Lawn People
How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals
Make Us Who We Are
By
PAUL ROBBINS
T E M P L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Philadelphia
PAUL ROBBINS is Professor in the Department of Geography
and Regional Development at the University of Arizona. He is the author
of Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction.
Temple University Press
1601 North Broad Street
Philadelphia PA 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2007 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Published 2007
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robbins, Paul, 1967–
Lawn people : how grasses, weeds, and chemicals make us who we are /
Paul Frederick Robbins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59213-578-3 ISBN-10: 1-59213-578-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59213-579-0 ISBN-10: 1-59213-579-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Lawns—United States. 2. Lawns—Weed control—United States.
3. Lawn ecology—United States. I. Title.
SB433.15.R63 2007
635.9’647—dc22 2006038426
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Cover photograph: National Archives (306-PS-59-13580).
C H A P T E R 6
Do Lawn People Choose Lawns?*
W
E HAVE SEEN THAT THE AMERICAN LAWN, while a cultural
artifact, is one historically tied to the political economy of property
and the creation of certain kinds of people. We have seen that as a
green monoculture, the lawn absolutely requires certain repeated patterns of
homeowner labor and the application of key inputs, which are by their nature
hazardous. We have also seen that the promulgation of these inputs is increasingly
required for a range of economic “actors”–all of whom are increasingly
insinuated into the lives of consumers and who are concomitantly communicating
specific messages not only about risk, but also about identity. Citizenship,
ecological metabolism, chemical hazards, and economic imperatives come
together every time someone practices intensive lawn care. For those people
who participate in intensive lawn care practice–which is a majority of lawn
owners–how are these several forces understood and reconciled? How do these
people understand their behaviors in the context of their home, family, and
community?
Chemical Communities
The survey results briefly outlined in Chapter 1 tell us something in this regard:
lawn chemical users are wealthier urban and suburban people whose neighbors
tend to use chemicals, and who tend to be more worried about chemical
usagethan those who do not use them. This contradicts many of the most
commonly used predictors of “green” conduct. Higher education, as an obvious
*This chapter was written with the assistance of Julie T. Sharpe.
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 97
example, tends to coincide with higher use of lawn chemicals. As such, more
careful examination of the survey results may be required, beyond the
demographics of individuals, including responses that hint at the associations
lawn people feel to a larger collective or community.
Considering people’s commitment to community relative to their lawn care
behavior presents a more detailed, if more complex, picture (Table 6.1). Specifically,
people who claim an interest in what is going on around their neighborhood
and who tend to be able to list a greater number of their neighbors by name
are far more likely to use lawn chemicals. This suggests that intensive lawn care
is “neighborly,” in the sense that the more involved members of a community
manage their lawns more intensively.
Assessing the relationship between people’s chemical use and their views of
their neighbors’ impact on water quality complicates this picture (see Table 6.1).
On the one hand, those who claim their neighbors’ influence on water quality
is negative (whatever their neighbors’ specific behavior) tend to claim that
homeowner practices are generally bad for water quality, especially the use
of a lawn chemical applicator company. These people also tend to be older and
better educated. Education and life experience indeed are reflected in environmental
awareness, and a general feeling that what people do around the
home influences the ecosystem. More importantly, chemical use is correlated
with awareness of one’s neighbors and cognizance of environmental impacts.
This is the case even when using multi-variate regression to consider and hold
constant all the previously mentioned variables (education, income, etc.). These
results are revealing, if a little counterintuitive. They contribute to a profile
of chemical users as not only more socially involved and concerned, but also
more aware of environmental impacts. They are more communitarian, but again
more anxious.
TABLE 6.1 Survey Responses on Community and Chemicals: Direction of
significant relationship, positive
Parameter “Interested in Knowing Believe “Neighbors’
What’s Going on Practices have a Negative
in Neighborhood” Impact on Water Quality”
Lawn chemical use ϩϩϩ ϩ
Neighbors known by name ϩϩϩ
Age ϩϩ
Education ϩ
Lawn care companies negative impact ϩϩϩ
on local water quality
Home owners negative impact on local ϩϩϩ
water quality
(ϩϩϩ pϽ.01, ϩϩ pϽ.05, ϩ pϽ.10)
C H A P T E R S I X98
Lawn Neighborhoods
Add to this the fact that a majority of people (52%) surveyed believe that
their neighbors use lawn chemicals. The effects of these uses, while considered
deleterious for water quality, were also viewed as good for the community. While
most reported that their neighbors’ practices had no impact or negative impact
on water quality, half also agreed that these practices had a positive impact on
property values (Table 6.2).
As noted in Chapter 1, homeowners with higher incomes and higher property
values are more likely to use lawn chemicals than homeowners with lower
property values. The cost of lawn care chemicals certainly plays some role in differential
use. According to the National Gardening Association, U.S. households
spend $222 each on lawn care equipment and chemicals annually, the marginal
cost of such an investment; this climbs considerably in households with
incomes less than $30,000.1
The association of inputs with housing values (which accrue to the
homeowner as well as the neighborhood more generally), suggests some
obvious instrumental motivations not only for chemical application but for the
positive association between such practices and community values. As most realtors
will tell you, lawn upkeep is a relatively inexpensive investment for maintaining
property values. In follow-up discussions, some lawn owners explicitly
told us that their lawn care inputs were investments in their homes. Indeed,
people with higher incomes and expensive homes have much more capital–in
the form of an existing manicured lawn–to protect with chemical applications.
