The Lawn Con: Manufactured Conformity
Ralph Levinson: Hi, I'm Dr. Ralph Levinson, Health Sciences Professor Emeritus at UCLA.
Luc Lewitanski: And I'm Luc Lewitanski, French journalist covering technology, politics, and power.
Ralph Levinson: Welcome to Your Planet, Your Health, where we share stories about the environment without falling prey to despair. In these conversations, we explore the knowledge and tools we can use to be good earthlings.
Luc Lewitanski: So, fellow earthlings, if you've listened to some of our previous episodes, we've taken you on retrospectives about how science, politics, and our survival have intersected over the years. And well, today we're going to be talking about leaf blowers. Now, you might think this sounds like somewhat of a small subject, but this is actually an inroad for us to look at what the manufactured homogenous rows of American lawns have wrought upon their environment.
Ralph Levinson: And this is certainly topical and newsworthy. There's actually a movement to ban gasoline leaf blowers that's been gaining traction across some American cities and states.
Luc Lewitanski: Well, that's right. And in fact, it was just announced in March 2024 that Portland will formally begin phasing out gas powered leaf blowers in 2026 to scale all the way up to a full ban by 2028.
Ralph Levinson: And this policy was years in the making, the planning discussions go back to 2018. In addition, there's been an even bigger ban, a statewide initiative in my home state of California to phase out the sale of gas powered lawn equipment starting this year in 2024. It starts with banning the sale of new equipment and there are carve outs, but yes, this is a major initiative that's in this incredibly large and populous state.
Luc Lewitanski: And this one also took a while to phase in, right? Newsom passed the law in 2021, and it's taken effect just this year in 2024.
Ralph Levinson: These wheels grind slowly. Now, to kick things off this time around, we're going to be doing a poetry reading of sorts. This poem is somewhat atypical. It appears to have been written by an individual who goes by the pseudonym Touch Moonflower. And he wrote it, it seems, last fall, fall of 2023. So Luc, why don't you get us started? Kick us off with the first stanza and then we'll alternate.
Luc Lewitanski: A bright and shining example of the suicidal absurdity of techno-capitalist society occurs every year at this time, all across the country. Deciduous trees spend all spring taking nutrients out of the soil to make leaves, which photosynthesize all summer and fall.
Ralph Levinson: When the cold comes, those leaves fall. The technical term is dehisce. And the trees go dormant for the winter. All across this great land, people proceed to fire up specialized machines literally called leaf blowers, which burn irreplaceable fossil fuels pumped out of the ground at great expense to produce, in addition to carbon monoxide and noise, powerful blasts of forced air.
Luc Lewitanski: They blow the leaves into immense piles and then rake them into huge bags made of polyethylene, a by-product of fossil fuel refinement which will take longer to decompose than the geologic processes which produced the fuel to begin with. A very, very long time.
Ralph Levinson: These bags full of leaves are then loaded into trucks which, burning fossil fuels, move them to giant areas called landfills, where the leaves, trapped in plastic, undergo anaerobic decomposition and rather than releasing their nutrients back into the soil, turn to slime and sulphurous gases.
Luc Lewitanski: This entire process means that, wherever modern humans congregate, the soil quickly becomes impoverished, as the nutrients required for cyclic leaf production are removed, rather than stored in the ground, producing a kind of grey, dusty soil that, when I was a professional gardener, we immediately recognised and referred to as 'blower disease'.
Ralph Levinson: It is all so astonishingly pointless and debased and wasteful that it would probably be better not to spend too much time contemplating it. Let's turn our attention to more pleasant things.
Luc Lewitanski: And actually, Ralph, upon talking about this with you, at the risk of losing all the poetry in this message, Ralph, let's do a little bit of elementary fact checking. Let's correct the record here. Did Touch Moonflower get it all right here?
Ralph Levinson: Well, as you say, this is a poem, not a scientific summary, and we should enjoy it as such. But in fact, there were a few small errors that don't take away from the main theme. So for example, he mentions that polyethylene bags, in his estimation, are going to take longer to decompose than it takes to form oil. And I'm sorry, that's simply not true in the real world. Polyethylene bags, these kind of plastics can take hundreds, even a thousand years. But the organic material that's going to form petroleum has to seep down to areas where there's a lot of heat and pressure. And that could take thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. In fact, oil does take much longer to form than it takes plastic to decompose. He mentions that gas leaf blowers emit pollutants like carbon monoxide and volatile hydrocarbons, which is true. But there are also many other pollutants coming from these. And I would stress that these include carcinogens like benzene and other pollutants such as carbon dioxide because the gas engines used in these leaf blowers and in many gas lawnmowers are incredibly inefficient and just spew out pollution.
Luc Lewitanski: So the fact that gas leaf blowers emit carbon monoxide is true. It's not so much a correction there, just kind of adding to the list of pollutants.
Ralph Levinson: No question that the spirit of what he's saying is true, but you know, scientifically didn't quite get it right.
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, and we couldn't just sit by and just read misinformation on air.
Ralph Levinson: No.
Luc Lewitanski: So, thank you for correcting the record.
Ralph Levinson: You're welcome. That does not take away from the spirit and the point the poem makes about the incredible, senseless, useless waste of using fossil fuels to do our raking for us.
Luc Lewitanski: Ultimately, we shared this because we thought the thrust of what he had to say was noteworthy. And what I like about it is this sort of this literary device of defamiliarizing you with a process that you might be experiencing in your daily life and just trying to take an outsider's perspective on it to question why things are a certain way. And that's certainly something we're going to unpack now.
♪ "Leafblower" musical montage interlude ♪
Luc Lewitanski: What Touch Moonflower was touching upon here was trying to get us to think back to what a pathological habit Americans have developed with this lawn care and these leaf blowing things. And so, let's try to figure out how we got here.
Ralph Levinson: Well, it's not just Americans, but yes, America is the king of this wasteful thing.
Luc Lewitanski: It's a typically American thing as well. It certainly reaches its paroxysm there. And it's not unlike Coca-Cola or Levi's jeans has become a way for Americans to implant their hegemony abroad and a symbol of America from the manufactured lawns on American military bases… like the interstate highway system, like fast food chains, like television, the lawn has served to unify the American landscape. But anyways, how did we get to doing such a lovely thing? How did we get into this situation in the first place? What poisoned our minds? What idea got into us to think that we needed to have these little green expanses in our front yard? It's a simulacrum of a simulacrum at this point. It's people imitating a fake... There's an interesting theory we came upon for why did lawns become such a fixture of elite aristocracy in Britain and France? One might think of the Garden of Versailles, which was designed by Le Notre. Let's think about a picturesque European landscape. Let's think about what an idealized green carpet would look like. In the Palace of Versailles, there was a demand made by the French king to install a giant "tapis vert", a big green carpet.
