Mowing Up with the Joneses Part III

My mother-in-law Sharon just sent me a link to this blog last week in the Washington Post arguing that we ditch our lawns. It provides even more interesting information about our obsession with lawns and the various kinds of harm that it does. (Mind-blowing fact: more than 20% of the states of New Jersey and Massachusetts is covered in lawn!) Following up on Parts I and II of this series on my own blog, if our desire for a neat, green lawn is the result of history and culture and chasing after prestige, then can it be changed in favor of something that is more environmentally friendly, less dangerous for humans, and easier to keep by homeowners who are already sufficiently busy and stressed?

There are all kinds of substitutes for a green lawn that are beginning to make headlines today. Some people plant gardens in place of lawns. Some people in rural areas let their lawns revert to what they were intended to be, such as woods or a little piece of wetland. Some people grow grass and wildflowers to attract birds and butterflies and other pollinators. Some people grow food forests. It's particularly exciting when businesses on large plots of mowed lawn make a switch. For example, the Audubon Society local chapter to which I belong is now working with the National Humane Education Society in Charles Town, WV, to convert twelve acres of lawn to wildflowers and native grasses.

Will these efforts continue and expand? I predict that they will because they push our prestige button in much the same way that organic food has done: once it became more widely prestigious to eat organic food and shop at farmers markets, and just a little bit more affordable, the movement took off. Now even Walmart attempts to sell mostly organic produce. Such processes trickle down from the wealthy to the Joneses, and then Americans in general begin to aspire to those markers of status. Today there are people taking workshops on growing monarch way stations or planting native species in their backyard. Sales are increasing on books explaining how to grow enough food for one's entire family on one acre of (previous) lawn. People may not be ready to convert their entire lawn into a micro-farm just yet, but lots of them are putting in greenhouses or small gardens.

There are also government efforts afoot in many places. My above-mentioned mother-in-law lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, and the county government is converting a portion of the lawns of neighborhood residents into rain gardens to help capture rainfall that would otherwise carry more pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Top-down government solutions such as these are controversial and sometimes create other problems, but they are also a sign that local government policies, which have long been pro-lawn, may be changing.

The key to these efforts, in addition to wrapping them in what I would call "attainable prestige", is changing our aesthetic values. We have to make messiness visually pleasing. The eyes that have been trained by culture to appreciate a neat, green lawn will have to be retrained to love the look of bright wildflowers buzzing with bees and butterflies. The rural landowners who mow all their fields to keep them neat will have to learn to feel good about letting a few of them go to grass and milkweed, knowing that there are grasshopper sparrows and meadowlarks and monarch butterflies thriving because of that decision. And we will all have to stop complaining about that neighbor’s messy yard.

Mowing Up with the Joneses Part II

In Part I, I described some of the historical causes and environmental consequences of the American love for grassy lawns. One of the explanations offered by Ted Steinberg, author of American Green, is prestige: the valorization of a neat, mowed lawn trickled down from the wealthy aristocrats of Britain to the working class of the United States over many decades, as individuals, counties, and homeowners associations came to feel that a neat, green, mowed lawn expressed a certain level of class. I think prestige is an important explanation for this and so many other human behaviors and preferences.

But why a neat, monolithic green lawn rather than something else, say a lawn covered in rose bushes or expensive stones from some far-off land? I think there is another explanation here, which also applies to a great many human behaviors and preferences.

One theory that has been prevalent in cultural anthropology over the last century involves the idea that human cultures are built on binary oppositions that structure relationships between people and things in each culture. For example, male/female is an important binary, and each society will have its own culturally-formed ideas of what are “male” and “female” behaviors, dress, roles, activities, etc. For some anthropologists, such binary oppositions reflect structures in the human brain that force us to think about the world in this way. For others, these are cultural constructions that have no biological or psychological basis. One of the problems with this human tendency to order society around binary oppositions is that one side of the binary is valued more highly than the other. Thus, the theory goes, sexism exists because most or all societies value the masculine over the feminine.

Another important binary seen across societies by anthropologists is nature/culture. The cultural life of most human societies rests on subjugating nature. Religion seeks to tame our natural impulses and instincts. Laws about marriage seek to control our bodily desires and legitimize offspring. Agriculture is all about bringing nature into tune with human rhythms of time and space. And so on. Societies generally value culture over nature, and in some ways nature comes to be seen as the enemy of culture.

This theory may explain in large part why we breathe a sigh of relief when we look out of our windows and see a neat, green lawn. Our lawn mowing and other practices have tamed nature. Rather than a variety of colors, we see a smooth green, accented in a controlled way by flowers we bought at Home Depot, guaranteed to a look a certain perfect way that is a far cry from their wild, original versions. All the scary insects and animals, such as snakes and spiders, don’t have much of a chance in short grass completely exposed to our human eye, especially if we use pesticides on the lawn. Some people even fight to the death against any plant or animal that mars that perfection. Our former neighbor was at war with clover and dandelions, obsessively bringing out the Roundup and re-seeding any little patch in the lawn. (And you don’t want to know what he did to the rabbits and groundhogs.) I always wondered how he felt as he looked across the fence at our messy lawn, with yellow dandelion flowers poking up in spring, white clover flowers in summer, and little bees buzzing all around (at least, that is, until my husband sacrificed them to the blades of the mower).

