Lawn Obsessions

Lawn Obsession in America

 

 

People trace America's obsession with the lawn back to the rise of suburbia in the 1950s and the image of the cookie cutter house with a white picket fence as the ideal home. The verdancy and trimness of one's lawn was (and is still) a sense of pride in American culture. It is a reflection on the state of one's home - after all, if the lawn isn't manicured then what else could be falling asunder inside the home? How far are we Canadians from this ideal? How far do we go to put the outer appearance first? We are monocroping ourselves into a state of unparalleled ignorance. Using pesticides and herbicides to rid our perfect little lawns of all of the creatures that allow our Mother Earth to thrive. A few pests versus extinction, it is time to choose. The more we monocrop the more likely we are to loosing it all. We have seen in the past how easily entire crops can be wiped out, now imagine what would happen if we were all hoping and praying on a sole crop of corn, of potatoes, of wheat to keep us alive.


America grows more lawn than food. Here are some statistics on just how much space is used for cultivating this purely ornamental herb.

• 80% of all households in the US have privately-owned lawns (Templeton).
• North Americans currently devote 40,000 square miles to lawns, which is more than the amount of land used for wheat or corn (Fulford).
• The average size of a lawn in the United States is one-fifth of an acre (Vinlove and Torla) to one-third of an acre (Templeton).
• Space devoted to turfgrass is growing at 600 square miles a year (Kolbert).