Despite any expectation of social reward for environmentally protective
behavior, homeowners are actually rewarded for environmentally detrimental
behavior.
But instrumental thinking seems to only be a small part of this set of logics.
Far more significant than the affect on property values, most respondents
believed that their neighbors’ lawn care behaviors had a positive influence on
“neighborhood pride.” This distinction implies something far beyond instrumental
economic logic. The practice of lawn care is instead part of a normative
communitarian practice. The unbroken, unfenced, openness of the front yard
TABLE 6.2 Perceived Impact of Neighbors Behaviors on Local Conditions
(percent of sampled respondents)
Impact of neighbors’ practices Negative None Positive
Water quality 34 49 11
Property values 6 41 50
Neighborhood pride 5 18 73
parkland–connecting household to household with no borders–is ultimately a
form of common property, the maintenance of which is part of normative institution
of community care. Participation in maintenance is a practice of civic
good. Disregard for lawn care is, by implication, a form of free-riding, civic neglect,
and moral weakness. This is further reinforced by the ecological character
of lawn problems, including mobile, invasive, and adaptive species such as grubs,
dandelions, and ground ivy. These pests, if eliminated in one yard, can easily be
harbored in another, only to return later, crossing property lines, blowing on the
wind, and burrowing underground. Intensive care by one party merely moves
problems around; only coordinated action can control “outbreaks” and achieve
uniformity. In this sense, lawn care differs from other kinds of individual investment
in community, such as Christmas lights, painting, or other efforts. It is a
far greater problem, requiring coordinated collective action, at least where green
monocultural results are desired.
As such, intensive lawn management tends to cluster. If your neighbor uses
lawn chemicals, then you are more likely to engage in intensive lawn care,
(e.g., the hiring of a lawn care company or the using of do-it-yourself fertilizers
and pesticides). In addition, lawn management in general is associated with positive
neighborhood relations. People who spend more hours each week working
in the yard report greater enjoyment of lawn work, but also feel more
attached to their local community. Yard management is not simply an individual
activity but is instead carried out for social purposes: the production and
protection of neighborhoods.
Taken together, the picture of intensive lawn practice is not one of individual
people making individual choices on their personal property. Instead, the
evidence points to the profile of a highly regulated community. Lawn people are
residents of lawn neighborhoods, relatively well-educated, high-income communities
with expensive homes. Of course, these communities also share a collective
anxiety, since chemical users do perceive a link between their neighbors’
behaviors (if not their own) and fouled drinking water. Since, however, ince
more concern tends to coincide with more use, it would seem that lawn communities
are reading the boxes and bags of the products they use, communicating
or quietly acknowledging risks, and then proceeding with a collective
ecological project.
This kind of behavior raises as many questions as it answers. How are such
risks and benefits reconciled in real life? What does such a community feel like
to live in? Are such obligations seen as a joy or a burden? Does participation in
the lawn community provide satisfaction or pressure? What room for maneuvering
or the lack of participation is there? Do people trust the information
they receive regarding lawn care, either from chemical applicators or from the
packages they purchase? What are we like, those of us with deep personal and
community investments in our lawn? Impersonal national surveys can only get
us so far in answering these kinds of questions.
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 99
C H A P T E R S I X100
The Lawns of Kingberry Court
To get some insight into how people actually reconcile individual benefits,
community priorities, environmental hazards, and personal risks, we conducted
intensive, face-to-face household interviews in a suburb of a large Midwestern
metropolitan city. These eight resident families ring the cul-de-sac of Kingberry
Court and were chosen both because of their relatively high socioeconomic status
(matching the profile of the most likely chemical users) but also because they are
all close neighbors, physically next to and across from one another in a nearly
closed residential space. Their geographical proximity to one another meant they
were more likely to know each other and that the lawn management activities of
each would have a visual and environmental impact on each of the others. Treating
this small group in a kind of “village study,” we hoped to get a view of the way
a face-to-face lawn community functions, in an environment where mutual expectations
are set through simply living daily life in close proximity.
Kingberry Court is an example of upper-middle-class life in an fairly average
American suburb. Like many other Midwestern suburban developments, the
area was converted from corn and soybean fields to suburban tract development,
built in response to rapid suburbanization from the nearby city in the mid-
1980s. Developers built eight houses on the cul-de-sac in 1987–1988, marketing
the homes to professionals who wanted to escape the city and raise children
in the higher-rated, well-funded schools of the suburbs. Legally located within
the central city limits, Kingberry Court is particularly attractive to urban professionals
because it straddles the boundary between city and suburb. The residents
of Kingberry Court gain three kinds of advantages that typically make such
developments attractive: a short commute to work, lower tax rates, and the benefits
of suburban schools (demographic details are described in Appendix B).
Although the houses on Kingberry Court are larger and more expensive
than average for its metropolitan region or for the United States as a whole, they
fall under rather typical restrictions, taking the form of a stringent development
charter to protect the market value of homes. Outbuildings such as sheds or
detached garages are not allowed in the development, compost piles are not permitted
because they may produce odors or attract insects, and even vegetable
gardening is prohibited (because the presence of food in the yard is thought to
attract local pest animals such as raccoons and skunks). Most of the residents of
Kingberry Court do have small vegetable patches surreptitiously hidden at the
sides of garages or near back property lines, but they are all aware they are
operating in defiance of the community charter in doing so. Such charters (see
Chapter 7) are extremely common for subdevelopments established in the last
twenty-five years.