Ralph Levinson: In Versailles, there were lawns, but there were also these very geometric gardens, there were hedges and so on.
Luc Lewitanski: You have these giant geometric expanses, you've got these giant green rectangles. I'm like, these green homogenous rectangles are really a completely constructed idea of what is nice and beautiful and pastoral. So this wide green homogenous expanse, meticulously trimmed, you know, was this ideal for the Versailles Palace. But actually, in doing a little bit of research here, I came upon this idea that the idea of the lawn itself as a popular thing for British and French aristocracies, It was popularized in the imagination of European aristocrats through Italian Renaissance paintings. Basically in the 1500s, some Italian Renaissance painters drew pastoral green expanses of landscapes. This idealized version of a fake nature, of a utopia, of a completely constructed pastoral natural scene. This was a fixture in some Renaissance paintings that were popular amongst British aristocrats, And then, in turn, it influenced their idea of what was proper and natural, and they demanded that their gardeners, workers, slaves, toil with their scythes and trim down the land with this really time-consuming and labor-intensive process to destroy the beautiful meadows of their countrysides to turn them into these manufactured fake landscapes.
Ralph Levinson: Aristocrats liked having a front lawn that wasn't wild and wicked, where they can lounge in leisure. on land that they didn't have to use, except for leisure.
Luc Lewitanski: These British aristocrats asked their gardeners to make their front yards, what they looked at when they opened their front door, when they went outside, They wanted to recreate this fake ideal from the pastoral landscapes in the paintings. And these British and French aristocrats were tending towards a form of pastoral, beautiful nature that was entirely artificial. The British aristocrats and their gardening decisions were directly influenced by the aesthetic choices made in Renaissance paintings from hundreds of years before. Specifically, British gardening in the 18th century was influenced by 15th century Italian Renaissance painters. This ideal of a beautiful green expanse, when I say it's a simulacrum of a simulacrum, I mean to say this was literally rich European aristocrats who wanted their houses to look like the paintings they liked.
Ralph Levinson: It's not just the paintings. I mean, the aristocrats started it because they wanted to be able to have picnics on front lawns and stuff, and they were showing they didn't need to have productive land.
Luc Lewitanski: But Ralph, what do you think about this?
Ralph Levinson: No, Luc, you know, at first I pushed back a little bit on that idea until I saw where they were coming from. And in fact, it's true that if you think about the mid-late 1500s in England, there was a lot of allusion to the Italian Renaissance and Italian culture. And certainly a lot of European gardens in the subsequent centuries were based on Renaissance ideas and ideals, at least to some degree. Now the Renaissance was very self-consciously alluding back to Roman times. So when they developed their gardens, they very much had in mind the ideas that went behind Roman gardens. And it was very much part of the Renaissance scheme to go back and look at the literature. They would comb monasteries. They did have descriptions, Cicero's letters, and those type of things that described gardens. They found the statues that were in gardens and put them in their own gardens. And much of what we know about how they were thinking about it comes from this book that was written in 1499. This book was called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Now, yeah, it's a mouthful. And it had some ideas that were extrapolated from Roman gardens. And a lot of that had to do with the geometry of it and the symbolism behind the geometry. And this became later things like what we would see in Renaissance gardens and subsequently gardens in Versailles and throughout Europe. These sometimes very self-consciously symbolic, other times just the aesthetic of it, the organization. But basically it was landscape as an idea or an ideal, not landscape as this is where the cows are grazing. So there's the functional garden, right? Where you grow things. And then there's this, where you put your statues, where there's a pool. In our gardens, we are making a statement. With our land, we are going to make an aesthetic and philosophical statement.
Luc Lewitanski: The nature of that statement is you can afford to have this land not be used for the production of food, which again was a luxury at the time. And not only that, but they had no power tools at the time. None of these polluting two-stroke engines. So they, I mean, in a way it wasn't polluting, but it was extremely labor intensive. This was the blood, sweat and toil and the many, many hours, hours and lives of agrarian labor just doing this, this Sisyphean task just to make these rich people have a back or a front of their nice little house that looks like their pretty pictures.
Ralph Levinson: The labor is a really big deal, right? I mean, you had to be wealthy. These were not, you know, just small landowners, you know, who were concerned both in Roman times and in Renaissance times with these effects, and even in subsequent centuries. You're absolutely right about the amount of labor involved and the fact that, which is still true today to some degree as we'll discuss later that, yes, land has more productive uses than ornamentation and ostentatious wealth. And it's also important to remember, as I think you pointed out earlier, that these weren't mowing in the sense we'd- It wasn't until the 19th century that the lawnmower, even vaguely as we know it now, was invented. These were, and even then barely. I mean, this really, when you're talking about mowing, you're talking about some guy with a blade chopping this down.
Luc Lewitanski: And in a way you can argue from our environmentalist prism, it was more environmentalist because they didn't have these power tools. But ultimately, it gets back to the question of like, why was this necessary in the first place? Why did we need to do all this labour to maintain gardens? I think it's fantastic that you actually had a copy of this allegorical novel, the influential work from 1499, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Ralph Levinson: And the sub-translation of that is "A Strife of Love in a Dream".
Luc Lewitanski: Okay, so that speaks to these idealized idyllic views of nature and these perfect symmetrical, geometrical forms.
Ralph Levinson: Right, That was the main thing there. This was woodcuts in this and they didn't go into the nature of the plants you should put in. Again, it was the ideas and it was very much about the geometry and the layout. It was very much into geometric form.
Luc Lewitanski: Right, but actually many influential designers of the Italian Renaissance drew inspiration from the novel's garden concepts and incorporated them into their own designs. So there's a way in which this shadowed and echoed itself and so this was part of the dissemination, the popularization, the idea of making this form of nature something to aspire to, at least within these elite spheres. Of course, the Italian Renaissance garden itself was sort of breaking down the space between the garden and the house and the landscape. It was sort of creating a form of manicured land. And of course, all form of gardening is man imposing his will on nature. But it's destroying nature as a tribute to a picturesque ideal of what nature, what these people would like nature to look like, you know, it's sort of recreating a forgery. Gardens are a form of political theatre presenting the power, wisdom and order and beauty and glory of the ruling class at the time. I mean, these people basically popularized these ideals. So the imagined aesthetic of the antiquity became the aesthetic of the aristocratic elite around the time of the Renaissance, and this was popularized by people like the Medici and the landscape paintings that they started to order. And it was a way for them to showcase their orderliness and their ability to have this mastery over land.
Ralph Levinson: Well, and also to show off their sophistication, just like all art did. Art is, you know, supposed to manifest your sophistication, your taste, your aesthetic, and your ideals.
