Why are lawns so popular in the United States?
Our attraction to green grass is very visceral – it’s pleasant to look at. It also sets off other plantings nicely. Most lawns are responsible for containing erosion. They also serve to help noise abatement and they act as a carbon dioxide sink. The lawn, as we know it, is a relatively new phenomenon. Wealthy landowners in the late 1700s to the 1800s had lawns that were largely pastures. Lawns became more as we use them today only until after the civil war. The Public Park movement championed by Frederick Law Olmstead used open expanses of lawns in the mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, baseball fields and golf courses began to use lawns as focal points. With the birth of the suburbs after 1946, the lawn industry flourished. Lawn chemical industries help to foster this growth. Today, conventional lawn care uses a lot of resources in the form of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have been linked to non-point source pollution, as well as other environmental degradation.