The people of Kingberry Court are themselves typical examples of uppermiddle-class
Americans. Six of the eight respondents interviewed hold advanced
degrees and all eight households earn more than $100,000 per year. Their
occupations include professionals (two medical doctors, one lawyer, and three
research scientists with doctoral degrees) and business ownership (one owns a
manufacturing firm, the other a construction business).
Each of the eight respondents is white, married, and has children. Seven of
the eight respondents were male. Four of the respondents have been living on
the circle since it was first completed fifteen years ago, and the other four bought
houses between five and eight years ago. Their ages range from early thirties
(the newcomers) to late sixties (original residents).
All of the eight residents use lawn fertilizers and pesticides. Walter, Arthur,
Suzanne, and Frank2
hire lawn care companies to spray fertilizer and pesticides
on their yards at regular intervals during the growing season. The number of treatments
per year range from two (Walter) to six (Arthur). Tom and Patrick are
do-it-yourselfers. They both purchase the same pre-packaged fertilization and
pesticide program from a home improvement store and apply the chemicals
themselves that requires four treatments a year. Michael and Jason are also doit-yourselfers,
but design their own programs by purchasing different combinations
and brands of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides and applying them at their
own rates, five or six times a year. Thus the residents of Kingberry Court also represent
the more general profile outlined previously: socially elite homeowners who
also tend to be lawn chemical users. With this in mind, we set out to determine
whether these residents–lawn chemical users all–viewed the lawn as an environmental
risk; whether they trusted the information they received regarding their
yards; how their daily lives influenced their lawn care choices; and what responsibilities
they felt to one another, to the environment, and to their yards.
Is the Lawn a Personal Risk or Environmental Hazard?
In talking with these residents about their environmental commitments and
concerns, it became clear that “green values” are complex and uneven commitments.
Homeowners described varying levels of allegiance to “environmentalism.”
Only three identified themselves as environmentalists, three were
ambiguous about their concern for the environment, and two vocally declared
no concern about environmental issues. Overall concern for and about the environment,
however, was not a prerequisite for being concerned about the specific
dangers of lawn chemicals or vice versa. Six of the eight residents described the
potential risks of lawn chemicals, and expressed some uneasiness in using them.
Suzanne and Frank each identified themselves as “environmentalists” and
discussed their general environmental ethic at length. They also identified themselves
as recyclers and expressed concern about environmental issues especially
including air pollution and hazardous waste. Frank explained,
We left our previous home because of a hazardous waste incinerator.
We didn’t want the kids around that. We try to do as much as we can
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 101
naturally, without the [lawn] chemicals. We put coffee grounds in
with the tomato plants. We used to do composting back in the old
neighborhood.
Walter, Jason, Arthur, and Patrick expressed ambivalence over their
concern for the environment and espoused a middle-of-the-road approach to
environmentalism. Walter described the contradiction these four all felt
between protecting the environment and maintaining the look of their yards:
I would call myself an environmentalist, but there are different kinds. I
am not strict. If I had an outbreak of bugs that were going to kill the
trees I’ve worked on for twenty years, there would be no question that
I would spray to get rid of them. I would use lindane, even though it’s
illegal, because I have worked on those trees for decades. But I try to
keep from doing any more spraying than I have to.
Arthur echoed these feelings with his statement,
Of course I am concerned about the environment. Of course there is
always a little bit of a risk [when using lawn chemicals], but it is small
enough that it is not going to stop me.
When we asked Patrick if he would call himself an environmentalist, he said,
I would be right in the middle. I’m surely not going to strap myself to a
tree to save it. But I would vote for someone with a strong environmental
record. You know, I try to recycle. But I don’t do anything to extremes.
I just try to do my part.
Michael and Tom flatly denied any concern over the environment. As Michael
said,
I’m no environmentalist. I use all the chemicals I can. I don’t care about
chopping forests down. There’s plenty of wood and everything. I’m not
one of these organic farmer type guys.
Certainly, our conversations underlie the fact that that a direct relationship
between socioeconomic status and environmental concern cannot be assumed.
Michael and Tom, the least environmentally conscious residents of Kingberry
Court, were the most highly educated (Michael) and had the highest income
(Tom).
Even so, six of the eight residents, including four who would not accept
the label of environmentalist, expressed concern over the dangers of lawn
C H A P T E R S I X102
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 103
chemicals. Only Jason and Michael said they had no concerns at all about
the chemicals they were using. Jason said he was using such a small volume that
his chemicals posed no hazard, and Michael, a (medical) doctor, insisted that
lawn chemicals simply were not harmful. The remaining six residents’ anxieties
centered around three more specific concerns: children, pets, and the wider
environment.
Children, Pets, and Nature
Walter, Suzanne, Tom, Patrick, and Frank all expressed concern over the impact
of their use of lawn chemicals as specifically being concerned about the
children in the neighborhood. Frank does not let his children into the yard for
several days after a treatment. Suzanne talked about some of her friends who
have stopped their treatments because they have small children at home. Tom
said,
Certainly I’ve been responsible over the years when there were younger
kids in the neighborhood. I made sure they weren’t getting on the grass,
and put those little flags up, keeping them off so that they don’t walk
through it and put it in their mouths.
Walter talked about his grandchildren:
I try not to go out there and zap things all the time. I am particularly
conscious about it because I have an autistic grandson. Nobody knows
what triggers that. He’s always smelling the roses, and I’m thinking,
did I put something on there that’s going to make him worse? I want
a nice looking lawn, but I don’t want to endanger my kids walking
across it.