Luc Lewitanski: Exactly. There was a way in which the Renaissance consciously constructed itself as a reaction, a critique of the dominant society of the medieval times. The "Middle Ages" is itself the construction of people who were living in that era and who were dissatisfied and wanted to make a critique and therefore had their idealized version of what the past was. They had some documentations and obviously their ruins were less damaged than they are now, but it was going from an echo of an echo of an idea. On that point of the modern garden emerging in England, I had from the London Luminaries website about the English landscaping movement. They attribute Italian Renaissance artists in the 15th century and later 17th century French artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorin who were depicting these Renaissance landscapes. And their paintings merged depictions of the Roman Campania, the countryside, and the mythical ancient Greek land of Arcadia. So when these paintings arrived back in England as souvenirs, an awareness and fondness for these kinds of landscapes grew among aristocratic British men and so they began to use them as the models for their real-life gardens, their home gardens. And as you're saying, this is bringing us to England. But anyways, I'll be citing a few quotes from Lawn People, a book by American geographer Paul Robbins. So, we know from European medieval art that cultivated lawn spaces were represented as part of the garden ideal of paradise. Medieval artwork depictions of the Garden of Eden included something like open grass, as did the "prairie émaillée" (dotted meadow) traditions of 15th century tapestry. These ideals were not realized in the real world landscape until the 17th century, however, when palatial plans first began to incorporate large areas of turf grass as part of manor design. The distinction between a rambling grass meadow and a lawn was established in France during the 1500s, where estate gardeners tended to both. The lawn emerges in this period as a form of architectural expression. When the turf grass aesthetic was exported from the continent to England in the 1700s, the meadow was left behind and the manicured lawn became more universal.
Ralph Levinson: But lawns without that kind of self-consciousness and that, you know, still harking back to that geometric form really starts in the 18th century in England, in a big way anyway. The 18th century in England the 1700s, which of course is bringing us up to the new colonies in America, because these were British transplants for the most part, or at least part of what we would now call the United Kingdom, Scots, Irish, Britain, and so on. For the most part, they were also German, Swedish, and so on. But much of the culture was from at least harking back to that. Certainly of the elites, right? I mean, the elites who were governors and so on were from very much from British upper classes and at least related to them culturally and aesthetically.
Luc Lewitanski: Actually, it was very hard to get this European grass to take root in America. It was not indigenous to the land and in fact in large parts of southern America they were importing the grass from Africa because the settlers who initially came to America realized that the European grass they imported was just not taking it was too arid. The conditions of the soil in the southern United States, or the southern American colonies, or whatever it was then, they were just not appropriate. And going back to the origin of the lawn, I mean the whole point of the homogenous lawn is that you don't use it to grow anything so they're not useful for anything edible. They're only this ostentatious signal to boost the owner's self-esteem. You know, it's a statement to say 'I don't need to use my land. I can afford to have this boring field of nothing in my front lawn. You know, I can show to the neighborhood that I'm this wealthy individual and I can afford not to do anything with it'. And ultimately that was the original purpose for the English elites It was the first land that they decided to let lay fallow and not use For agrarian purposes because it could afford to it was an arbitrary elitist aesthetic to show that they could afford not to use the land. Well, obviously not all Americans wanted to model their life after European aristocracy Though the first settlers in America, and certainly the wealthy ones, did have an interest in recreating the mores of aristocracy. So, it was a practice that was imported from this desire to emulate the European aristocracy and the European elite by American settlers. But so, this is from "American Lawn" in 1999 by Georges Teyssot: Like the Gothic castle, the lawn experienced a 19th century Renaissance, the revival of a primitive civilization of shepherds. The passage from practical reason to lavish consumption also took place in the New World. A movement addressed by Thorstein Veblen, whose "Theory of the Leisure Class" described this shift from "use value" to "luxury value" by habitually identifying beauty with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not expensive is accounted not beautiful. The same variation in matters of taste is visible also as regards parks and gardens. Veblen illustrated his point with the example of the closed-crop yard or park, which appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples. It appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do classes. As such, lawns are nothing but, at their best, imitations of the pasture. High regard for these spectacular expanses of green grass manifests the ethnic origins of their enthusiasts, a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate. In the eyes of the new American leisure class, for which higher cost meant higher beauty, the lawn conferred signs of acquired nobility. In 1957, a group of Westport, Connecticut residents acquired flocks of sheep to keep their lush lawns trimmed. This tradition may explain why some suburban lawns are populated by a range of brightly painted concrete animals such as rabbits, does and their fawns, a plethora of bambis and pink flamingos. To the extent that the estate lawn, with its substitutional basis, is a simulacrum of the pastoral, the popular lawn becomes a simulacrum of substitution. Cluttered with plaster or plastic effigies, this grass menagerie is a "ferme ornée", or an ornamental farm, where the aesthetic of the grotesque lives on. Quoting from Georges Teyssot's "American Lawn".
Ralph Levinson: And you mentioned it being like the sheep or this, but they still, they didn't want to see working farms and villages. They would actually put up stands of trees so you didn't see the riffraff. You didn't see, you know, how the sausage was made, so to speak. Because you didn't want to upset your aesthetic experience with actual people working on a farm, an actual farm. So people like Washington and Jefferson wanted to emulate the British aristocracy and the gardeners at Mount Vernon on their website talk about, and they have diagrams that there's no question that George Washington went around, looked at gardens. He never went to England. and he never went to Europe.
Luc Lewitanski: George Washington, the gardeners that he hired at the time were specifically English landscape gardeners. Now bear in mind in the colonies, of course these people were mostly from England, but he made a conscious choice, even though as you say, he'd never set foot in the UK.
Ralph Levinson: Now back to Washington, where this became important is that images of Mount Vernon were disseminated in the early 19th century. And those who could afford to really, Washington was of so much respect and so beloved that this became a kind of, Not a standard that most could achieve but it did set a certain bar that at least was a value in early America.
Luc Lewitanski: Remember America being such a huge land. Most people weren't directly getting to see Mount Vernon.
Ralph Levinson: No, of course not.
Luc Lewitanski: But because, as you're saying Washington was such a popular guy, part of what helped the contagion of this idea of the American lawn were the images of Mount Vernon that were produced and distributed throughout the country in the 18th and 19th centuries. And this gave wealthy Americans this ideal to aspire to sort of copying and it's part of the spreading of this idea.
Ralph Levinson: Absolutely. Yeah, Luc, let's just back up for a moment. There's an interesting phenomenon that happened where George Washington and all in Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson in Monticello, they were aware of these gardens. After all, they came from – their ancestors came from British aristocracy, or at least from Britain, and would have known what the aristocracy was up to. And Jefferson had been in France. They wanted to mimic this. And it seems that the popularity of George Washington and Mount Vernon really helped get this going, at least among American elites that in fact in the 18th and 19th centuries pictures were distributed of Mount Vernon. And this was a very self-conscious imitation of what the British elites were doing.
