ABSTRACT
Nothing more captures such anxieties associated with urban living than the strange case of the American lawn. The momentum of the nascent lawn chemical industry, viewed at its inception by Rachel Carson in the 1950s (above), was fully realized by the late 1990s when the lawn chemical economy at last came of age. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, more people in the United States apply chemicals to their lawn than do not. In an analysis of national water quality, the United States Geological Survey reveals that 99 percent of urban stream samples contain one or more pesticides and that in urban watersheds insecticides were detected more often and at higher concentrations than in non-urban systems (United States Geological Survey 1999). Though these chemicals are coming from a range of urban sources, lawn care is an important contributor. But what does this mean for the people who actually use them with such hesitation?
