities and towns in the U.S. have banned it as well as other pesticides applied outdoors.
Since 1970 we have lost more than a quarter of the nation’s entire bird population. Insects, including pollinators such as bees and butterflies, are in steep decline. Why this precipitous loss of wildlife? The answer is, to a great extent, lawns and the pesticides we spray and spread to protect them.
Most species of grasses that make up our lawns are not native to this continent. For example, Kentucky Bluegrass evolved over millions of years in Eurasia and North Africa and did not arrive here via settlers until colonial times, at most, some 400 years ago. Evolution is slow; in terms of geologic time, 400 years is a millisecond. As to the nutritional needs of our birds, butterflies and bees, those artificially dark, clipped and coifed green lawns are vacant parking lots and often vectors of poison.
Is there a different way? Yes, and it is expanding across the country. Individuals, businesses and local and state governments are replacing turf grass with plants native to their local areas. Native plants are the essential foundation for all animate life: without native plants, we have no insects; without insects we have no birds — or, for that matter, any other complex life form.
If you look at the American lawn in terms of native plants, instead of an environmental disaster, 49,000 square miles is that much opportunity to rebalance the biosphere we all rely on for our existence. By replacing at least some part of our lawns with native plant communities, we can assist nature’s needed resurgence.
The term paper? It’s by Timothy S. McSheffery and can be found at mch2o.com/images/Penn%20State/Cultural%20Ecology/American%20Lawn.pdf. The paper begins with a joke: St. Francis of Assisi reports to a higher power.