The Lawn Con: Manufactured Conformity

Your Planet, Your Health

In this episode, Ralph and Luc 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. We also look into solutions, ranging from bans on leaf blowers to cash schemes to encourage people to quit their lawn.

We read a poem about the lunacy of leaf blowers, and highlight ways in which manicured suburban imported lawn grass is a synecdoche for colonialism.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-l1JO3FbzE

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: Local bans on gas-powered lawn equipment
01:48 Poem about leaf blowers by Touch Moonflower
03:59 Commenting on the poem
06:51 How did lawns become so common in the USA?
07:56 Versailles' green carpet and Italian Renaissance landscapes inspired the British lawn
18:59 How 18th Century aristocratic English turf grass took root on the new continent
21:53 Thorstein Veblen on why American elites found lawns so respectable
24:10 Founding fathers disseminate the pastoral ideal
27:05 Planning communities of continuous lawn: Andrew Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted
32:03 Frank J. Scott tells suburbanites that homogenous manicured grass is neighbourly
34:48 How the lawn got cemented into the American imaginary in the aftermath of World War II
37:16 Post WWII suburban developments empowered Home Owners Associations (HOAs)
41:01 Quantifying the environmental impacts of modern US lawns
45:47 Why imported turf grass is a synecdoche for colonialism
50:40 Carpets of grass are fuel that spreads wildfires
51:38 Gas powered leaf blowers are huge polluters
55:00 How loud are leaf blowers?
55:51 Lawn care is a Sisyphean task of sterilisation
57:53 Norms around lawns are socially enforced
59:59 What solutions have helped people quit their lawn?
1:09:50 Conclusion and wrap up: the zeitgeist is shifting!
1:11:50 Luc's cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell

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.