Uprooting Tradition For an Eco-Friendly Future

How to incorporate Nature into your life:
Uncovering the aristocratic beginnings of lawns and the way they've become woven into the very fabric of suburban life. Take a stroll with me as I trace the path from the sprawling estates of the White House and Mount Vernon to the post-WWII suburbs, where maintaining a pristine lawn became synonymous with the American Dream.

But it's not just a story of aesthetics and social norms; we'll confront the harsh environmental toll of our green indulgences, and I'll share the personal tale that ensued when my own lawn transformation defied neighborhood conventions.

The lush tapestry of our yards does more than just please the eye—it tells a tale of identity, conformity, and the hunger for status. In a candid episode, we'll navigate the pressures and expectations imposed by homeowners associations and the shifting tides of community values.

As the blades of grass sway in the winds of change, I propose a renaissance in lawn care, urging us to plant the seeds for a more conscious approach to nature. We'll explore alternative visions for our outdoor spaces that honor the environment and our place within it.

Whether you're a green thumb enthusiast or simply a curious soul, join this thought-provoking exploration into the grassy knolls of history and the future we might sow beyond them.

Resources:
https://blog.nwf.org/2024/04/why-we-have-lawns/

Chapters

• 0:00 The History of Lawns in America
• 17:40 Reimagining Lawn Care Culture
• 22:17 Spark Consciousness

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Did the last episode leave you wondering why the fuck we have lawns in the first place? I got you. Join me on Season 2, episode 4 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to hear the historic tale that's rooted in colonialism and slavery. Welcome to Season 2, episode 4 of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness. We're dropping knowledge bombs and answering your burning questions about nature, animals, spirituality, mental health, women's empowerment and other profound topics. This podcast probably won't change your life, but hopefully it will give you some food for thought, some guidance on this twisted path we call human existence. My role as an award-winning story keeper and catalyst for healing humanity and Mother Earth is to help you reawaken to your own connection with nature and, through this reconnection, reacquaint you with your intuition. What you do with it, how you incorporate that into your life, is up to you. I hope you'll make changes that benefit both you personally and Mother Earth as a whole. I hope you'll share what you learn here with others and that they'll make different, more compassionate and enlightened choices too. Either way, take what works for you, leave the rest. Always work to be the best version of yourself and try to leave the world a little better than it was when you arrived. I still am waiting on some really powerful questions to be submitted via the Patreon membership. If you could check that out, that would really help me, if you submit your questions, so that I can not have to try to anticipate so much what it is that your burning questions might be, but actually answer those burning questions. However, that said, I figured after the last episode one burning question might be how the fuck did we even come to have lawns anyway? And so I am here to answer that this week.

Speaker 1: 2:30

In the seitan of the show, many people envision the perfect American lawn. Right, it's this lush green golf course uniform, no life in it carpet that is the front of and the back of your house. Now, in this country this might be surprising for you, but lawns actually cover 40 million acres, which is the size of Colorado, and it actually comes deeply rooted in as a cultural status symbol. It's become that. But, as we learned in the last episode, there are some pretty stark ecological consequences to that, and some of them we didn't even talk about. So I just want to touch on that really quick first. First of all, it takes around 9 billion gallons of water daily just to manage these green carpets and many people are still, unfortunately, spraying for pesticides and blah, blah, blah, and so we're introducing all kinds of toxins into the ecosystem and, as we talked about before, there's no wildlife and all of that, right? So where did all of this? How did this even get started, right? So, and actually we have to go all the way back to pre-colonial times, really, before we even came over to America from Europe and stole land from the people who were already here, but that's an episode for another day. But we have to go all the way back to Europe and to Britain.

Speaker 1: 4:04

And it was a status symbol, right, because, let's think about it, it's pretty expensive and a lot of work to maintain these green spaces, right. And so in Europe, the only people like in the 17th and 18th century we're talking those big manor houses with their big expansive lawns the only people who could have that was the aristocracy, the rich people, right, and it became a status symbol. And they had a whole staff of gardeners and they had grazing animals and those had to be maintained by a staff. So only the aristocracy could have these. And so it became a status symbol of wealth. So only the aristocracy could have these, and so it became a status symbol of wealth. And I mean and you can even see it even in a lot of British gardens today right, they're highly landscaped and this all takes work and time and money. And it was a very clear, clear demarcation of class and status. Do you have a green, lush lawn or not? Is it a more utilitarian space because you're using it to survive and grow food for yourself? Right, very stark differences and this division as much as when we came across as pilgrims and said we want a different life for ourselves.

Speaker 1: 5:26

It was impossible to leave all of our programming behind. Just like, when you move out of your parents' house to go to college, you take your programming with you. When you graduate college and you move into your own place by yourself, you take your programming with you wherever you go, unless you very, very consciously decide not to. But nobody was talking about stuff like that back then. So of course they brought their programming with them. 1776, right, we're coming out from under the shadow of colonial rule, we are newly independent, we're trying to forge our own cultural identity.