As noted in Chapter 1, Suzanne’s anxieties extended to her dog, though not
to the point of changing her lawn care behaviors. Similarly, Patrick, Walter,
and Frank all expressed concern over the impact of their chemical use on their
dogs. (Tom did not have any pets). Frank explained that his dog is not allowed
outside for several days after a lawn treatment or until after it rains. Patrick
said:
Six or seven years ago there was a big debate in our paper about what some
of the chemicals were doing to the animals. Dogs, lymphomas, things like
that. That was an awareness thing for me: I’d never heard of that.
Patrick, Arthur, Walter, and Frank all expressed concern about the impact of
their chemical use on wider ecological relationships in the region. Frank
described the problem of runoff and drew a comparison between farmers
C H A P T E R S I X104
fertilizing their fields and homeowners fertilizing their lawns, both of them contributing
to water quality problems. As Patrick said:
It all just runs off in the sewers. So you want to make sure you are putting
as little as possible into the ecosystem . . . There is that consideration,
where does all this go, potentially, eventually? Maybe it’s washing
off into the river system. I do a lot of water sports, so I am concerned
about that.
Walter told a story about his son’s job at a local golf club:
My son worked at a country club north of here, and I saw what they did.
They were putting diazinon on. It rained, and it killed all of the ducks
at the country club. The country club didn’t want anyone to know about
it, so they hired him [Walter’s son] to put them all in a dump truck and
take them away. And I’m thinking, geez, you know there’s some really
horrible environmental effects here. Obviously, if it kills ducks, it kills
fish too. It says that on the bag [of pesticide], but you know you don’t
pay much attention to that. Still, it goes down the drain. I want a nice
looking lawn, but I don’t want to endanger any [wildlife].
What do these stories tell us about the environmental awareness of lawn
chemical users? To begin with, there is a prevalent and apparently deep anxiety
about the environment associated with lawn care, even amongst people without
“environmental” concerns. These anxieties are most commonly expressed
and experienced at a personal level, especially concerning children and dogs.
Even so, these anxieties do little to curb behavior. The case of Suzanne, who
would rather tie booties on her dog’s feet than change her lawn care practices,
is a somewhat extreme example.
These concerns, we have shown earlier, are specifically more pronounced
amongst people who use chemicals than people who don’t. Most obviously, it is
because chemical users read (or at least glance at) the bags of chemicals they
apply, as Walter explained. But where does most chemical information come
from? Is it trustworthy? How is it reconciled with the pronounced anxieties of
lawn managers? Why use chemicals about which you are so anxious?
Trust in Experts
Our group of neighbors together told us three typical stories to explain their
use of lawn chemicals despite knowledge of their hazards. The first of these–
centering on trust in professional experts–was most common, since several residents
employed other people to manage their lawns. Generally, residents
believed that because lawn chemical producers and the companies that apply
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 105
chemicals are acting in a professional capacity, environmental risks are reduced
or eliminated. This trust in the expert status of members of the lawn chemical
industry was used to transfer responsibility for lawn chemical dangers from individuals
to the industry itself.
Trust in experts was an important factor for Frank, Arthur, Suzanne, and
Tom. Frank, Arthur, and Suzanne all placed environmental responsibility for
treatments with their lawn service companies. For Frank and Suzanne, this trust
was facilitated by their own self-proclaimed lack of knowledge of the technical
details of treatments. As Frank explained:
I don’t know their job, but they seem to know their job. We really don’t
know the impact of what they are doing. . . . We’ve had a variety of bugs
eating something. I don’t know what they were. I don’t know what they
spray with . . . When they come out they just look and see what they need
to do.
The guy that does our chemical treatments was a botany major
at [local university]. That makes us feel better than if there were
some teenage kid that doesn’t know anything about anything doing our
lawn . . . These guys seem pretty safe. They seem very professional. We
trust the people we are paying to put it [the treatment] down. They
know what they are doing.
Arthur echoed these sentiments:
Of course, I am concerned [about the environmental impact of the treatments].
But I have had a discussion with the head of our fertilizing company
and he pretty much assured me that the amounts and the way we
are doing it, plus the professional manner in which they do it, that I am
not worried. We are not overdoing it.
Suzanne reiterated her own lack of knowledge and her willingness to place technical
responsibility on her service company’s shoulders.
[The company] comes out and does our fertilizing. When they find some
bugs or something they just spray and leave us a note. We’ve used them
for years, so they just go ahead and do whatever they need to do.
Tom placed environmental responsibility with the company that manufactured
his four-step program.
I rely on the fact that I buy [this brand of] products. They’re a big company
so they should be environmentally responsible. I rely upon their
expertise to put these products on my lawn.
C H A P T E R S I X106
When asked if he would ever switch from his current treatment program,
he replied:
I guess I’ve just grown accustomed to using [this brand]. I’ve had good
success with it, feel like it’s a good product, it’s worked well. So, I’d just
stick with that out of brand loyalty.
Tom is the owner of a small manufacturing company himself. He spent a
portion of the interview describing his company’s recent efforts to reduce waste
and increase recycling in production processes, viewing this effort as integral to
the company’s financial success. Tom’s statements reflect an increasingly prevalent
view that a successful business enterprise would by default also protect the
environment. In this way, responsibility for the fate of lawn chemicals is tied to
the manufacturer rather than the user, or perhaps more directly, to the free market
economy. Environmentally unsound businesses cannot thrive or even exist
in a complex and efficient economy.
