Leaving Behind the Traditional Lawn

After 20 years as apartment renters in the concrete jungle, my wife and I have just become homeowners. We now reside on a quiet street of close-set 1920s bungalows in Asheville, a small and wonderful city in the mountains of western North Carolina. And we have a yard -- about an eighth of an acre of verdant greensward, partly shaded by massive old oaks, with a couple of vegetable beds and several masses of perennials.

One recent eve, with beer in one hand and garden-hose nozzle in the other, I stood in the balmy gloaming watching fireflies and considering the weird and -- for me at least -- quite pleasurable sensation of inhabiting an archetype. American Dad. Husbanding the lawn our two young children will grow up playing in, where we'll have cookouts and throw Whiffleballs and play flashlight tag.

Alas, as so often seems true in these times, a carefree walk along the well-trod path made by my lawn-tending forebears just doesn't seem to be in the cards. Practices that have been followed for generations turn out to have unwanted consequences; these are now coming home to roost, and it would be plainly irresponsible to ignore them.

I've certainly been aware of what Elizabeth Kolbert calls "the anti-lawn treatise" -- a dissenting cultural trope that names the results of the national obsession with uniformly green lawns ("toxicity, habitat destruction, resource depletion, enforced conformity") -- in her latest New Yorker article, "Turf Wars." But as an apartment-dwelling New Yorker, I haven't had to do anything about it, and so haven't paid close attention. And now I must. Time to learn exactly what's wrong with traditional turf-keeping, and explore how I might reinvent my own little patch -- while preserving, I hope, opportunities for cookouts and flashlight tag.

Kolbert's essay takes care of the "what's wrong" part pretty well -- its account of the cultural and chemical evolution of the American lawn reads like pathology. At first an aristocratic badge of wealth, lawns became -- via mass use of non-native grass species and an ever-more-powerful arsenal of chemical and mechanical tools -- the duty of everyman. Why? Well, as Kolbert says, "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."

But the result of the ubiquity -- in many suburban areas, mandated by law -- of the American lawn is a big picture that's gone clearly wrong:

The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it -- all green, all the time, everywhere. Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.

And that's not to mention the contribution nutrients from lawn fertilizer make to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the dangers -- known and still unknown -- of releasing huge quantities of powerful herbicides into the environment, and the $50 billion a year Americans spend on lawn upkeep.

The final straw for me is that here in western North Carolina we're enduring an extended, multi-year drought (which may represent a new norm for the region, in a changing climate). Our house is right at the top of the deep-red bulls-eye below:

And so, I embark upon another exercise in rethinking a familiar practice, one that feels like I was born to it. Greensward, I hardly knew ye.

Having to engage in these dialectics with standing practice is work -- it's not easy, especially when my time and energy feel stretched to the limit as is. But in past experience, the most important thing has been to begin, and plod along, and the fruit that eventually results is well worth it. And perhaps rethinking the lawn will be the same. Kolbert describes a number of interesting interesting alternatives to the traditional lawn, and as I read these -- and many other methods of and experiences with reinventing one's lawn described in WorldChanging and Boing Boing posts sprung by Kolbert's essay -- I began to get excited. So many things I could -- and want -- to try: permaculture gardening, gardening for wildlife (particularly the establishment of bee and songbird habitat), producing as much of the family's food as possible under my (and wife's) watchful eyes.

In so many ways, this is the proposition I find life offers me: I can stay asleep, walk the easy, comfortingly familiar road that's always been there for me, and continue to feed the ambient suffering of our Earth. Or I can come awake and have an adventure -- with many, many fellow travelers to share with, learn from, and be inspired by -- in hopes of establishing a thoroughly tweaked set of cultural norms that won't dig us all into an ever-deeper hole.

I have to say, though, that anyone who thinks this is typically an easy choice must be pretty "green". As in inexperienced. Change is taxing for us humans. Takes courage and daily commitment, and I can only take heart in the examples, past and present, of individuals who've shown up for the demands of a rapidly changing world.