Speaker 1: 6:03

But, like I said, we've brought this programming with us, and one of the programs that came with us was about yards, and so for a time there was this difference between the old world, aka britain, and the new world, aka America. And when we first got here, it was a very utilitarian space, right, people were trying to forge an existence out of stolen land and survive, and so they're gardening and they're raising livestock and all of this, right, it was that same stark contrast between the aristocracy and the lower classes in Britain. Well, in America it was all that lower class appearing lawns quote unquote lawns and diplomats and other people who were going back and forth across to the two. They developed kind of lawn envy. They saw these big, manicured gardens and they're all oh I.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Wealthier people started to transform their yard space from a utilitarian space to these green carpets, and that included the White House, the ultimate symbol of what America is supposed to be like. Right, big, iconic estates like Mount Vernon and other big estates that the founding fathers owned. They all had these big, expansive green spaces. And guess what? Just like in Europe, they take a lot of time and effort and money to maintain and if you have a lawn, you already know it's not maybe as massive as something like Mount Verdon, but you know that maintaining a green lawn takes time and effort and money. All of that side note goes away If you replace your lawn with natives. Once that work is done, you're done. You never have to do that work again. You can use that time and money and energy on having fun, go on a vacation, whatever you want, but back in the day, in like George Washington era, guess who's doing the hard work of maintaining these massive green spaces?

Speaker 1: 8:47

Spaces, it's slaves, people, it's slaves. It's deeply, deeply rooted in our culture that slaves are taking care of these rich people and that, whether we acknowledge it or not and I encourage you to acknowledge it because that's the first step of healing this in our culture that is still pervasive today, right? This is why, when a Black person is in a neighborhood with lots of green lawns, people don't think they belong there. They do belong there just as much, I would argue. Nobody belongs with green lawns, but that's a whole other argument. They become again a status symbol in America, just like they were in Europe, and so at some point we finally free the slaves. But there's still obviously these cultural issues that have to be addressed and that's a whole other podcast. But the lawns are still a status symbol.

Speaker 1: 9:34

And if you've heard of Frederick Law Olmsted, he was a very big landscape architect. People to this day still talk about him, even though he was back in the 1860s is when he was really popular and he designed all of these suburban landscapes that valued open spaces and greenery. Now, as we learned last episode, that's a great thing to have, but instead of lawns and just green carpet, let's use those public open spaces in a more environmentally friendly way. But that's not what he was thinking or imagining at that point in history. And so he actually did design Central Park in New York City and he also designed Riverside, illinois, which was one of the very first planned suburbs in America, and he kind of became the standard for what these green spaces were supposed to look like. Now, to be fair, his vision was that it was approachable in a cohesive blend of natural beauty and structured design that could be accessible for everyone, not just the wealthy, hence why he did parks and planned communities and things like that.

Speaker 1: 10:46

And this guy Frank J Scott in 1870, saw this and continued to build on this idea, and he was really the one that came up with this whole idea of lawns as we know them today. He argued that with open-faced front lawns, we declare our like-mindedness to our neighbors and our distance from the English who surrounded their yards with an inhospitable brick wall. I want to pick this apart a little bit. First of all, like-mindedness. This is a country that was founded on individuality and on wanting to not live under the status quo and to be able to have self-determination. So why 1870, so like 100 years later? Are they all of a sudden now saying we want to be like-mindedness, we should be championing individuality, and that remains true today. We should be championing individuality, and that includes what the front of your house looks like. If you want a brick wall, have a brick wall. If you want to have crazy wild weeds, have that. But that's where this idea came from. And the other thing I want to pick apart with this is distancing from the English. Well, you're not really my friend. Again, only a hundred years after winning our freedom, kind of less than we're saying we want to continue to distance ourselves. But really they had big green spaces there too. Yeah, okay, maybe they were behind a brick wall, but they still just had big green carpets. So he's repackaging what Britain's doing, trying to make it seem American, but it isn't Because of these lawns, of course, necessity being the mother of invention, that same year 1870, this guy, elwood McGuire, invented the push mower, which meant all of a sudden, now this manicured, well-maintained lawn was accessible, and that's good, I suppose.

Speaker 1: 12:54

But again, it's good because it was less labor intensive and less costly. That's good. But again, as we're discussing, lawns themselves weren't the best idea we ever had and in addition to all of those already things that we've said are maybe not the best idea for ever, because of this desire to, to have these green carpets, it opened up some really scary possibilities. So after I think it was world war there, as people may or may not realize, there was a whole upsurge in the war machine in World War I and in inventing all sorts of crazy weaponry, including chemicals, chemical weaponry, and so World War I finally comes to a close and and all of a sudden, there are people who are employed in the chemical warfare service, which was really about inventing chemical weapons for military use and all of these chemicals, and there's a surplus of those people in those fields and there's a surplus of the actual chemicals themselves and the government is left going. Well, what do we do with poisonous gas and these jobs now that the war is over. Well, someone somewhere along the line came up with a brilliant idea that these poisons could be used in agriculture and water management. They didn't stop to think what might happen if we do this. They just said this is great because these people won't lose their jobs and we can continue to produce this stuff. And yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1: 14:46

As we talked about in the last episode, these chemicals get into our soil, into our water supply, into our bodies, into our food Not a good thing. It gets into wildlife, and we didn't talk about this last episode. But just as a quick aside, rat poison, which is still, unfortunately, used, doesn't just kill rats, it kills whatever animals then eat the rats that have died. It's also a very long, slow, painful death. They essentially stop being able to clot, their blood stops being able to clot and they eventually kind of internally bleed to death. It's horrifying and there are far more humane and ethical ways of dealing with any and all beings that you do not want inside your house. But at the time, beings that you do not want inside your house, but at the time right after World War II or World War I, rather, they're using it on everything Not great. And unfortunately, even though the use of chemical warfare was eventually banned by the Geneva Protocol in like the 1920s, these chemicals remain in our environment because they just don't break down.