Tom never asserted the possibility that he may be using the chemicals in the
wrong way, at the wrong times, or in the wrong amounts. Tom also avoided discussing
the possibility that the manufacturer itself may be causing environmental
risk. Tom’s story provides an interesting contrast to the liability claims
of lawn chemical producers themselves, who assert that the environmental fate
of lawn chemicals rests solely with the user.
For these four Kingberry Court residents (Frank, Arthur, Suzanne, and
Tom), the professional status of lawn care service companies and chemical manufacturers
goes a long way to ensure the safety of lawn chemical treatments.
Whereas some scholars emphasize that modern Americans are increasingly skeptical
of experts,3
reconciling lawn chemical application with deep anxiety requires
some measure of faith in the responsibility and knowledge of others. The importance
that homeowners attach to the concept of trust in professional experts,
moreover, is directly related to what this concept means in their lives. In this
sense, the general tendency of applying lawn chemicals to be more likely among
upper middle class professionals is linked to the professional character (and
assumed legitimacy) of the professions such people occupy. Frank and Arthur
hold advanced degrees. Tom, Frank, and Arthur all seemed to derive a strong
sense of identity from their professions (business owner, chemist, and medical
doctor, respectively). Suzanne also took pains during the interview to stress the
career and status of her husband, a construction contractor. For these four at
least, their sense of themselves as professionals is central. Because they are welleducated
and successful in their own careers, they assume that other educated
professionals must be good at their jobs, dedicated, honest, and forthcoming. This
concept of skill in one’s profession is understood to include taking care of any
potential health or environmental dangers resulting from one’s work. It is not
clear if people doing other kinds of labor (e.g., waiting tables, washing dishes,
or answering phones) would share such faith in the expertise of others. The professional
status of chemical-using communities plays a key role in reconciling
environmental anxieties through trust in the corporate management of risk.
Qualified Mistrust
Walter, who uses a lawn care company, and Patrick who is a do-it-yourself applicator,
both openly distrusted lawn chemical companies. Walter explained his
uneasy relationship with his lawn care company.
Right now I’m hiring [this company] to do my lawn. I did it all myself
up until a year ago when I hurt my back. . . . Now they offer this program
where they claim you can regulate your own stuff. . . . I tell them what
I want on it, and they claim they follow my instructions. Now, whether
they are really doing that, I am suspicious that they probably aren’t. . . .
I think I’m living under an illusion [that the treatments applied are safe].
They are using less of it than I would have myself, and I’m hoping they
are putting on what I told them I want on there. . . . but I’m not 100%
certain of that, nor am I certain that nothing at all might not be better
than what I am doing now.
Despite his misgivings, Walter continues to employ the same company, however.
And while Patrick and Tom both were do-it-yourself applicators and both used
the same branded four-step program, Patrick further described some mistrust
in the manufacturer, at least in terms of prescribed volumes. Patrick explained:
I use [this brand’s] four-step fertilizer system. And I cut it in half. So I
use a very low level. My wife is concerned about, with all the little kids,
through the years, having fertilizers back there of a high concentration.
So we initially had [a lawn service company], then thought that that
might not be environmentally the safest thing to do. Plus, the expense.
And I thought, [this brand’s] four-step program and I just cut it in half
and it seems to work fine. Hopefully I’m not putting on more than I
need. And I figure it might be a little bit safer for the animals.
What motivates Walter and Patrick to continue to apply lawn chemicals,
despite their misgivings about the safety of their actions? If trust in experts is crucial,
but by no means unqualified, what motivates intensive lawn care practice?
Hectic Lives
In explaining their use of chemicals, residents largely emphasize the pace of their
lives. Four of the eight residents stated, with some degree of pride, how busy
they and their families are with careers, hobbies, sports, and travel. This often
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 107
C H A P T E R S I X108
translated into a feeling that they did not have time to worry about lawn chemicals.
Although they knew that lawn chemicals might have some dangers, and
that they themselves might in fact be responsible for these dangers, they felt
that they did not have the time to educate themselves in the technical aspects
of lawn treatment or weigh the health and environmental impacts. This feeling
was sometimes related to another theme that emerged from the interviews:
for some Kingberry Court residents, yard work is boring and distasteful. In addition,
residents suggested that, on balance, the yard simply did not play a major
role in the life of the neighborhood. Both the reluctance to do yard work and
the yard’s lack of explicit importance probably contributed to these a sense that
chemical treatments simply are not worth much consideration.
Walter, Michael, Tom, and Suzanne all emphasized that they did not have
time to worry about treatments. Michael spoke about the demands of his eighty
to 100 hour work week. Walter explained:
When I first moved here I was traveling a lot so I didn’t have time to do
much in my yard. I thought, my lawn must need something, so I was
treating it . . . I think of yard work as a fun activity . . . But I just don’t
have the time anymore.
Tom had to cut his interview short because he was getting ready to go to his son’s
state championship soccer game. He commented:
To be honest, we have a very busy household here. Our kids are very busy
with soccer and we do a lot of traveling for their sports events and such.
Patrick, Michael, and Jason explained that they did not enjoy yard work, and so
they tried to spend as little time and mental energy on the yard as possible.
Patrick explained:
I’m not as meticulous about the yard as maybe other people. I want the
grass to be just barely alive in the summer so that I don’t have to cut
it . . . If I had to spend more than an hour a week [in the yard], it’s getting
to be too much. I like to do a little, just to spruce things up. But
that is not how I . . . that is not my escape. I won’t cut my grass twice a
week and I won’t edge unless I have to . . . [my wife] likes to go out and
put in her hour or two a week. It works out real well. With both of us
putting that kind of time in, it’s not a burden . . . I like to put my hands
in the dirt, a little. After a couple of hours, that’s it, I’m done.
