The lawn as wasteland
Getting rid of the grass in our front yards might be a way to resist waste and flight climate change.
This Spring, Louisa and I got rid of our front lawn. We tore out the sod and had it replaced with cedar bark chips, planted some shrubs, and installed a bench on which to sit during warm summer nights as the sun sets. We think it looks quite nice.
Classist grass
Have you ever wondered where the concept of the immaculate lawn comes from? From watching movies set in Edwardian and Victorian times, you’re probably familiar with large English family estates that employed groundskeepers to maintain an impressively large sward of closely cropped grass in prime condition – the lawn. The possession of a large piece of land that did not grow a food crop proved that the owners were so rich that they could afford to keep many acres of their land without commercial gain. In other words, they could afford to waste land. The lawn became a major status symbol. With the rise of a middle class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ordinary folks began to afford their own homes. To prove that they, too, had arrived economically, they kept their front yards in lawn.
Today, particularly in Western countries, the lawn has continued to serve as a major status symbol. Homeowners spend many hours and countless dollars ensuring that their lawns are weed and insect free (requiring herbicides and pesticides), and lush and green (requiring massive amounts of water). It is estimated that North Americans spend upwards of 129 billion dollars per year to maintain their lawns. At 40,000,000 acres (over 16,000,000 hectares), turf grass (sod) is the single largest irrigated “crop” in the USA, while lawns occupy about two percent of all the land in the USA.
Twenty years of topsoil
I recently visited a farm in Ontario that has grown sod on the same swatch of land for over 20 years. Every time the sod is harvested, a thin layer of soil is removed with the sod, which is then cut into pieces to be installed on home lawns, golf courses, sports fields, etc. to avoid the labour involved in growing grass from seed. While viewing a recently harvested sod field, my gaze was directed to a copse of trees that now stands at least a metre above the field’s surface. That’s a meter of good Ontario soil lost forever. Each subsequent planting of grass requires the scuffing of the surface land, adding a sprinkling of new soil and grass seed, and massive amounts of fertilizer and water. It doesn’t require a lot of knowledge, or imagination, to realize that this sod growing industry, and the maintenance of the lawns that ensues, generates huge volumes of climate altering greenhouse gases, not to mention the loss of potentially staggering amounts of food that could be grown on these lands instead.
Could getting rid of the grass in the front of our houses be visible acts of principled resistance to wasteful stupidity?
I think some (most?) of those old English estates keep the lawns short with sheep. I was told by one of the guides that Fort Langley Hist. Park had kept the lawn short with a historically accurate flock of sheep until the tourists complained about the dung. I suppose now they use lawn mowers and have Canada goose leftovers to soil their shoes.
It is urgent that we act on ecosystem decline and climate change, and your article models hopeful change and encourages us to move down the road of experimenting with new practices that spark bigger change. Thanks Bob and Louisa!