Luc Lewitanski: Well, it was part of the contagion of this idea of the lawn, right? It was spread through the reproductions of American founding father, America's first president, George Washington and his home in Mount Vernon. So this gave wealthy Americans an ideal to mimic, an ideal to aspire towards. You know, this was very much an aspirational thing for American elites. And this was part of the propagation of this very popular meme of wanting to, you know, destroy all the local biodiversity in your front lawn.
Ralph Levinson: Andrew Downing, who his first book was in 1841, and it was called "A Treatise on the the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America". And it was a big success. And in the book, Downing wrote, "When smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know the order and culture are established."
Luc Lewitanski: So it's very much his moral idealization of assuming that if you keep a good front lawn, you must be a good person. That's what he's reflecting on.
Ralph Levinson: That's right.
Luc Lewitanski: This Andrew Downing. That's very much this moral connection of thinking that your character is reflected by the quality of your lawn is already coming up in Andrew Downing's writing in 1850.
Ralph Levinson: This brings us a little later to Frederick Law Olmsted. In 1868, Frederick Olmsted was hired to create the landscape for a planned community just outside of Chicago, west of Chicago. In this planned community, we get lawns, very much the lawns we now know, at least in design, where each house in this planned community called Riverside, Illinois was set 30 feet back from the street. And instead of having walls between the houses in the front anyway, there was just this one expanse of lawn giving this kind of broad view. At least in the front yard, they didn't have walls between them. And so they were all connected by this expanse of green lawn. And so this was where the idea of a planned community, suburb, the use of the lawn as a statement really first shows up. This is really sort of the birth of the suburban lawn in my mind.
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah. I mean, and it's crucial that this imagined one giant green expanse, the suburbs, as though they were one continuous park. This idea of this one long expanse of land that becomes a collective responsibility is a very different it's as you said the fact that Olmsted instead of erecting walls between people's front lawns had it as one contiguous space that you could walk across it almost created this philosophical statement of how in the American suburbs basically the one continuous lawn, in the idealized version at least, is sort of supposed to be like a park. It is like the park that you walk across it I mean At this point, suburbs are not really designed to be walked across. But there is at least this ideal in the mind of the planners that they are for the collective and therefore maintaining it as a homogenous patch is part of the responsibility of the people who are owning the land. I mean, this was a novel concept compared to the UK.
Ralph Levinson: Right. It was clearly a community effort. It was clearly a symbol and statement of community. It was a planned community. You're absolutely right.
Luc Lewitanski: Back to this idea of the one continuous lawn. There's this author Michael Pollan, who's written a little bit about his feelings on American lawns, and he talks about how there's a very performative aspect to the American front lawn that in fact it is just there to look pretty. It's just there to send a signal. It's just there to be a symbol. So the backyard is the place where you have fun and you have your rules and you have your privacy and you're less exposed. But the conceit of the American suburb is that you're all cohabitating in one giant continuous park and the American lawn is a symbol of that continuity. The lawn is a purely exposed performative area. This is a quote from Ann Leighton, who was a historian of gardening. Ann Leighton's contention was that America has made essentially one important contribution to world garden design, and that is the custom of uniting the front lawns of however many houses there might be on both sides of a street to present an untroubled aspect of expansive green to the passerby. And she goes on to say, "France has its set of formal geometric gardens, think Versailles, Le Notre. England has its picturesque parks, whereas America, this unbounded democratic river of manicured lawn across which they array their houses". And so I thought there was something about that fiction. It's creating a space that no one can actually walk on, and yet that it's trying to recreate a park in suburban lifestyle where everyone drives from thing to thing. So it is very much a paradox.
Ralph Levinson: You mentioned that nobody can walk on - Sure, people could walk on it, but there's the trope of the old man, raised fist, 'GET OFF MY LAWN!'
Luc Lewitanski: Exactly, thank you for bringing that up, yeah. Because it's true that that speaks to like, even as an archetype, we're not in this idealized green, expanse of what each suburb is one giant continuous park. It's no, it's people's private property and they are not too keen, they have -
Ralph Levinson: Keep off the lawn signs.
Luc Lewitanski: So it's not being enjoyed by anyone.
Ralph Levinson: In 1870, a couple of years later, after Olmsted was designing this planned community, Frank J. Scott, who wrote a lot about beauty and landscape art, wanted to make Olmsted's ideas accessible to the middle class, make it something that they can embrace. And he published the first volume devoted to "Suburban Home Embellishment". What Scott emphasized, which is again, different from old world practice, is to dwell on the individual's responsibility to his neighbors.
And here's a quote: "It is unchristian," he declared, "to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure". One's lawn, Scott held, should contribute to the collective landscape. He actually considered this a Christian conformity obligation.
Luc Lewitanski: So Frederick Olmsted picked up the torch from Andrew Downing, but Frank J. Scott picked up on Downing's idea as well as Olmsted's desire to spread this, by also keeping the moral component, right? I mean, we have this quote by Frank J. Scott who imposed the responsibility onto the individual. So now you are basically, if you bought a house in the modern suburban developments, you were signing up for maintaining your little plot of this universal expanse of green to create this makeshift park that was very hard to maintain in a lot of these climates. It was not at all natural and has to be perfectly uniform and homogenized.
Ralph Levinson: And it had to do with whether you were a good citizen in the community, whether you were a good Christian, talking back to that religious aspect of it. It's hard to appreciate, but in 1868, 1870, a lot of what we now think of as lawns translating through the picturesque and the English manor houses back to the palaces and the Renaissance gardens. Here, we're finally getting to suburbia and the lawn. There were obviously also technological advancements. You know, as I mentioned, there was the invention of the lawnmower. And well, the first patented lawnmower in England was 1830 in the United States 1860. And these were sort of like the push mowers that we're used to, the old fashioned ones. They were only first mass produced around the late 1800s. It was in 1902 that they were the first petrol-driven lawnmowers. But the rearly next big quantitative leap in lawns really comes after World War II, the aftermath of World War II, the need for housing, and the growth of suburbia and the GI Bill that allowed for people to get mortgages, at least people who were white and acceptable. And this was also the time of the birth of the
Homeowners Association. With the birth of these very self-conscious suburban flights from the city, there was the development of Homeowner Associations starting at this period in the 1940s.