Jason said:
Mowing the lawn is fine, but all the other stuff I could do without . . .
We certainly like the way it looks, but we wish it took a little bit less time
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 109
to keep it that way . . . It’s an obligation for me. I’d choose to do many
things before I’d go out in the yard.
Michael explained:
Cutting the grass is work. I’ve tried to pay people to come and cut it
but our yard is so small, it doesn’t meet their minimum. I hate the
cutting . . . if I could find someone to take care of it reasonably, I’d do
it in a heartbeat.
Without question, the incidental and taken-for-granted character of the lawn
puts it at a low priority, at least for daily concern or worry. Somewhat ironically,
this tends to lead to a defaulting decision to apply chemicals(or hire a company
to do it), largely indiscriminately. The hectic lives of residents make the submersion
of anxiety easier to reconcile. For several of the residents, this takenfor-granted
character of the lawn is reinforced by an insistence that the lawn has
little to do with the life of the community. At the same time all agreed that they
knew their neighbors fairly well, the residents explained that interactions with
their neighbors were more likely to revolve around children, careers, and hobbies
rather than the yard. Patrick explained:
We know the neighbors pretty well. We have cookouts and we know each
other. We have kids the same age . . . the conversation is not about the
yard. That’s not my main motivation to go over and talk to someone.
Mostly it is about common aspects of kids and sports.
Suzanne, one of the more senior residents of the Court, described the neighbors’
relationships:
Our street is very friendly . . . Our street used to do little street carnivals
at the end of the summer because the kids all played together and
the parents all were very friendly. So we are lucky. I don’t know if it’s
that way everywhere.
Tom echoed these thoughts:
[We talk] more about the kids, school events, sports, athletics they’re
involved in, that kind of thing. Not necessarily what our yards are doing!
Occasionally, if someone is doing something, you’ll take notice of it,
which is kind of the polite thing to do: ‘Hey, I like that new tree.’
Walter said:
We talk about our kids and jobs just as much [as we talk about our yards].
We are so much older than most of our neighbors, so that makes a big
difference. A lot of my neighbors are in their forties and they are more
or less interested in their kids, and that’s it.
Jason described his interaction with his neighbors:
We more often talk about our kids or our jobs . . . We’ve never ever talked
with Tom and his wife about the yard even though we talk quite a bit.
As Michael described it:
I never see them [the neighbors while I’m doing yard word]. We don’t
cut at the same time, don’t do anything at the same time. If I’m out there
in the yard, I gotta get it done.
Unsurprisingly, it would seem then that busy, professional, urban residents
spend little conscious mental energy on the mundane arrangements of everyday
life, especially something as trivial as the lawn. Despite misgivings and anxieties
concerning lawn chemicals, therefore, the lawn is largely described as
nominal and tangential to the pulse of the community. As economists have
asserted, the use of lawn chemicals is a near unconscious trade-off for the return
on increasingly scarce time in the harried lives of the leisure class: a nonchoice.4
The lawn managers of Kingberry Court receive benefits from lawn chemical
applications in the form of reduced mental energy and decreased time spent on
the lawn. They have little reason to consider the potential negative consequences
of the routine, every-day practice of chemical use. According to these lawn managers,
the yard is seen as an incidental part of the taken-for-granted domestic
scene. It is not worth discussing with the neighbors, and the work surrounding
it should be minimized. Even if the yard was not so commonplace, any concerns
about lawn chemical treatments would probably fall by the wayside, swallowed
up in the hectic pace of professional and family life on Kingberry Court.
This may overstate, however, the degree to which the management of everyday
life and its objects, like the lawn, is passive. The level of civic engagement
embodied in the maintenance of the lawn in a face-to-face society like Kingberry
Court suggests something else. Despite an insistence that the lawn is collectively
trivial and tangential, there is a persistent moral responsibility tied to lawn care
that no resident can deny.
A Moral Responsibility
Indeed, our discussions with residents suggested this sense of a “neighborhood
norm” of lawn management is the most important driver lawn chemical use. Six
of the eight homeowners explained their decisions about lawn chemical use in
terms of something that they owed to their neighbors. Four lawn managers also
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described the ways in which the neighborhood itself actually forced certain
kinds of lawn management onto individuals.
Patrick and Arthur described their lawn chemical use as something they felt
they had to do to meet the expectations of their neighbors. Patrick explained:
I know that this neighborhood has a certain status. A certain look. I
surely wouldn’t want to ruin it for anybody . . . [I don’t enjoy yardwork]
But I do want it to look–you know, I want to fit in. I won’t cut my grass
twice a week and I won’t edge unless I have to. I’m not going to have
the most meticulous yard and a water sprinkler system. I’ll water by
hand, if I have to, occasionally in the summer. So I’d say I’m more of a
follower. I want to do just enough work to fit in.
In explaining whether there were any circumstances under which he would
increase his lawn chemical treatments, Patrick described his system of monitoring,
which relied heavily on a notion of the view of his lawn by the neighbors.
When weeds grow prominent,
I would feel really out of place. It’s not only how the yard looks to me,
but how it looks to the neighbors. If it’s not in keeping with the neighborhood
[then I’d have to spray more]. . . . I’m willing to go to the edge
in this neighborhood [in terms of less mowing, letting a few weeds grow
in], but I’m not willing to go to the other side and have big holes in the
yard. It’s funny you mention this, because my mom’s yard [which is not
sprayed] looks like that (big holes in the yard) right in the middle of [a
nearby town], where if you don’t cut twice a week you are a communist!
