Lawns are Distant Memories (and maybe they should stay that way)

A lawn is an attempt to recreate a memory of a memory of a memory. Like all iterated copies, it is no longer recognizable when compared with the original. What we have now is an intense simplification, a purely aesthetic concept, little more than a living green carpet.

The memory we are trying to recreate is one that would have covered much of the fertile portions of continental Europe and the British Isles, and it can still be found in many rural places there and in North America, and probably elsewhere, too. It is the place where my ancestors grazed herding livestock, mostly cows and sheep. It is a pasture: a green expanse of grasses and forbs cropped short by many teeth. An anthropic, managed ecosystem with the function of fattening animals for slaughter.

Here is the difference, though: in a pasture there would be dozens or hundreds of species of grasses, asters, legumes and other flowering plants. Some of these would be less palatable than others, so the field would not be uniformly cropped, but dotted with patches of prickly or poisonous plants. Farmers and shepherds may have pulled these out, or maybe not. These places would be fertilized by the dung of the same herd animals that cropped them, and also by deer and other wild animals. Insect pests in these fields would be kept in check by letting ducks and chickens out onto them, or by the wild birds and small mammals that might live nearby in hedgerows or woodlots. And always, at some point, the grazers would be rotated from one area to another, letting the un-grazed pastures grow tall, flower, fruit and disperse seed. In these times, the pasture would reach maturity and become a meadow.

We modern, suburban humans no longer graze herd animals, but we do remember a lush green expanse, and we want to walk in the morning dew, sit and have a picnic with our families, listen to the birds sing, take in a partly tamed outdoor landscape; still a little bit wild, but also friendly and inviting, domesticated. So, we replaced the grazers with lawn mowers, powered by fossil fuels. We replaced the dozens of pasture species with just one (often Kentucky Bluegrass: Poa pratensis), and roll it out on the yard like an actual carpet; anything that breaks the uniformity gets weeded out.

Without the dung of our herd animals, we need to spread synthesized fertilizers, and without the birds and small mammals to keep insect numbers down, we spray insecticides. The lawn clippings that our herd animals once turned into milk or cheese or beef, wool or mutton, now we ship away in brown paper bags, burning more fossil fuels in the process. We also often do this in a place where pastures could not actually grow because there is not enough water, so we pipe in water from far away and simulate rain clouds that will never come. We do this perpetually, never letting the facsimile of pasture mature into meadow. In fact if anyone does let up on their intense routine of “lawnmaking” we shame them for letting it all “go to weeds.”

See how far this is from what is once was? It is a sculptural representation of a painting from our past. A lawn is just an idea, now. Those who want it aren't even sure why they do. “My parents had a lawn, and their parents, and theirs.” But following the memory back far enough, it was no lawn, but a pasture, which was only the temporary, managed form of a meadow.

If you want a place to walk and sit and relax in your yard, or in a park, then there are many ways to accomplish this. We are humans: we build, we innovate, we engineer, we tame. We can figure out a smarter way to make this desirable space, one with ecology and economy, efficiency and diversity in mind. But first we have to let go of that memory of a memory. Unless you live in a fertile, temperate farmland and want to graze your herd animals; then you can have all the lawn you want.