7th Podcast: The Lawn Con: Manufactured Conformity
We’ve just released the seventh episode of our podcast “Your Planet, Your Health”, titled The Lawn Con: Manufactured Conformity.
In this episode, we unpack how Americans got so obsessed with maintaining square green carpets on their front lawns. We dive into the history to trace back the origins and dissemination of this artificial aesthetic. This is a planetary health issue because caring for lawns uses precious resources like land and water and gas-powered lawn equipment is very polluting. We also look into solutions, ranging from gas-powered lawn equipment to cash schemes to encourage people to quit their lawn.
You can listen at yourplanetyourhealth.com/7 or right here:
The photos of Ralph’s front yard (former lawn) and the visiting pollinators (birds, butterflies) were taken by Susan Levinson.
Sources:
• Ann Leighton, American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century, 1986.
• Michael Pollan, “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns”, The New York Times Magazine, May 1989.
• Georges Teyssot, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, 1999.
• Monique Mosser, The saga of grass: From the heavenly carpet to fallow fields, 1999.
• Cristina Milesi, “More Lawns than Irrigated Corn”, NASA Earth Observatory, November 2005.
• Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, 2007.
• Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, 2007.
• Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War”, The New Yorker, July 2008.
• Joseph Manca, "British landscape gardening and Italian renaissance painting", Artibus et Historiae (297-322), 2015.
• Jamie Banks and Robert McConnell, National Emissions from Lawn and Garden Equipment, Environmental Protection Agency, April 2015.
• Christopher Ingraham, “Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them”, The Washington Post, August 2015.
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