Make lawns make sense
So popular, yet so problematic.
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It’s Friday, which means we’re giving you a three-minute take on a big climate story from the week. This morning, that story takes us to an American staple: the cherished lawn.
Lawns are large, unnecessary, and water and labor intensive. Yet they’re stubbornly constant: Nearly anyone who owns a home in the United States has one — and likely gives it little thought.
Soon, that may change.
Last week, Southern California ordered an unprecedented restriction on outdoor water use, a move that affects 6 million residents. The restriction comes as the region faces increasing water scarcity fueled by climate change:
The American West is amid a 22-year megadrought that is the driest stretch in at least 1,200 years.
Nearly 80% of the West (and 95% of California) is currently experiencing “severe drought.”
And Lake Mead — which provides water to 25 million people — has dropped to its lowest levels since 1937.
Lawns, meanwhile, are an easy target for environmental action. In Southern California, they account for as much as 70% of a home’s water use.
The critique on lawns, however, shouldn’t be limited to the American West. As we face increasingly worse climate impacts, the value of lawns, like so many other American staples, should be questioned.
The lawn has long been a staple of a climate-fueling American Dream, an ideal that also brought us the gas guzzler in the driveway and the single-family home plopped within a sprawling suburb.
Beyond being tremendous water sucks, lawns have a dark side that their lush exterior hides. To maintain them, for example, requires pesticides that leak into waterways and lawn mowers that emit pollutants, harming human and planetary health. Worse yet, lawns may replace valuable carbon sinks, like forests or healthy soils.
Lawns also push us further apart. Physically, they take up space that leads to suburban sprawl, making us more car dependent. And socially, without the density provided by compact cities, lawns promote alienation, as David Roberts writes in his Substack newsletter, Volts:
“No matter how much we try to replicate the benefits of public spaces and public life in our private estates, it is futile, because the one thing you can’t replicate is people. You can nurture your lawn until it’s a perfect simulacrum of a well-tended public park, but there’s still no one on it.”
To make sense of lawns, we have to backtrack hundreds of years: Lawns emerged from 17th-century England, catching on among the (white male) elites in America before spreading to the middle-class with the rise of suburbs in the mid-20th century.
In other words, lawns comprise two essential ingredients of our climate crisis cocktail: colonialism and capitalism. This obsession with well-maintained grass is lavish, wasteful, and functionally useless: After all, lawns exist to be maintained.
To move away from such an American staple, we need a cultural shift. Fortunately, such a shift is already happening in parts of the country:
To conserve water in Las Vegas, for example, “nonfunctional” grass is being forcibly removed for desert landscaping.
In San Diego and Phoenix, homeowners are being paid to replace grass with more water-efficient landscapes.
And in my hometown of Washington, D.C., the local government helps replant lawns with features that reduce stormwater runoff.
The point is that lawns are not simply water sucks. They are carbon-intensive assets of a previous era, nonsensical symbols of luxury and leisure.
And as temperatures rise, lawns don’t simply become unnecessary — they become dangerous.
Would a yard that have a more diverse landscape combat this problem? A yard that has flowers and other plants that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, rather just grass. Not 100% sure how that would work for places like California, Nevada and other states affected by these major droughts and diminishing water supply. Would it be more beneficial to have more yards that have this diversity, or to have less yards with homes that are closer together so that we did not have to drive as much?