In this week’s issue, Tad Friend writes about an attempt to ban the use of leaf blowers in the town of Orinda, California. One resident told Friend that the blower question “is seemingly small—but people are virulent, almost foaming at the mouth, on both sides.” Friend explains why the topic has been so divisive:
In Orinda, as in much of coastal and near-coastal California, gardens and trees do the representational work that lawns do elsewhere: they enhance your property by extending your living space and by advertising your ability to bring nature to heel. Any challenge to a property’s routine maintenance thus becomes a threat to self-worth, net worth, and an entire way of life. So a lot of people here will give up their leaf blowers only when you pry them from their cold, dead hands (or, more precisely, from their Hispanic gardeners’ cold, dead hands).
Lawns and landscaping have been notoriously competitive, combative arenas in the suburbs. Not long after she moved to Connecticut, a friend of mine was confronted with a committee of concerned neighbors who brought with them the telephone numbers of local gardening crews. In 1979, Calvin Trillin wrote a U.S. Journal article about a less neighborly dispute between Rodale Press and the town of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where the press was then headquartered. Rodale had been founded by J. I. Rodale, an organic-farming pioneer. Trillin described how Rodale’s son, Robert, had an epiphany about the headquarters’ grounds:
Watching the lawn outside his window being mowed every week, Robert Rodale eventually succumbed to the notion that Rodale Press ought to practice what it preached…. Last spring it was decided to have three distinct sorts of lawn—carefully divided and labeled with wooden signs. Two patches, amounting to something slightly less than an acre, would be mowed once a year and maintained as meadowscapes. A thirty-five-hundred-square-foot section in the corner … would remain untouched except for poison ivy control.
These decisions went against the town’s weed ordinance. Trillin’s article describes the lawsuit that followed.
Wade Graham’s 1996 Far-Flung Correspondents piece tells us that lawns cover some fifty thousand square miles of the United States, an area “roughly equal to Pennsylvania, and larger than that occupied by any agricultural crop.” Graham’s piece described botanist John Greenlee’s search for the ideal lawn grass, “grass that would be naturally low-growing, drought-tolerant, evergreen, and trampleable.” During his quest, the aptly named Greenlee came to this conclusion about American lawns:
He knew that grasses in nature were extraordinarily tough, thriving in some of the harshest environments imaginable. Why were our lawn grasses—strains selected as the result of hundreds of millions of dollars in research—so perpetually thirsty, hungry, and disease-prone? Then it came to him: Our pampered lawns are not plants, they’re animals. The distinction was crucial. Animals don’t generate their own food, but plants do. Plants combine carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight to make a simple sugar. Photosynthesis. Either you can do it or you can’t. If you can, you’re a plant. If you can’t, you’re an animal.
The environmental consequences of that animal’s pesticide diet was the subject of Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2008 “Turf War,” which traced our national love of a green lawn back to Andrew Jackson’s 1841 treatise on landscape gardening. Kolbert ominously described the vicious circle that our national lawn fetish has created:
The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos—both of which affect the nervous system—took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to—among many other organisms—tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”
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