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POSTED: Monday, July 21, 2008
FROM BLOG: LiveScience.com Blogs - Your daily dose of science scuttlebutt...

The following blog post is from an independent writer and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.com.


Like sunscreen and ocean air, the scent of a freshly mowed lawn is one of those quintessential summer smells in America. And there is a lot of lawn in America.

An article by Elizabeth Kolbert in last week’s New Yorker traces the evolution of the American lawn from the days when only the wealthy could afford to keep such a luxurious expanse of green to today, when Americans spend an estimated $40 billion on keeping up their grass. According to satellite data from the Department of Defense, Kolbert writes, turfgrasses take up an area of the United States the size of New York State.

The most interesting part of the article covers the burgeoning “anti-lawn movement,” a rag-tag assortment of individuals and groups who are calling for an end to the lawn as we know it, favoring replacing it with trees, gardens or more natural meadow.

How is grass not natural, you might ask? Well, as Kolbert discusses in the article, most of the grasses covering American lawns, including Kentucky bluegrass and Bermuda grass, are not native to North America. They’re also effectively grown as a monoculture (like so many other plants and crops), which makes them more vulnerable to pests.

Herbicides and synthetic fertilizers make it possible to grow the grasses into the intensely green expanses we see today, by boosting their growth and keeping out “weed” species. Of course, these chemicals have side-effects: Herbicides and other pesticides can kill birds and other native species, while excess fertilizer can run off of lawns into streams and rivers, and eventually into the sea, where it creates a “dead” zone where marine species can’t survive.

Lawns also require water; a third of all residential water use in the United States goes to landscaping, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Another study cited by Kolbert estimated that watering lawns in the United States uses up 200 gallons of water per person per day.

What proponents of the anti-lawn movement suggest is ditching all the chemicals and mowers and maintenance and just letting nature take over — whatever nature happens to be in any particular region of the country, be it prairie, forest or scrub. This is already done to a certain extent in the Southwest. On my trip to Tucson to cover NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission earlier this summer, the lack of lawns in favor of pebbles and desert flora certainly stood out. It stood as an example for me of how normal we consider lawns in the eastern United States, and how arresting it can be to see anything else in front of a house.

Others propose using the lawn space for more productive purposes, such as growing food in the space that now supports grass. Kolbert cites a book, “Food Not Lawns,” that says that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. (Growing food in our front yards would also do a lot to localize food production, though that’s a blog for another day.)

While the anti-lawn ideas are intriguing, and personally, I think, preferable, to the large lawns prevalent in some suburbs now, I doubt the green is going away anytime soon. I think Kolbert’s article gives pause for thought though – it might be worth pulling up a little of that sod and planting a vegetable garden, or letting nature reclaim a little of the lawn.