Pollinators Need You to Kill Your Lawn
The Strange and Senseless History of Our Lawn Care Obsession
On individual lots, it is common for 90% of the available landscape to be dedicated to lawn.
It’s a funny thing, how we all became Lawn People, dutifully pushing heavy gas guzzling mowers in the hot sun and spraying carcinogens all over where our kids play.
Turfgrass has replaced millions of acres of diverse native plant communities across Canada and the U.S., with that acreage ballooning each year. In many U.S. states, turfgrass takes up an area that more than doubles the area allocated to state and national parks, state forests and wildlife management areas. On individual lots, it’s common for 90% of the available landscape to be dedicated to lawn.
With so much space covered in turf, Lawn People are then compelled to act in ways that will maintain a particular aesthetic. And the requirements are immense!
Let’s look at the numbers: In the U.S., lawn irrigation consumes on average more than 8 billion gallons of water daily. This accounts for 30% of all water used during the summer in the east, and up to 60% in the west. That’s 32 gallons per day per person in the country! This is more water than is replaced by rainfall in most areas, making this entirely unsustainable.
In Canada, residential water use increases by 50% in the summer months due in large part to lawn irrigation, and 50% of the water used outdoors evaporates before serving any purpose!
Plus, keeping the turf “weed free” is a toxic endeavour. There are several studies documenting the connection between lawn pesticides and lymphoma, leukemia, and myeloma, and the environmental impacts are being increasingly studied. In 2019, Health Canada re-approved the controversial herbicide glyphosate (found in Roundup products) for sale in Canada until 2032. For those concerned about its health and environmental risks, Consumer Notice provides a short guide on the product: https://www.consumernotice.org/environmental/pesticides/roundup/
Homeowners also put roughly the same amount of fertilizer on their lawns as is used in big agriculture. 40-60% of fertilizer applied to lawns ends up in surface and groundwater, where it kills aquatic organisms and contaminates drinking water.
In Lawn People, political ecologist Paul Robbins found that people who use chemicals to maintain their lawn tend to think that these chemicals have a negative environmental impact, particularly on local water quality — and yet they do it anyway. According to the EPA, Americans spend more than 3 billion collective hours per year maintaining their lawns and feeding the massive and mega-profitable lawn economy, pulverizing habitat and toxifying our surroundings.
What on earth has driven this nonsensical behaviour? Well, Robbins argues that Lawn People are the result of both a moral and political economy. The political history of the lawn begins with the early European colonists and their ideals.
Colonial Logic
Colonial garden aesthetics are dominated by turfgrass accented by non-native flowers.
Lawns originated in the 1500s in Europe as aesthetic, managed gardens. These were very distinct from commonly-managed land which tended to consist of meadows for livestock grazing or forests for foraging. Lawns grew in popularity among British aristocracy throughout the enclosure of the commons, where peasants were forcefully kicked off of their lands during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The Enclosure Acts gave the aristocracy access to land and a desperate group of people who needed to sell their labour for a wage, many of whom became gardeners and groundskeepers.
The lawn was then tied to the colonization of Turtle Island, with wealthy North American settlers using it to claim land and display status. Vast areas of forest and native grasslands were razed for settler monocultural agriculture and gardens. The turfgrass Europeans brought over is actually highly invasive and has little in common with native perennial grasses.
In the 1700s, Thomas Jefferson and other elite Americans copied the landscaping paradigms of rich Europeans, sculpting expansive lawns accented with expensive non-native plants from European colonies. This set the standard that has dominated our landscaping choices ever since.
Well-kept lawns, you see, flaunted wealth. The owner was so wealthy, in fact, that they (but let’s face it, he) could waste vast acreage on impractical turf rather than use it to grow crops to sustain himself and his family. It also boasted wealth and whiteness because slave labour and/or large amounts of sheep were required to keep the lawn trimmed before the widespread use of the lawn mower.
Now, lawns remain a symbol of class status. Brooks and Francis note that “Domestic lawns developed in lock-step with the growth of the middle-classes and the subsequent global expansion of consumer capitalism.” During the post World War II consumer boom, the chemical industry was facing declining profit margins, and quickly capitalized on the expansion of suburban single-family housing. The lawn was central to this suburban transition.
As lawns became tied with property values for this population, and as the vast and coercive lawn care economy reached an increasing number of homeowners through commercials and advertisements, the lawn soon came to embody a moral character.
“Good” lawns contain dense, soft grasses with no weeds, maintain a rich and vibrant colour, and are neat and consistent - grass should be manicured and homogenous. Brooks and Francis note that “These characteristics are associated with wealth, education and implicit moral worth; good neighbours have good lawns.”
The moral lawn economy is so powerful that an increasing number of homeowners are carpeting their yards with artificial turf! Setting aside the uncomfortable question of how to clean the artificial grass should any animals defecate on it, it’s a tad bit bonkers that we’ve reached a point where plastic grass is what we need to purchase to signal our responsibility to our neighbours. What stage of capitalism is it when people begin carpeting outdoors…?
Even when there is dissent and communities fight back, lobby groups backed by the lawn-care and chemical industries have formed to counter the claims of antichemical groups mounting campaigns for pesticide restrictions or regulation. If the peer pressure won’t get you, the lobbyists will.
Lawns and Habitat Fragmentation
Urban and suburban landscapes are highly ecologically fragmented.
With real estate developers accelerating the expansion of urban and suburban sprawl, and the strong moral and political economic incentives to become Lawn People, there simply aren’t enough parks and protected areas or spaces hosting diverse native plant communities to support thriving biodiversity populations. This is especially troubling as there is little connection between protected areas. With the advance of climate change, species taking refuge in protected areas will need to migrate to cooler temperature zones, but paved cities and inhospitable urban and suburban environments will prevent them from doing so.