Luc Lewitanski: There was one moment that massively exported the popularity of lawns across the world and across American soldiers stationed at military bases around the world. Because just as today, you know, every American embassy has a perfectly manufactured lawn, even in Saudi Arabia. Well, back in the Second World War, every military base had its perfect manufactured lawns. And you have to remember this was a time of great turmoil and stress but also these were the formative years for these young American men and these were the areas during which they could fraternize and socialize and so these were very formative places for the GIs, the American soldiers stationed in these bases around the world between 1941 and 1945. And so, these American lawns become exported and obviously they end up changing the local landscape of wherever America sets up its bases but also American soldiers who came from all across different areas of the United States ended up being sent to places in the world where they could see this perfect ideal of the European grass. And this was very influential in the American imaginary. It tied further this this idea of American hegemony and the American lawn, and it tied the idea of the American dream and having one's manufactured lawn. And so when the American GIs came back, thanks to some government grants as well, they were able to buy and invest in properties. And so there was a massive boom, right? There was a boom in birth, but there was a boom in acquiring property through the GI Bill. Obviously, that was very racist and only affected some people, but it was a policy that put a lot of dollars, put a lot of public investment towards the idea of developing housing and the housing choices that they made there, the types of developments that were built in America after the Second World War are when this goes from being an elite practice and a practice in some suburbs to being the dominant mode of American life, both in the public imaginary but actually through legally enforced means in the planning decisions. So, let's back up a little bit, right? The reason why American deserts today have these manufactured green lawns is a consequence of the experience of the draft and military people experiencing this, and their new homes were taking inspiration of that. But of course the advent of the mass-produced suburb created this scenario in which the developers, the builders, were actually setting up lawns in place before anyone purchased the houses. And then this became a responsibility for any person purchasing the house or the deed for the property that they would have to take on this responsibility of the lawn. And the developers empowered these local associations, sometimes for profit organizations, called Homeowners Associations, HOA for short. And basically the choice made by the housing developers because they were empowered by the government to give this structure power, allowed basically to create this structure that acts almost like a local government, enforcing the most petty ways of imagining what it is to be a good neighbor. This very sort of busybody, I mean obviously not all HOAs are created equal and some can be more or less coercive and some can be quite pleasant and fraternal, but the principle of the legal structure of an HOA is is something that was set up with these mass developed suburbs, the expectation that each of them should have a lawn, and then there was the creation of this administrative body that was entirely there for policing good neighbourly behaviour and enforcing a certain length for how tall your grass has to be. And there's very rigid forms of policing the appearance of the neighbourhood, basically. And so, this is a responsibility that people take on. But the HOAs are created by the developers when they build a neighbourhood. This practice began with the mass suburbs of the post-Second World War moment, but of course, the HOAs are in effect to this day, and their power is written into the deeds. And so there's automatic membership for anybody who purchases housing in one of these areas, right?
Ralph Levinson: It really kind of shocked me a little bit how oppressive these homeowner associations can be.
Luc Lewitanski: So the lawn upkeep is part of the deal for new house purchases in these mass-produced suburbs. And once the HOA is codified and people purchase housing in the suburbs, whether or not they're making an informed decision, they end up stuck with this burden of having to maintain their lawn to be the same as those of their neighbors. And there's very little power to change the system from the inside once you're in one of these HOAs. Now, there are stories of people banding together, but those are the exception to the rule. Part of the enforcement of this ubiquitous practice across America is very much due to the way in which developers empowered Homeowners Associations to enforce this policing of lawn length and the height of grass. And so ultimately this has culminated in a situation where America is completely associated with this aesthetic. Going back to the Second World War and the military bases, this is really an aesthetic of landscaping that America has exported. And so, as I was saying, the American communities in Saudi Arabia have their lawns in the middle of the desert, you know, it looks just like
an American suburb. And similarly, as I was saying, all the American embassies and consulates around the world have this very prominent fixture of the green lawn. It's something that became codified in the way Americans chose to organize themselves around this manufactured storefront window that no one can use, you know, there's almost this too beautiful to touch idea. So we have this down of understanding how we got here, why lawns are all over America, why they're such a quintessentially American thing. But ultimately, how many are there? How big has this gotten? Can we quantify this both in terms of how labor intensive it is, how much time it takes, how much land it takes, how much water it takes, how much noise it creates, how much pollution it creates? Let's try to quantify why we have this bee in our bonnet against lawns. It's not just that we want people to get off their lawns, and to stop mowing them. There are actual quantifiable ways in which this obsession with dominating nature to create this green carpet all over everyone's front lawn is actually quite destructive. And we're going to go into the scientific record to bolster this up. Let's try to measure just how bad lawns and leaf blowers are on their local ecosystem, on their environment. Why are lawns so bad in the first place? What do we have against lawns?
Ralph Levinson: Well, you brought up some of these issues. So all right, Luc, how bad is it? Well, first, let's talk about the amount of land used. One estimate quoted often is 40 million acres of land. Now, that also translates to more than 50,000 square miles. One estimate is that the combined United States lawn area is larger than the country of France. All right, France, you're a lawn now. This is a lot of land.
Luc Lewitanski: Going back to quoting Michael Pollan: "In a little over a century, Americans have rolled a green mantle of grass across the continent with scarcely a thought to the local conditions".
Ralph Levinson: As far as what we spend on them, there's again various estimates, but one that's often quoted is $30 billion a year. What about water use? Now, water use is a big deal, and I'm very aware of it here in Southern California, we're in a mega drought, 3 trillion gallons of water.
Luc Lewitanski: Americans use over 3 trillion gallons of water to maintain their lawns.
Ralph Levinson: This water is not retained in the soil as it would be with native plants or plants that have deep roots. It runs off and ends up in the ocean. Now, we're talking about the soil and the loss of nutrients. So what do we do about that? Well, we use 3 million tons, that's 6 billion pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizers on our lawns every year. And the nitrogen then can also run off, and nitrogen runoff is a big harm to the ecosystem. Fertilizers end up causing algal blooms and hypoxic areas as they filter down eventually into bodies of water like the Gulf. The other thing that we do to keep our lawns in moral shape is to put almost 60 million pounds of pesticides on these lawns that of course will affect the bees and the pollinators. It's not just keeping your lawn. The insects that fly into your lawn don't respect your property rights.
