How Stupid Is Our Obsession With Lawns? (Ep. 289 Rebroadcast)
June 30, 2021 @ 11:00pm
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Nearly two percent of America is grassy green. Sure, lawns are beautiful and useful and they smell great. But are the costs — financial, environmental and otherwise — worth the benefits?
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Where I live, in the great northeast of the United States, it’s finally summertime. When you get outside, it’s beautiful. The trees, the flowers — and of course, the lawns! Who doesn’t love a good lawn? It looks good, smells good, feels good. For a lot of people, a lawn is the perfect form of nature. Even though, let’s be honest, the lawns we like don’t actually occur in nature. Even though the process of producing such a lawn is full of the most unnatural activity. Even though this unnatural slice of nature requires so many inputs — the water, the fertilizer, the weed-killers, the mowers and trimmers and the leaf-blowers, the fuel to power all this machinery, the fuel to power the trucks to transport the people who run the machinery — all in pursuit of the perfect lawn.