While I sat on my front porch impatiently waiting for my coffee to cool, our nextdoor neighbor turned on his lawnmower. Then, like clockwork, the neighbor across the street also brought out a lawnmower. Soon after, I watched as two men got out of a van labeled “Mike’s Lawns” and began mowing someone else’s lawn. 

But the problem with lawns is far more than just noisy lawnmowers. Subject to a third of all residential water use in the U.S., lawns strike me as impractical, unused spaces that carry no productive value. The non-native grass saturated in herbicides pollutes our air and water. Lawns are bad for the environment; this we know to be true. 

But the problem with lawns runs deeper yet. Even these boxes of seemingly harmless, perfectly manicured, velvet green boxes sitting purposeless in front of homes, carry legacies that cannot be de-historicized nor depoliticized. 

Rooted in colonialism, racism, and classism, lawns serve as status symbols. Like theatre, lawns are meticulously crafted to create a designed, controlled, and safe experience that mimics—in this case—nature, or so we think. The harmful association between grass and healthy, beneficial “nature” ignores all that is wrong with lawns (including sprinklers, lawn mowers, pesticides, etc), especially from an ecological perspective. 

To Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 landscape-gardening book, a town over from mine, Hartford, CT, might feel foreign from Downing’s home with a nursery in New York, (which, by the way is a state the same size as all of the lawns in the U.S.) but climate change “carries no passport and knows no borders.” 

The effects of front lawns in America have and will continue to have global impacts that exist beyond your white picket fence. In Hartford, CT, where the white picket fences and manicured lawns of the suburbs give way to unkept public parks and parking lots, signs of climate change are ever-present. 

I will be spending this semester exploring the environmental impact of  lawn maintenance, investigating the ethno-racial roots of front lawns in America, exploring their purpose, and assessing their historical significance.

I am eager to discover more about the American obsession with lawns, the impacts of which have been largely caused by those shielded from the reality of climate change behind their white picket fence— for now.