One of the critiques against the theory of binary oppositions is that they are overstated by the anthropologist, that actual human behaviors and preferences are much more in flow and flux between and around these binary structures. There are certainly groups and societies that value nature as well as culture, and ecologists and anthropologists study small-scale indigenous groups to learn how we can better live in an integrated, sustainable way with nature. Furthermore, critics argue, these binary structures can change over time. So there are people today who are happily living with weedy lawns or planting wildflowers to attract snakes and spiders and all the biodiversity that comes with them, to the yard. In other words, according to this take on the theory, we’re not necessarily naturally inclined to a neat, green lawn; it is something that has been given to us as a preference by history and our circumstances. And prestige. And thus it can be changed. We may always prefer culture over nature, but the content of that relationship can be altered.

In Part III of this series, we’ll take a look at how some individuals and groups are converting lawn into a little slice of wilderness, answering recent calls to forms of prestige that seek to bring a little nature back into the cultural world of our lawns.

Mowing Up with the Joneses Part I

Yesterday was like many days: the grass in the yard was getting a bit high but not yet too high, and my husband Chris had to face an ongoing existential crisis: to mow or not to mow.

One day last fall, I remember, he had decided not to mow, that it could wait a couple of days. He saw our neighbor Charlie mowing his yard, thought about it some more, and still decided not to mow. Then Brian across the street was seen riding his lawn mower around his yard. In the midst of still more indecision, we heard a lawn mower starting down the street, and suddenly Chris just couldn’t stand it anymore. He had to mow the yard.

Is this the result of some good old-fashioned masculine competition? I’m sure it is, but that’s an analysis for another day. What interests me most is the mowing itself as an American cultural phenomenon. I drive down a country road and see acres upon acres of mowed yards, especially where there are new housing developments. Why all the mowing? When did it start? Is it peculiarly American? At some point will we realize the benefits of keeping even a little bit of that space wild?

Fortunately, believe it or not, there is a book that covers the social history of lawn mowing in the United States: Ted Steinberg’s An American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006). The history of mowed lawns began as an issue of prestige. Wealthy people in Britain had nice big lawns because they could afford the laborers or slaves to cut the grass with a scythe. Those in the United States who were newly well off thanks to the industrial age wanted to look aristocratic, too, so they aspired to nice, green lawns - considerably more difficult in American than in British climates, requiring lots more equipment and management time. Prestige requirements always trickle down, so in the early 20th century it became a matter of pride for just about every homeowner to have a “neat” yard, an ethic that spread with the development of suburbs and the expansion of the dream of home ownership beginning in the 1940s.

Today keeping a nice lawn is codified by homeowners associations and county and town councils. Steinberg describes lots of contentious processes whereby cities and associations have required increasingly ridiculous grass length maximums, even three inches in some towns! As with many things, a generalized social pressure that once gently guided Americans to keep their lawns neat has now turned into a set of strict regulations, accompanied by fines from the government and lawsuits between neighbors. Americans now grow and maintain lawns - and in many cases are forced to grow and maintain them - in drought-stricken areas where grassy lawns were never intended to be, such as in Arizona and other southwestern states. Yet, because of gas-guzzling lawn maintenance equipment, water requirements, and herbicide and pesticide use, lawns generally cause a great deal of environmental and human destruction that most of us don’t even consider:

• Around 75,000 people are killed or wounded by lawn mowers each year
• Much more gasoline is spilled on lawns each year by people trying to refuel their lawn care equipment than was spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster
• Approximately seven million birds die each year due to pesticides used on lawns
• Those who care for lawns use more herbicides per acre than most farmers
• Using a gas-powered leaf blower for thirty minutes is equivalent in terms of hydrocarbon emissions to driving a car 7,700 miles at 30 miles per hour.

The more I study humans as an anthropologist, the more I seem to run into “prestige” as the answer to many questions that began with “Why do people ...?” Many of these behaviors are ultimately harmful to individuals and societies, including mowing. So what do we get out of it? The chance to look like one of the Joneses to outsiders who drive by our houses? Or maybe even the chance to look a little better than the Joneses? Prestige is an important factor in human behavior, and Steinberg uses this explanation convincingly.

However, according to Steinberg, now the prestige issue has turned on its head. What used to be a way for lower middle and middle class Americans to tap into the prestige of home ownership and lawn maintenance now strangles people financially. Two-income couples, long commutes, and little extra money to spend on lawn equipment mean that more and more people are letting their lawns go a bit - and then suffering from the fines they are forced to pay or the stigma of being “bad neighbors." Lawns comprising non-native grass species, as an alternative to native wildflowers and weeds, may be contributing to the terrible allergy problem in the United States, leading to increased medical expenses. Herbicides are tracked into the home and ground into the carpet, where they can be harmful to children and pets. And, of course, the runoff of herbicides and lawn chemicals into our waterways causes endless destruction, economically and otherwise. It turns out that prestige costs a lot of money, perhaps more money than it is worth.

I think there is another reason as well: the cultural emphasis on taming nature and forcing nature to be “neat”. And that is the topic for my next blog in this series.