It’s like, oh man!
Arthur’s wife, Helen, made an association between the value of her house, the
number of weeds in her yard, and the character (and perhaps the ethnicity of
the her next door neighbors:
I respect the whole neighborhood. I would not let the house run down.
I would not let it grow up to look unseemly. That’s just out of common
courtesy. You want to keep up what you paid a heck of a lot for. You start
to let it go downhill and then the neighborhood changes. Not that I
mean by kinds of people, because we have all kinds here, all . . . nationalities.
I just mean things start to go downhill . . .
Arthur added:
Everyone around here works very hard keeping up their homes. I
wouldn’t insult my neighbors by not keeping my house up.
C H A P T E R S I X112
Jason’s wife, Karen, talked about a potential “backlash” from her neighbors if
she failed to maintain the yard in a certain way. She said:
I think we’d get a lot of complaints [if I didn’t do yardwork]. Maybe you
might not hear it, but everyone here keeps their lawn looking nice. If
you were the only person who didn’t mow . . .
Walter spoke about a neighborhood backlash from over-treatment of the lawn,
as well:
If something happens to your yard, the neighbors are on you. That’s the
reason I changed from [this lawn care company]. When they killed my
yard and it went absolutely dead, I was ostracized around here. People
wanted to know, what the hell are you doing? You are decreasing our
property values!
Frank said he himself felt insulted by his neighbors’ yard maintenance, or lack
thereof:
Everybody around here, they’ll put out a few marigolds, a few impatiens,
just enough to dot the landscape . . . We get kind of irritated when people
don’t do something with their yard. I get mad if people don’t put
plants out to make their front yard look nice.
It would seem that although Kingberry Court residents insist that lawns play little
overt role in the neighborhood and are rarely the topic of discussion or serious
consideration, front yards influence, and are heavily influenced by, an overarching
sense of neighborhood monitoring. In fact, the actions and opinions of
the neighbors suggest that residents have a comparatively small range of actual
choice in the management of their lawns.
Moreover, the direct actions of neighbors is repeatedly reported to influence
how others treat their lawns. Michael and Frank both talked about a neighborhood
outbreak of grubs which forced them to start using grub-control chemicals.
As Michael put it:
We don’t have a grub problem, but the neighbors all do the grub treatment
and chase them all over here. So, we kind of have to do it.
Collectively, this arrangement of lawn care begins to assemble itself into a kind
of community pattern, or an ordered neighborhood rhythm. In a prominent
example, the decision to mow on a particular day emerges as a collective group
nondecision. Suzanne explained:
The neighbors have a lawn service and their guy comes out on Wednesdays.
So, I try to cut my grass on Wednesdays also because our yards
kind of flow together. And the neighbor behind us, if they see us out they
will also cut their grass on the same day, to keep it all looking nice at the
same time. . . . So we kind of keep an eye on each other, thinking OK,
this is grass cutting day. And also keeping an eye on the weather. This
Wednesday it’s supposed to rain, so Thursday will probably be grasscutting
day this week.
Several lawn managers spoke about the imperative to mow in time for the
recent high school prom. Limousines came to the cul-de-sac to pick up several
high school students, pictures were taken on front lawns, and everyone wanted
their yards to look perfect. Frank described the scene:
We were out cutting our grass at 9 o’clock at night in the rain, because
the next day was prom for the neighbors’ kids. I was going to let the grass
go for a couple of days, but after talking to Suzanne, whose daughter
was going to prom, I thought I better cut it today. So if we know people
are going to have parties, we try to cut the lawn [the day before] just
so it will look nice.
Sometimes, the actual tasks of lawn management themselves are taken over by
other residents. In these situations, not only decisions about lawn work but
actual carrying out of tasks is out of the hands of the homeowner. Walter
describes two experiences:
We recently had a hailstorm and one of my neighbor’s said, ‘I was going
to come over and pick up your [fallen] branches.’ He thought I was a
little slow getting to it because I am too old.
My neighbor here [Frank] was having some problems with his job, so
my son and I mowed his lawn for him. We didn’t ask, we just mowed it.
I knew he was under a lot of pressure and needed help.
Whereas the above described behaviors are concerned with planting and
mowing, chemical treatments are also greatly influenced by the neighbors. When
we asked Suzanne why she continued her lawn chemical treatments even though
her dog’s paws were bleeding, she replied:
I guess we didn’t want the yard to look bad when everybody else’s looked
so nice . . . You try to make it look as nice as you can, without offending
other people.
Walter, another long-time resident, described himself as a “trendsetter” on the
Court. He used a lawn chemical company when he first moved to Kingberry
Court, and he says that all the other residents were soon following suit. When
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 113
he fired the service company a few years later, all the residents also dropped
their lawn services. Walter explains:
If all of the sudden I want back to spraying my yard, they probably
would too. It’s very much a group activity around here. People come
around and they ask you information, they are worried about everything.
They know I am from [local college]; they see me as kind of an
authority.
Risk Citizens, Contradiction Reconcilers,
Networked Actors
Taken together, the survey results and the stories of the people of Kingberry
Court suggest a profile of people who apply chemicals despite anxiety, who are
skeptical about chemical producers but have faith in those who produce and
apply them, and who downplay the importance of the lawn in community life
while setting their environmental schedules by the community lawn clock.
