ABSTRACT

Estimates of lawn coverage are difficult to make, but turfgrass cover is estimated to be around 16 million hectares nationally. With private turfgrass estimated to exceed 23 percent of urban land cover, and lawn grass coverage increasing by well more than one hundred thousand hectares annually. The lawn, a significant chemical input and a massive multi-national economy, remains in hiding, if directly in plain sight, an artifact of personal choice, nested in a vast economy, driving an inchoate sense of consumer anxiety. The pronouncements of people like Tom, interviewed in his home in 2003, suggest a growing awareness that lawn chemicals have social and ecological effects. The fragmentation of the landscape by lawns also adversely affects reproduction, survivorship, and dispersal of birds species. Pressures for the development of the lawn monoculture are most evident at the local scale where the economy of urban development assures a steady supply of spaces for management and an enforced demand for normative lawn aesthetics.