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Like it or not, what you do with the land around your house tells the world what sort of citizen you are.

A smooth, green, weed-free lawn says that you’re a neat, tidy person, with nothing to hide; affluent enough to hire someone to mow the grass or leisured enough to do it yourself. You’re someone who might leave his golf course-like estate to play a few rounds of golf on the similarly green grounds of the local country club.

To an environmentalist, though, that carefully nurtured greensward is an ongoing ecological crime, and its owner—you—an enemy of the planet, a villain. The green lawn is anti-Green.

Next to having a nuclear power plant in your front yard, having a lawn is about as environmentally incorrect as you can get these days. Immense quantities of noxious chemicals are employed to keep lawns thriving.

In addition to the four horsemen—pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides and petrochemicals—they use inordinate amounts of that increasingly endangered resource, water. Even the seed is suspect, since lawn grasses are almost entirely nonnative. And the amount of money spent on lawn care is, needless to say, prodigious: billions of dollars annually.

Constant mowing is needed to maintain these green monsters. Hardly anyone has a good word for this exercise; it is boring, it is endless. “Continual amputation,” as Sara Stein calls it. Or for the machines: “the angry roar, the horrid fumes” (Eleanor Perenyi); “ought to be outlawed along with chain saws and other noisemakers” (Henry Mitchell).

Greedy and thuggish, lawns impoverish the soil. Their shallow roots form an impenetrable mat, beneath which the earth bakes hard and barren. No flora means no fauna—no robins in spring, no bees or butterflies, no frogs or toads or snakes. (As environmentalists, it goes without saying that we cherish snakes.)

To read current gardening blogs and magazines you’d think no one has lawns anymore. In The New York Times, under the heading “Spring Chores,” Anne Raver suggests: “If the lawn needs reseeding, tear it up and plant vegetables.” (Easy for her to say.)
Yet a short drive through any suburb or small town quickly reveals that the great American lawn is alive and, if not healthy, certainly no endangered species.

And the lawn-care section of the hardware store isn’t getting any smaller, either. Even in desert states, homeowners labor away with sprinklers and mow: “Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it. . . . I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing,was Sisyphus.

Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again ?”

Michael Pollan Second Naturers to create the obligatory emerald sward, and where actual grass will not survive they plant substitutes that mimic the real thing (until you test it with a bare foot). Arizona—once a haven for hay fever sufferers—now has as much pollen as the rest of the country, thanks to the lawn cult.

In fact, in some communities keeping one’s grass trimmed and verdant is quite literally a civic duty. At least once a year a story hits the press of some rebellious home owner who chooses to plant vegetables or wildflowers or—worst sin of all—nothing in his or her front yard, and runs afoul of the local zoning laws.

Mostly, though, Americans love their lawns. To the settlers who first came to North America, faced with a vast untamed wilderness, a cropped grass lawn must have seemed like the ultimate paradigm of civilization.

According to scientists, our basic genetic coding is what drives us to surround our houses with turf. Humans evolved on the African savannas over a period of two million years, in a landscape of grassy plains dotted with trees: not unlike a fine park. When we mow our lawns, we’re trying to re-create those happy long-ago days, dodging lions on the savanna.

“A smooth, closely shaven surface of grass is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban hove. Dwellings, all the rooms of which may be filled with elegant furniture, but with rough uncarpeted floors, are no more incongruous, or in ruder taste, than the shrub and tree and flower-sprinkled yards of most home-grounds, where shrubs and flowers mingle in confusion with tall grass, or ill-defined borders of cultivated ground”

Frank Scott,
in The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, 1870