The UN concept of World Habitat Day "is to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and the basic right to adequate shelter for all. It is also intended to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat." The second part of that statement could be about fighting global warming. It could be about fighting trends in urban spatial development that make towns and cities less sustainable. Or it could be about fighting a battle in our own backyards.
In the July 21, 2008 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the absurdities and forces that have given rise to the ubiquitous suburban lawn.
I recently spent a weekend in the rural South African town of Riebeek West, where there is some of the urban tendency to keep lawns trim and weed-free, but with much more tolerance for people who leave gardens untended for a while, or who grow indigenous plants instead of lawns. Here, it is much more obvious that to maintain a suburban-style lawn is to wage battle against nature. The summer is hot and dry, and water needs to be conserved.
But Kolbert writes that lawns are an invention that has spawned not only a multi-billion dollar complex of industries ("Americans spend an estimated forty billion dollars each year on grass."), but also a set of cultural forces that require conformity. The battle, in other words, is not only with the natural environment.
And here's why it's important to the future of the human habitat.
In 1841 Andrew Jackson Downing started a gardening revolution in America that presented the velvety lawn as something "Beautiful and Perfect". When their upkeep required considerable resources, lawns provided status; but then:
As mechanical mowers enabled middle-class suburbanites to cut their own grass, this meaning was lost and a different one took hold. A lawn came to signal its owner's commitment to a communitarian project: the upkeep of the greensward that linked one yard to the next.
Eventually having a lawn around your house became not just something to aspire to, but something that you ought to do. I have lived in suburban houses in Canada where I've felt the pressure to conform. I have let the weeds take over, and incurred the displeasure of neighbours who feel I am not being a responsible citizen.
Yet lawns entail the application of toxic pesticides and artificial fertilizers that result in habitat destruction, reduced biodiversity, and health risks for humans, birds and other animals. Extensive watering puts pressure on available resources, and mowing pollutes the air. Lawns are sterile, monotonous, wasteful, unproductive and unnatural. So, surely, I would be showing greater respect for my neighbour and environment by not keeping a lawn. But many people don't see it that way.
Some initiatives have emerged to encourage people to reduce lawn size, revert to meadow or other natural flora, or grow food. But the pressures against this movement are intense. Apart from social pressures, lawns are felt to be the easiest way to manage residential property (though this is a falsehood). And efforts to at least ban pesticides (as Toronto did and Ontario is now doing) are met with cries of 'foul!' from the pesticide industry, which can't see farther than its next lawn application.
Kolbert reports that a recent NASA-funded study found that lawns and golf courses in the US cover nearly 50,000 square miles - roughly the size of New York State. And keeping this turf well irrigated requires 200 gallons of water per person, per day. A separate estimate from the EPA is that nearly a third of all residential water use in the US goes toward landscaping.
We are literally sucking the ground dry and poisoning habitats for the sake of styling our own habitat in a way that does nothing constructive for us or any other life forms. This is not only irresponsible stewardship, but ultimately damaging our own efforts to provide humanity with shelter, water, food and other necessities of life. The manicured lawn, as an integral part of the broader suburban project, adds to our difficulties in meeting the challenge of finding the resources we need to maintain modern society without irreversibly damaging our finite habitat on Earth.
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