What most people don’t realize is that lawns were originally a status symbol. Having a lawn meant you affluent enough that you didn’t have to use every square inch of your real estate to grow food. Lawns have become a big part of both the urban and suburban landscape. But few really like the maintenance they require.
A recent essay by an Ohio woman who refuses to mow her lawn has struck a nerve. Thirteen hundred people have weighed in with a comment on Sarah Baker’s tale of flouting a neighborhood mowing ordinance in the face of a $1,000 fine.
As Baker notes in her essay, lawns are a big part of contemporary American life. There are somewhere around 40 million acres of lawn in the lower 48, according to a 2005 NASA estimatederived from satellite imaging. “Turf grasses, occupying 1.9% of the surface of the continental United States, would be the single largest irrigated crop in the country,” that study concludes. Conservatively, American lawns take up three times as much space as irrigated corn. The authors mapped the entirety of the nation’s turf grass, below. You’ll notice that it’s basically a population density map of the U.S. — where there are people, there are lawns.
Much of are land is now covered with totally worthless lawns and to make matters worse with increasing water shortages they are an environmental disaster.
And how many people want to spend their Saturdays mowing the lawn. I live in the normally soggy Western Oregon, although it has been much less soggy in recent years. But the summer months are nearly always very dry which requires dumping large quantities of water on the turf. And then there is the fertilizer that finds it’s way to the local streams and rivers resulting in toxic algal blooms during the heat of the summer.
Even here in Western Oregon our local water district encourages yard foliage that requires less water and that includes golf courses that have less and less turf. But local districts still require lawns:
Again, in some cases the time investment may be worthwhile — some families use their lawns all the time. But think of your own neighborhood, and of the number of houses where the only time you see somebody out on the lawn is when it’s getting mowed.
It doesn’t need to be this way — there are plenty of low-maintenance alternatives to turf grass out there. But some homeowners associationsrequire residents to keep a lawn. And plenty of municipalities, like Sarah Baker’s, have strict guidelines on how a lawn should be maintained.
But in the end, much of the pressure to keep and maintain a lawn is self-imposed. Freeing yourself from all those hours on the lawnmower might simply be a matter of realizing that there are alternatives.