Speaker 1: 16:02

And then we get to World War II and DDT. This was discovered as a solution for malaria and typhus-carrying insects. Okay, sure, I would argue, there was probably other ways of doing it, and we now have outlawed the use of DDT as a pest management thing in this country. But it was very prevalent for a very long time and we eventually got rid of it because somebody went oh wait, this is causing cancer and other bad things. But again, to fuel the profit engine of the companies and making DDT, they decided to use it in agriculture, not just in war and not just to protect soldiers Not that soldiers should be exposed to it either, but I'm just saying they made it more pervasive as a way of having an insect-free, perfectly manicured lawn and to fuel their own profit margins. Not wonderful. It also part of the reason it got banned is because it was also killing the bald eagle which, as everyone knows, is America's symbol. Thankfully it has been banned at this point. It was banned in like, I want to say, 1970-something 72, I think, anyway not great. 70-something 72, I think, anyway, not great.

Speaker 1: 17:40

We furthered this myth of the modern American lawn with the GI Bill because after World War II, somebody finally hit on the fact that we need to take better care of soldiers when they come home. I'd argue we still don't do enough. But again, different podcast for a different day. But in 1944, they passed what's commonly known as the GI Bill, and this was really great at the time because they started increasing benefits to soldiers and their families and so more and more people were able to actually own homes. My very first house that I bought on my own was actually built by a World War II vet, literally by his own hands, for his bride that he met, I want to say, in Austria or somewhere during the war and brought back to America with him. And it's a very cool history of the house. But that aside, he was probably able to afford at least the land for it because of the GI Bill probably able to afford at least the land for it because of the GI Bill. Now this is all really great. They're living this whole quote-unquote American dream thing.

Speaker 1: 18:39

We've introduced the 40-hour work week and again we can have a whole other conversation about that, but not today and it became, unfortunately. This is where really this whole lawn care became a big thing. Because now, remember, if we hearken back to 1870 or whatever it was, and they're saying this is a symbol of like-mindedness with your neighbors. Well, now more and more people have homes with lawns and they want to be like-minded with their neighbors and it becomes like this weekly thing that everyone does and some people even felt like it was their civic responsibility to have this uninterrupted suburban green carpet. That house that I was just saying was built by a GI.

Speaker 1: 19:35

I opted to transform my lawn into a wild native habitat space and I literally had a neighbor call me a bitch because of it, because I didn't have the green carpet, and part of the reason that's so upsetting that he clearly couldn't put into adult terms was because I was not yielding to this subtle pressure that people feel to have their lawn be like everyone else's. I was disrupting the visual harmony in my neighborhood. I was disrupting the visual harmony in my neighborhood. Now, I'm okay with that. He clearly was not and we need to change the dialogue around this. We need to change the dialogue around what is beautiful and what the standard of lawn care actually should be. It shouldn't be about adhering to norms anymore. It should be about caring for Mother Earth.

Speaker 1: 20:38

And then all of this problem of these green carpets and needing to conform to your neighborhood got even worse when homeowners associations were created and that was actually not all that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that happened in like 1947. And it basically took personal choice away from homeowners who are part of that HOA. You literally were required to maintain your lawns according to their rules, and that still exists, and it's more prevalent in some areas than others. I know in Colorado it was almost impossible to find a place that didn't have an HOA. It's a big problem out there, whereas in New England there are some planned communities or mobile home communities that have HOAs, but there are a lot more properties that are just existing in and of themselves. So you have a little bit more freedom with that Side note there.

Speaker 1: 21:37

So anyway, with all of this now, all of this history that is steeped literally in colonialism and slavery and intolerance and not allowing people to show up authentically, do we really want these green carpets anymore? I for one do not. 40 million acres of green carpet not good for the environment, not good for Mother Earth. It's time to change that. It's time to rethink that. And so what can you do? Well, if you have a lawn, do something different with it If you don't share what you're learning with other people.

Speaker 1: 22:17

This podcast is one way to do that. But share what you're learning. Encourage other people to do something different with their green carpets. Did you feel a glimmer, a spark, a light in the dark during this episode? You'll love my online course, the Soulful Seeker. Check it out at sparkconsciousnessnet slash TSS. You can also support the show as a Patreon member or episode sponsor. Learn about all of these opportunities and find additional resources about the topic covered in today's episode in the show notes. Hang on to the word carpet to help jog your memory and remind you to hop on back over to season two, episode four of Give a Fuck, presented by Spark Consciousness, to find all of that awesome info. And I will see you next time. Thank you.