Don’t Mow Your Lawn

Jul 28

Hi all! I know it’s been a long time since I’ve been here and I truly apologize for that. I have been incredibly busy with university. However, I thought I’d quickly drop by to post a quick essay I had written for an application that I am quite proud of. The prompt was to discuss what I’d “un-invent” if I could. Of course as an engineering student applying for an engineering role, I was stumped on this question for weeks, but I came to a conclusion and completed an essay on the topic that I can stand behind fully. Here is my essay on why landscaping should be un-invented:

Landscaping is the act of making a plot covered in nature look more attractive by “cleaning it up;” in other words, taking away its original inhabitants and covering it in neatly trimmed grass and imported decorative plants. The practice gained popularity in the United States after World War II, coinciding with the rise of American suburbia. In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act into law, also known as the G.I. Bill. This law provided funds for the college education, unemployment insurance, and housing of millions of veterans from the recent war. It decreased loan interest for these “G.I.”s, lowering the barrier to home ownership and increasing it from 44% to 62% of Americans between 1940 and 1960. Around the same time, White residents were leaving the US’s central cities in droves. They were unhappy with their living conditions and had the financial means to pick their lives up and leave. In doing so, they damned the cities to more struggle, as their tax dollars followed them to the more comfortable, more clean, and more White suburbs. On the other hand, people of color, mostly Black people, and other lower-class citizens were left to watch as the cities they called their homes deteriorated even further. The suburban houses the people fleeing the cities took residence in were uniform, with the same floor plans, the same picket fences, and completed with the same, tidy lawns. Abe Levitt, creator of the Levittowns, which are often considered to be the first suburbs, said, “A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling. It is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are the lasting ones.”

What makes a beautiful lawn? The earliest lawns were just well-maintained grass. Grass isn’t special, of course; it grows everywhere. The grass on lawns, however, needs to stay beautiful. Otherwise, the owners will be perceived as unclean, neglectful, and worst of all, poor. To keep the lawn hydrated, approximately one-third of residential water use is put toward landscaping irrigation, totaling up to nine billion gallons of water used a day. Eleven times the emissions of a new car are produced by gas-powered lawn mowers in the same amount of time to keep lawns trimmed and tidy. To help them grow when needed, nitrogen-based fertilizer is sprinkled onto the lawn recklessly. The production of this fertilizer requires a process called ammonia synthesis, which, as of February 2023, was the fourth largest energy consumer in chemical manufacturing in the United States. Phosphate rock, another component of most fertilizers, needs to be mined from the Saharan region of Africa, which has raised concerns about land use and waste produced during the mining process. These environmental issues affect the countries which they are mined from the most, while they only benefit the economies of the producers of this fertilizer; the United States tops this list with 53 million tonnes produced in 2022. Once the fertilizer is spread on the lawn, nitrogen leaches into the soil and often into nearby waterways and reservoirs. This can induce algal blooms in water bodies, depleting them of their dissolved oxygen and killing their native animal inhabitants, and turning them into “dead zones.” But as long as our lawns look presentable to our fellow upper-middle to upper-class neighbors, these issues don’t make a difference to us. As the years went on, the idea of a beautiful lawn started to include some exotic plants to line the outer edges and give the original grass lawn some flavor. Plants like the purple loosestrife, Japanese honeysuckle, and the Callery pear tree were brought to the United States from Europe and Asia to line the lawns and neighborhoods in the suburbs. These species are all non-native and invasive, meaning they drain the resources from the soil that would benefit the native plants, causing them to spread like a disease and kill any native plants in their way. The Bradford pear tree, a species of Callery, has become infamous for choking out native trees and dominating previously diverse environments. It was praised highly by the New York Times in an article published in 1964, where its and its creator’s praises were sung. It was cultivated specifically to be smaller than the Callery pear and sterile, so, as the Times put it, “There is none of the objectionable littering common with other fruiting trees.” This also conveniently prevents the public from having access to the free fruit provided by the original Callery. In recent years, it has become the poster child for invasive species, and many have retracted their original opinions, including NYT who published an article criticizing them in 2021.

When I was brainstorming for this response, every possible un-invention I had come up with had a reverse side of the coin, a benefit that I had found too important to erase. Planes emit worrying amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but they’re the reason I can get between my university and my hometown within a day. Single-use plastics refuse to biodegrade and are a large source of the microplastics that are plaguing our society right now, but they are far easier to manipulate into packaging. But landscaping is solving a problem that only exists because the rich, White residents of early 20th century American cities wanted to set themselves apart from those they felt were beneath them. In reality, native plants and biodiversity are beautiful, and if we weren’t conditioned to think otherwise, we’d find our naturally occurring yards to be wonderful decorations for our suburban houses. The Allegheny blackberry, common strawberry, and wild plum are all edible fruits that are native to the state of Minnesota, which would provide residents with free and delicious fruit they can find in their yards. The cardinal flower, harebell, and heath aster are just a few species of beautiful flowers all of different colors that could be adorning your lawn without selfishly depleting the soil of resources and requiring heaps of fertilizer to survive. The modern lawn is not a necessity; instead, I feel it is actually getting rid of the most beautiful thing about nature: its uniqueness, unpredictability, and biodiversity.

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I hope you found this valuable and interesting! I’d love to expand on this topic in the future on the learning pages to continue backing up my more opinionated side.

Feel free to reach out using the Contact page if you want a certain topic to be posted about on the Lessons pages or on the STEM+log!

Varsha Balaji

Don’t Mow Your Lawn

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