Arguably, these urban residents together participate in a “lawn community.”
The behaviors and feelings of these lawn people fundamentally contradict
apolitical theories of green citizenship, which hold that people engage in environmentally
protective behavior to receive social rewards from the community.
In research on environmental consumerism, such green behaviors are often
described as a “social dilemma” in which individuals must choose to make small
individual sacrifices for the common good. In this line of thinking, convincing
people that their sacrifice is worth the group’s reward is the key to creating
green behavior.5
The picture of lawn people and chemical-using communities suggests something
else entirely, since individual sacrifices are made in the form of environmentally
destructive behaviors that are rewarded by, or are at least in service of,
community. Refraining from using chemicals on the lawn is a behavior that creates
costs to the group, at least as perceived in chemical neighborhoods. The
maintenance of a weed- and pest-free lawn requires some personal sacrifice
and potential risk, but results in a shared good, enjoyed instrumentally (in housing
values) and more abstractly (through social cohesion). Using lawn chemicals
confers social rewards on the user. A well-maintained lawn is a sign of good
character and social responsibility, a commonly expressed and central countervailing
incentive for chemical lawn care, despite known and acknowledged risks.
Input of labor and even the application of chemicals that people may regard as
environmentally problematic are sustained as a form of collective action, driven
both through an impulse towards collective good and an urge to avoid being noncooperative,
lax, or antisocial. Three further things are also evident.
First, the inherent hazards of community maintenance through intensive
lawn care are largely reconciled through qualified anxiety. Keeping in mind that
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people who do not worry about lawn chemicals are the ones that do not tend to
use them, lawn people (such as those in Kingberry Court) are by their nature
anxious. They acknowledge uncertainties and hazards, especially those rooted
in their own behavior. Are their applications hurting their pets, their family,
their neighbors? When ultimately this worry is externalized by a qualified faith
in chemical capitalism, for most members of such communities, proper citizenship
involves ongoing inner dialogue concerning the hazards that are inherent
in the practice of everyday life.
In this way, lawn people are model citizens of Beck’s “risk society.” As risk
is individuated–both by the reduced regulatory responsibilities of the state and
the risks shed from corporate to consumer spheres–lawn people shoulder the
burden of a range of new choices. They are reflexive about their decision making,
however, constantly evaluating the complex choices that new technologies
present, and reconciling them with the priorities of their community. It further
underlies Beck’s point that, since the modern individual is compelled to his individual
responsibilities in a larger context, a community of individuals emerges:
“individualization thus implies, paradoxically, a collective lifestyle.”6
Second, people who practice intensive lawn care do, to some degree, resemble
the rigid caricatures in advertising photos promulgated by the chemical
industry. As suggested in “pull” marketing, these lawn people are dedicated to
family and community and they feel obligations of stewardship to the landscape
itself. Clearly advertising does not produce this effect, however, since the source
of such behaviors is rooted in the social community and the landscape. Even so,
the mutual mimicry of the social-communitarian subject and of the economicconsuming
subject is relevant to our understanding of the lawn, which serves as
a bridge between the two. Desire and community obligation cannot in themselves
be marketed as commodities, after all, as deeply held “feelings” they provide
no outlet in and of themselves for economic growth or accumulation. But
as embodied in intensive lawn practices, such desires can be bought or sold to
provide an industrial source of revenue and a sink for risk. To produce and
maintain this link between consuming and participating, the lawn industry projects
back to lawn people images of communities that can be actively achieved
through hard work and the right commercial products.
Advertising neither actively creates turfgrass subjects nor passively represents
them, but instead creates a discursive connection between people’s image
of themselves and the industrial image of the lawn, maintaining the flow of
chemicals that is essential to the survival of beleaguered formulator and applicator
firms.
In this sense, lawn people are the ultimate logical participants in O’Connor’s
ecological contradiction of capitalism.7
As noted previously, O’Connor emphasizes
the irreconcilability of accumulation and sustainability. The implications
of this contradiction, it would seem, are not merely a series of ecological crises
(though bear in mind that chemical production does produce acute site-specific
D O L AW N P E O P L E C H O O S E L AW N S ? 115
problems that have drawn the attention of regulators [see Chapter 5]), but are
also the constant shifting of responsibility for this contradiction to the point of
consumption. Here, individual people–instead of firms or even states–become
responsible not only for consuming surplus goods and services, but for experiencing
and regulating the externalities that result.
The rhythms and behaviors of these neighborhoods, although enforced by
human communities, are dictated by the pattern, pace, > and specific ecological
needs of other species. Lawn grass has at its disposal not merely the labor
of individual homeowners (who might at any time neglect to mow or spray for
grubs on an ad hoc basis) but instead an entire social machine, organized to
enforce and make regular all of the practices necessary for turfgrass growth.
Lawn people are, therefore, also perfectly enrolled participants in actornetworks.
The turfgrasses to which they are linked (many of which are already
evolutionary beneficiaries of grazing ecologies of previous imperial ecologies
[see Chapter 2]), benefit from lawn chemicals and demand the labor of
lawn people. Lawns, in this sense, are not simply plots of grass, but instead are
a fixed cluster of grasses, chemicals, and people: a form of socioenvironmental
monoculture.
But alternatives exist. A cottage industry for reform has emerged in recent
decades to provide a menu of antilawn options for urban residents. Do these
practices represent real alternatives? Are they realistic under the current legal
regime? Or do alternatives simply reinstitute the position of lawn people as the
lonely adjudicators of a larger socioeconomic machine?
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