Luc Lewitanski: So, we've just talked about why lawns require such upkeep in terms of maintaining the soil. You spoke about the pesticides and the fertilizer. This ultimately comes down to the idea that lawns are monocultures and they destroy the local biodiversity. They're not indigenous to the local land. The plants that you grow for your lawn are a very manufactured choice. It's, again, imported from Europe and recreating this fake ideal. So lawns in fact are a biological desert and that's actually an insult to deserts, you know, they're plant pollinator plants. It is more varied, interesting flower butterflies and bees, and lawns are much less exciting than deserts. It's a deeply engineered landscape really. Lawns are destructive to the local biodiversity and they're this completely artificial product. Let's go back to quoting Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan says, "Gardening, I had come to appreciate, is a painstaking exploration of place, everything that happens in my garden: the thriving and the dying of particular plants, the marauding of various insects and other pests, teaches me to know this patch of land intimately. Its geology and microclimate, the particular ecology of its local weeds and animals and insects. My garden prospers to the extent I grasp these particularities and adapt to them. Lawns work on the opposite principle. They depend for their success on the overcoming of local conditions". Now citing Elizabeth Kolbert's article, "Turf War" in the New Yorker from 2008: Almost all lawn grass in America is actually native to Africa, Europe and Asia. And so when you work with the biodiversity, when you work in gardening, you're collaborating with nature on what's best for the local area. The untended meadow is a lot better for the environment than this uniform manufactured imported idea of– yet, almost the entirety of the lawn grass in America is either from Europe in the northern parts and indigenous to Africa in the southern parts of the United States. So getting this imported grass to work and to thrive in its non-native environment is the reason why you have to have this massive upkeep of fertilizer and herbicides and pesticides and this massive amounts of watering. Until it actually gets growing to the point in which you're mandated to shorten it back again. So you go through all this effort to get it nice and green and not crunchy and get it back to growing and then you go all that effort is meant to be cut by the end of the week. You never want it to actually be unkempt. And in a way, the fact that the grass itself is imported from Europe and partially Africa is a microcosm, a small metaphor that holds this idea of the American colonial project. It represents the colonial history in itself, right? A synecdoche is a a literary device in which a part of something is substituted for the whole. So I'm saying the lawn is a synecdoche for America and specifically the history of colonial America here. And basically, lawns are the largest irrigated crop in America, three times as big an area as corn is dedicated to this inedible crop, right? And so, when colonialists arrived to America and they ordered the grasses from back home, it's this very colonial moment that happened. So going back to citing Georges Teyssot in 1999: "Historians of the colonization of the American continent have shown how the first colonists introduced European perennial species in 1633 that were apparently better suited to pastoralism than native annual species. This is the origin of the particular problem of the North American lawn, how to acclimate the plants of cold countries with those of warmer climates. This, to a certain extent, explains why the lawn appeared to the American colonists as something domestic, or at least domesticated. Produced by a millennial evolution and adapted to the specific needs of the sedentary northern European shepherd, this vegetal expanse required some sort of grazing, bearing that, it had to be scythed or mown artificially". Leonard Barron, writing in 1906 as the editor of the Garden magazine, was among many specialists to have explained this need. Mowing is necessary in as much as it prevents the plants from going to seed, and the prevention of seeding encourages vigorous vegetative growth, which means abundant foliage and bright healthy green colour. Certain horticulturalists, such as Sarah Stein, have come to consider the lawn as surface that, while vegetal, is artificial in that it only attains its emerald splendor when subjected to a perpetual torture. "Continual amputation is a critical aspect of lawn care", Stein has observed. Cutting grass regularly, preventing it from reaching up and flowering, forces it to sprout still more blades, more rhizomes, more roots to become an ever more impenetrable mat until it becomes the perfect lawn, the perfect sealant through which nothing else can grow. And in 1850, an English traveler described the American landscape as ugly and formal. Ugly because it was covered with scraps and debris. Formal because it was drawn with a straight edge, yielding very straight roads and square or rectangular fields. This forced acclimatation of the lawn can be explained as the effect of a will to civilize the continent. And if you think about like the British person coming over thinking, 'oh how uncivilized!', well, I think there's a microcosm for the American experience. Though again, the timeline here we're 1850 so it's post-colonial, but of course there were still close ties between the elites, the aristocracies and their mimetism and their imitating of each other, their mimicry.
Ralph Levinson: So Luc, you mentioned how what we use in our lawns, the grasses that we grow in our lawns are not native to North America. And indeed, these are invasive species. This is not just an aesthetic question. This has repercussions. For example, The grasses that we use, we use them because they grow quickly and we could just keep watering them and they'll be luxuriant and we just have to mow them and we'll have a luxuriant lawn. Well, what it turns out is these invasive grasses grow quickly, they get big when you're not mowing them and they dry out quickly. They're not made for quite the Southern California, for example, environment.
Luc Lewitanski: Because they're not indigenous to the climate. I mean, not only do they have built in because they grow so fast, as you say, built in this upkeep, but also there's a safety hazard, right?
Ralph Levinson: Absolutely. These plants dry out quickly. And on top of that, they are made to be more of a carpet. We do carpets of grass, whereas in the more native situation, they're more clumped with big areas between the grass. Now, why is that important? Because if a fire starts, by the time fire season comes along in Southern California, these are all dried out carpets of fuel for the fire. So they bring the fire from one tree to the other tree. So even if you sparsely have trees, you have this grass as this great way to spread the fire. So really, these are invasive plants and grasses that were brought to be ornamental, but we really pay a price for them in the form of wildfires, which are a huge issue, especially in the west.
Luc Lewitanski: Picking up on the initial theme that spurred all this on, the poetry from Touch Moonflower, on this point about leaf blowers. Now, I found out in this research based on Banks and McConnell's paper from 2015 that there are apparently 11 million leaf blowers in operation in the United States, and the gas-powered leaf blowers use these two-stroke engines which are extremely inefficient. And if you look at it in a certain way, leaf blowers are an unnecessary invention. They're a not particularly efficient substitute for rakes, in the first place. They're also kind of hyper individualistic, because they kind of just shove your problem out of sight to the next area, right? Whatever is undesirable in your area, just gets kind of punted and rolled outside of your little perimeter, and then it's somebody else's problem. I mean, of course, then there's bagging.
Ralph Levinson:
These leaf blowers, like you mentioned, use this very inefficient engine. They don't burn about 30% of their fuel completely. These create, by being inefficient in burning fuel, lots of pollutants. One estimate was about 27 million tons in 2011. The California Air Resources Board estimated that using a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming pollutants as driving a Toyota Camry from Los Angeles to Denver. It does give you a feeling for just how much these little things pollute. The leaf blowers, also among those emissions includes nitrous oxide, which also drives ozone depletion, a subject that will be familiar to our listeners from our last podcast episode, and is indirectly a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Let's broaden this view a little bit. It's not just leaf blowers, it's all gas powered lawn equipment and particularly also lawn mowers, which we had talked a bit about. Now, a 2015 study found that lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and other lawn equipment account for a quarter of all emissions of cancer causing benzene. These gas powered lawn equipment also accounted for 17% of the volatile organic compounds, which are the primary pollutants of smog, and were responsible for 20 million tons of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide emissions. There was a more recent report from 2020 that suggested that emissions from lawn equipment grew to 30 million tons of CO2 in 2020, more than was spewed out by the entire city of Los Angeles. Gas powered tools also emitted a lot of fine particulate matter, basically soot, but very fine particles. And these particles have been linked to lung cancer, heart disease, dementia, and other heart problems. In 2020, they released almost 22,000 tons of this fine particulate matter, or as much as 234 million cars produce in a year. You might think, oh, it's only this little engine, but it's spewing out benzene that's carcinogenic. It's spewing out smog-related chemicals, greenhouse gases, and this particulate matter.