Entemologist Doug Tallamy explains that habitat fragmentation makes large species’ populations smaller and isolated from one another, making them more vulnerable to local extinction. Species with large ranges will disappear from small fragmented patches of habitat immediately. Others often eventually disappear as their population sizes are no longer large enough to weather environmental or population fluctuations.
Migrating species, like the monarch, need access to native landscapes over vast distances. The steady reduction in the native plants they depend on for survival – milkweeds, asters, and goldenrods – have reduced their numbers by up to 96% since the 1970s.
The Importance of Native Plants
Monarch visiting Joe Pye Weed.
Native plants are the bedrock of our ecosystems and food webs. Plants allow animals to ingest the energy shining down on us from the sun. Through photosynthesis, they store this energy in sugars and carbohydrates, and this provides the basis for every terrestrial food web on Earth.
Animals access this energy by eating plants or by eating something that eats plants. Insects are the best at transferring energy from plants to other animals, who then transfer it to other animals. The thing is, most insects are very picky eaters.
Specialized relationships between plants and animals are far more common that generalized relationships. In fact, 90% of insect herbivores are restricted to eating one or just a few plant lineages that they co-evolved with over eons. Insect specialists that coevolve with certain plant species have adapted to circumvent the plant’s defenses, including toxic chemicals stored in the plant’s tissues and leaves. These insect specialists otherwise can’t subsist on or reproduce using other plants in the ecosystem.
Caterpillars are some of the most important insect herbivores, not only because many become pollinators, but because they are the most vital food source for birds. Birds are important for propagating more plant species as they spread seeds throughout the environment, and they are also prey for other species in each web.
A 2018 study comparing ecosystem sites with mostly native plants versus introduced and invasive plants found that the sites dominated by nonnative plants contained 68 fewer caterpillar species, 91 percent fewer caterpillars, and 96 percent less caterpillar biomass. That’s a whole lot less food for all of the species that depend on caterpillars!
Although birds also eat berries and seeds, caterpillars are the mainstay of most bird diets in North America and are vital to their reproduction. And the amount of caterpillars that birds need to raise just one clutch of nestlings is astronomical!
A typical nestling eats a full meal 30-40 times per day. Researchers counted several species bringing food to the nest over 800 times per day for days in a row:
Sapsuckers - 4,260 times
Downy woodpeckers - 4,095 times
Hairy woodpeckers 2,325 times
Chickadees - 6,000 to 9,000 times!
Sustaining an abundance of multiple species of birds would therefore require a pretty unthinkable number of caterpillars, but this was the norm when our landscapes were populated with plants that the caterpillars could use!
Further, although birds will eat berries from non-native plants, these berries tend to have much less fat than their native counterparts. Many North American species of birds need berries with high fat content to build up enough fat stores for migration or to survive the winter.
So, while many introduced plants can function to some extent in new ecosystems, the amount of time it would take for adaptations to occur that would allow them to support even a fraction of the local biodiversity that native plants do is… many millions of years longer than we have to spare! We need to be ensuring that a majority of our landscapes are full of plants that can support thriving local wildlife communities, not the dwindling minority we have now.
One major hurdle is that more of our most generative native plants have been dubbed as “weeds”. Now, a weed is just a plant that is considered out of place in a given space. Doug Tallamy notes that to an ecologist concerned with supporting biodiversity, most introduced ornamentals might be considered weeds. But to many homeowners and gardeners, anything outside of the planned aesthetic design is a weed, and what is aesthetic is still deeply shaped by the tastes of the colonial-capitalist elite.
When colonizers came to Turtle Island, they imposed European farming techniques, planting unhealthy monocultures and weeding out all other plants. In many cases, the word weed became part of the name of the plants they were exterminating, no matter how ecologically vital they may be. Milkweeds, for example, are the only plant lineage that can support monarch butterflies.
Much like social processes of dehumanization, framing a plant as a weed gives us all the ethical license to kill and remove it, for the assumed good of the rest of the garden. Goldenrods, for example, are one of the best groups of plants for native bee species and also host 181 species of caterpillars. They also produce seeds for birds, voles and mice that feed other mammals and birds of prey. But alas - they are seen as unattractive, bothersome weeds. Some confuse goldenrods with ragweed, wrongfully blaming the goldenrods for their seasonal allergies.
What to do?
The manicured turfgrass and the few ornamentals that dominate most of our yards are remnants of a deeply arrogant and misguided colonial ideology that is undermining our ecosystems’ abilities to support much life at all. The crisis with our pollinators alone should remind us that we too are part of our ecosystems and can’t survive if all other life perishes.
The tough thing is that private land dominates in late capitalism. Let’s not mince words - many have argued that the current housing and property market has increasing parallels with the feudal era, so most people reading this are likely renters and not homeowners themselves. If you are a homeowner with any size of yard, you can start replacing your lawn with native plant communities today.
Since many renters aren’t in control of what is planted in their yards, we’ll also need to organize and get creative to influence landlords, commercial property owners and municipal policy makers to make our urban and suburban environments as hospitable to other species as possible.
Tenants unions may be able to make headway with landlords, and local education campaigns and organizing efforts could persuade owners and politicians. Many towns and cities have native plant communities that you can link up with. We can also organize to reclaim abandoned sites and rewild them, create community gardens, and engage in some good old fashioned guerilla gardening.
Start where you are and get familiar with the plant species important for biodiversity in your area. Even working with a small deck or balcony garden can help vulnerable insect species that can have cascading effects across the ecosystem. Imagine the connectivity we could create throughout our urban and suburban environments for all kinds of thriving food webs by simply replacing non-natives with beautiful native plants, shrubs and trees. Don’t panic — plant native!
