The Revenge of the Lawn

It wasn’t until 1870 that the definition of a house as separate from its fellows, surrounded by a yard, really took hold in the American mind. By then, detached housing was becoming the suburban norm. Vested interests promoted the freestanding home on its island of green as a healthful alternative to the overcrowded city, where the threat of epidemics, in the era before modern sanitation, was ever-present. “The new ideal was no longer to be part of a close community,” writes Jackson, “but to have a self-contained unit, a private wonderland walled off from the rest of the world.” Holding the world at arm’s-length, the prim, croquet-ready lawn—made possible by Elwood McGuire’s human-powered mower, which arrived on cue in the fateful year of 1870—both embodied and enabled the new social philosophy of the suburbs. Jackson writes,

Although visually open to the street, the lawn was a barrier—a kind of verdant moating separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city. … [It separates] the family by real estate from intruders into private space.

Securing the perimeter of the nuclear family’s compound, the inevitable white-picket fence stood guard, a Leave It to Beaver update of the frontier stockade. “He put up a barbed wire fence/ To keep out the unknown,” Joni Mitchell sings, in “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” (1975), a Didion-esque indictment of the same status-seeking, spiritually arid suburbanites Malvina Reynolds mocks in her 1962 folk song, “Little Boxes” (inspired by the Levittown-like California housing development of Westlake), and whom Didion submits for our sardonic consideration in her essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (1966). Like Didion, who sets her morality play in San Bernardino, Mitchell uses The Valley and its sprinkler-swished lawns as a metaphor for the blank-brained narcissism and materialism that for many (especially New Yorkers of the Woody Allen persuasion) are L.A.’s gifts to American culture:

He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns

Even now, when we experience the crack-up of the suburban dream as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order through movies like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road and TV shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Weeds, the lawn endures in the public mind as a symbol of the American idyll, or at least a white, middle-class idyll. (...)

Despite such tectonic shifts, the suburban lawn remains an imperishable symbol of the American Dream, even of America itself, the deflation of its symbolic currency and its environmental unsustainability notwithstanding. The perfect lawn has always been environmentally unsustainable, its non-native grasses guzzling precious water and nourished by chemical fertilizers, its unblemished sward a victory over insurgent flora and fauna achieved through sustained carpet-bombing with toxic herbicides and pesticides. In an age of water wars and global warming, it’s morally obscene. According to a 2002 Harris Poll, 50-70% of all urban fresh water is squandered on lawns, more than half of which is wasted “because of inappropriate timing or dosage. Nearly all the water used could be saved by appropriate use of native landscaping that does not require any watering beyond natural rainfall.” We dose our lawns with 67 million pounds’ worth of synthetic pesticides annually, three times the amount used, per acre, on agricultural crops. We spend $5.25 billion on fossil-fuel-derived lawn fertilizers, whose fringe benefits include poisoning surface and ground water. Our gas-powered mowers produce as much pollution in one hour as our cars do over the course of a 20-mile drive; every year, they guzzle 580 million gallons of gas.

by Mark Dery, Boing Boing |  Read more:

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