Luc Lewitanski: So if we're talking about leaf blowers, there was a study quantifying the decibels, right? How loud are leaf blowers?
Ralph Levinson: Oh, they're incredibly loud. I mean, these are way beyond what the World Health Organization says is acceptable. The limit from the World Health Organization was 55 decibels, 800 feet away, but these go up to as much as 90 decibels. And there was actually a study that showed for every five decibel increase in average daily noise level around people's homes, there's a 34% increase in heart attacks and strokes. This doesn't mean it's not a problem for the people sucking it down using this equipment. I don't see a lot of them using really good masks. And the same thing with noise, not all of them are using protective gear.
Luc Lewitanski: Well, because it requires such effort in order to create this illusion of nature, I thought it brought to mind again, this essay by Michael Pollan on the question of the American lawn. And it made me think there's something very sisyphean about the pursuit of constantly, weekly, having to tend to this lawn that endlessly grows and grows fast. The myth of Sisyphus is a thing from ancient myth that then became popular philosophy and it's basically this idea of this man forced to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity and no matter how far he gets it it just rolls back down and he's constantly in this struggle and it's sort of a metaphor for our senseless existence, but there's something meaningless about the pursuit of the lawn itself. So, quoting Michael Pollan here: "Sisyphus, a 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 fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day, it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death".
Ralph Levinson: We sterilize it, we use a lot of energy and create a lot of pollution to sanitize our world of sex and death.
Luc Lewitanski: Very American way of a puritanical tradition. This cultural homogeneity is something that is manufactured and enforced. He's talking about how there's something completely artificial about the way Americans have transformed their wild expanses into this completely artificial and destructive process. and that not only is socially constructed, but in order to be maintained requires this shaming, you know, this culturally enforced homogeneity in order to maintain property values. And as you're saying, it's completely sterilized. It's artificial.
Ralph Levinson: Sanitized. I like that almost more than sterilized. Although sterilized does go with the sexual part. You know, this is what we have accepted as normal. And it's really not. And for 150 years, This was the norm.
Luc Lewitanski: Right, well, and I mean, norms are constructed, right?
Ralph Levinson: Oh, absolutely.
Luc Lewitanski: The lawn is an indicator of a neighborhood's socioeconomic character, and that is a collective thing, right? The well-maintained lawn, in that sense, is a sign that the owner is capable of maintaining it. You know, it's a sign on behalf of the person maintaining their lawn that they care about belonging to the community. They want to fit in. It's to show others that you are like them. You know, a properly maintained lawn. It's a way of signaling that you're sharing in the neighborly values. And in a way that's enforcing conformity in a very constructed and arbitrary way. But every person becomes, you know, sort of in the way that Foucault talks about how we internalize the norms of society and end up having a policeman in our mind policing what is acceptable behavior. In this case, it's like we've deputized all the neighbors to maintain this homogeneous idea.
Ralph Levinson: And as we talked about a little bit earlier with homeowner associations, it's more than merely shaming, they've been deputized to literally fine people. And really, these can be draconian, because the fines lead to more fines if it's not done the way they want. I mean, some of these homeowners associations were like defining how many gallons the shrubs had to be, you know, I mean, it was really micromanaged, and you can be fined, and it's up to the homeowners association how much, and if you don't pay the fine, they can hire their lawyers and then charge you the legal fees. I mean, yes, it's shame, but it's also there's teeth behind it. And not all of us live in HOAs, but keep in mind that this is close to a third of the US housing stock are in HOAs.
Luc Lewitanski: Part of the reason why it's indicative of high property values is because it's expensive to maintain, right? You have either the time or the money to take care of a loan. It takes about 70 hours a year on average to take care of a loan, whether that's done by the owner or by a paid professional, ultimately that's gonna be a non-negligible cost. And so, we've just walked you through how bad lawn equipment is for your health, for the health of your neighbors, the health of your environment, and how this is an arbitrary thing for rich people to signal to each other. And it's a completely socially enforced thing. It's a construct. So, how do we break out of it? What are our solutions out of this? What can we do about the problems caused by the American lawn? And more generally, the lawn care industry at large, the lawn care complex.
Ralph Levinson: The lawn care complex, absolutely. One of the things that has been going on for some time now to control this has been what we led this episode with, which is local laws to control this equipment. Now, bans are increasing. There's been bans, as we mentioned, recently in California and Oregon. It's also in Washington, DC, Miami Beach, Evanston, Illinois, and this goes way back. One of the first to ban this equipment straight out was Carmel, California in 1975. And indeed by 1990, 20 cities in California had outlawed this equipment, including Los Angeles. And the only people I see actually paying attention to that law is like institutions like at UCLA, They use electric leaf blowers and such. And interestingly, one of the first bands on leaf blowers was in Beverly Hills. And what they used then was one of the noise ordinances. They used these laws about permissible noise levels that were first passed in 1970 and the Noise Control Act of 1972. And then there was the Quiet Communities Act of 1978. Certainly, as we're trying to electrify, There are electric lawn mowers and leaf blowers. They're not new. They're very good. There was just a report from Consumers Report.
Luc Lewitanski: Well, they're better. They're better than gasoline, but ultimately--
Ralph Levinson: - Oh no, that's a good point. I mean, you don't have to have a lawn.
Luc Lewitanski: But if we start again from the narrow prism of this leaf blower thing that the poet, Touch Moonflower, was so moved by, well, there is compost, right? That's a good way to use leaves. Instead of throwing away dead leaves into landfills, you can use it as compost. And for lawns, certainly you can use permacultures and have local pollinating plants, recreate the local biodiversity. Also, we were talking about the coercive effects of shaming. I don't think we want to live in a shame-based way of being neighborly, but actually, the context of droughts in California specifically has led to some changes in attitudes in terms of what is the most desirable lawn. In 2015, Jerry Brown, who was then governor of California, signed an executive order asking to cut water use by 25%. You know, he sort of mandated residents to be more responsible. So, because his name was Jerry Brown, and because what happens with your lawn when you don't water it is that it goes brown and crunchy, he had this TV ad campaign to normalize in 2015 to say, "Get down with brown". This ad campaign to make it acceptable to have your front lawn be brown instead of green. And so publicizing solutions to spray brown grass into green grass. It's still crunchy when you step on it, but it's like lawn painting. It's sort of what they use on golf courses. And it's just, if it's just about the aesthetics, it's a lot less damaging to just do a spray on your grass. If water use is going to be constrained legally, then you know, it becomes a sort of, again, a collective action question.
Ralph Levinson: We've had very recently a limited watering allowed on lawns, and a lot of lawns were turning brown. And there's not that kind of regulation right now. We're doing a little better, but this is a mega drought. It's going to come around again. And of course, you know if somebody's watering their lawn too much, right? And because it's not brown and it became really obvious. And of course, anytime you're not threatening to shut off the water, that it's just fines. Well, there's a lot of rich people who are happy to pay fines and keep the lawn green.
Luc Lewitanski: A law whose penalty is a fine does not apply to rich people.
Ralph Levinson: Exactly.
Luc Lewitanski: Well, it turns out there are some municipalities that have created a cash for grass system. Some municipalities are offering a rebate for not having a lawn, basically, in order to incentivise limiting water waste. So, Albuquerque actually put in a ban in 1996. The city of North Martin started earlier, in 1989. El Paso actually started in 2004, and they grant residents $1 per square foot of turf converted to xeriscape plantings which are a local plant that respects the biodiversity.
Ralph Levinson: Well, xeri means dry, so it's basically any landscaping that doesn't use a lot of water. You don't do whole sprays and you could just use a trickle water system.
Luc Lewitanski: But so they gave you 1 dollar per square foot of turf converted. So, this is a real incentive scheme to help people transition, right? You want to create the positive externalities you want and so you nudge people towards the behavior you're looking for. You can create cash schemes to help. In the Nevada desert, such cash rebate schemes were able to remove 200 million square feet of grass. They planted new native vegetation that requires very little water and no mowing.
Ralph Levinson: Yeah, that's amazing. And probably with pollinator plants for local insects and birds.
Luc Lewitanski: Exactly, helping the local biodiversity. And so, I think what we can see as a concrete solution that worked and has worked in some places in America, is asking for local laws to be less restrictive about lawns, encouraging grass-free yards.
Ralph Levinson: And even when not given this incentive, although that's the whole point of incentives is they make it happen, or at least encourage it, when I changed out my lawn to a kind of xeriscaping, my water use for my entire house went down to less than a third of what it had been.
Luc Lewitanski: Right. And so that's also an impact pragmatically on many levels. Another example of such cash rebates and cash incentives that have worked is the example of Montgomery County in Maryland, which is actually quite a wealthy suburb in which lawns are massive and they reigned supreme. But actually, they took this bold step to ban mandatory grass.
Ralph Levinson: Wow.
Luc Lewitanski: You can't have an HOA enforcing lawn care in the same way in this county because the local legislature took action. And so they also distributed trees, so people could start planting these local trees. And so not only did they pay cash incentives, but they created 'quit your lawn' guides, you know, like the little how to's on the internet. And I wanted to highlight a few excerpts from Montgomery County in Maryland, they have this funny guide on, well not intentionally funny. They have this interesting guide on how to quit your lawn. So I'm quoting here from the Montgomery County guide on quitting your lawn. "If possible, we suggest you start with a backyard, not the front, your front yard is more likely to be subject to neighbours grumbling as they pass by. It will allow you to learn from the experience before moving to the more visible parts of your property. Now neighbour grumbling is completely natural. Many folks have become accustomed to the look of lawns in their communities and make a connection between meadows and tall grasses with disarray, mess and pests. By following some of these tips, you'll hopefully minimise the grumbles and eventually turn your neighbours opinions around". So they know that you're fighting an uphill battle against this cultural hegemony, but then they give a lot of nice tips, you know they say don't just let it go, they have some ways to trim and still show that your garden has some level of intentionality. The guide directly suggests what if you wanted to grow vegetables, have your flowers, you know, what if you want to restore wildlife habitats, you know. There are many reasons that they list as valid reasons to have an alternative for a lawn. And what I found quite humorous is one of the reasons they say to look for an alternative is if you dislike mowing, you know, that's a good reason not to have a lawn, and that's valid, I mean.
Ralph Levinson: Absolutely. And, you know, and aesthetics can change. People adapt. Of course, that may have to do with what their foundational values are. So in a neighborhood like mine, there tend to be a lot of electric cars and there's in West Los Angeles, a fairly high level of knowledge about environmental issues. Many lawns have been changed. And at first, I think for a lot of people, even for me, it looked a little funny. And then very quickly you see the beauty of it. These various flowering plants, they may just flower seasonally, but when they do flower, they flower beautifully. And in my front yard, there are tons of bees and birds that love these pollinator plants. And we have a bark mulch instead of a lawn and there's plenty of insects in there. We see the birds pecking at it all the time.
Luc Lewitanski: Exactly, this type of low-maintenance meadow that you've sustained, and that Montgomery's residents have, is actually a much healthier and more beautiful form of nature if you can just tune yourself to it. It's easier to take care of and a lot more beautiful. I would say at least and again the idea of beauty is completely socially constructed.
Ralph Levinson: Exactly.
Luc Lewitanski: And places like California, where you are, or some parts of California at least, are on the forefront of this shift in the cultural zeitgeist I would say, because now people are shaming each other for having the typical manicured lawn, especially in times of drought. It was poorly seen. It's poorly seen in the middle of a drought to be watering your massive lawn. I think this is a sort of an early signal in a shift in the cultural zeitgeist on this idea of what is the socially responsible thing to do with your lawn. Is it to maintain the property values by keeping this artificial idea in this completely manufactured artificial
enforced way or are you going to recognize the beauty of the local biodiversity and how you can let it thrive? So I think this story, as small as it seems, is kind of a microcosm for how we can break out of this homogeneity, right? We can see lawns are no longer culturally ascendant. What you've witnessed is a sign of the zeitgeist shifting.
Ralph Levinson: You could change the community standard now in a mega drought. It's not unreasonable to say, "Oh, the community standard should be not wasting water" and in in a time where we're cognizant of pollution, where we're cognizant of climate change, maybe not using gas powered equipment that pollutes and creates greenhouse gases. It's just a shift, really. It's still a kind of community standard. You're still caring for the community.
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah. And since these things are just constructs, we have the power to change these things collectively. And there are signs of this. So I think on that note actually, Ralph, we can sort of leave our listeners with this sort of hopeful idea. The lawn is no longer as culturally ascendant as it once was. It's done a lot of damage, but there are also very encouraging trends into something that's a lot more collectively minded, as you said. Yeah, well on that note, Ralph, we hope you've enjoyed this episode of 'Your Planet, Your Health', and we look forward to hearing you on our next adventure on these histories of climate movements and all of the ramifications of our discoveries. Now if you liked this, feel free to leave us a review on the iTunes Store or wherever you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts. Also you're welcome to comment on YouTube if you want. Although again we're not going to YouTube comments to crowdsource our ideas here.
Ralph Levinson: Well thank you. I actually learned a lot even though this is something I have been paying attention to, it was very interesting to see how this really evolved historically. I really enjoyed that.
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, no, I always learn a lot in our deep dives. That's always part of the pleasures of discovery.
Ralph Levinson: So Luc, why don't you take us out this time with your rendition of Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi" about the perils of paving paradise.
♪ Luc sings Big Yellow Taxi ♪
