Cities, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp. 369–380, 2001 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.Pergamon

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Lawns and Toxins

An Ecology of the CityPaul Robbins*, Annemarie Polderman and Trevor BirkenholtzDepartment of Geography, Ohio State University, 1132 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus,OH 43210, USA

This paper surveys the problems of contemporary urban ecology through the lens of lawnchemical usage, exploring the difficulty of explaining and managing urban ecological dilemmasthat, though built from the disaggregated choices of individuals, aggregate into large and seri-ous issues. Introductory discussion surveys the seriousness of lawn chemicals as urban non-point pollution sources and suggests why the issue, and problems like it, is understudied. Analy-sis proceeds with a case study from the United States city of Columbus, Ohio, utilizing formalsurvey techniques and analysis of county assessor’s data. The results suggest lawns and lawncare chemicals are expanding with urban sprawl and that users of high-input lawn chemicalsystems are more likely to be wealthy, well-educated, and knowledgeable about the negativeenvironmental impacts of the actions than non-users. Further investigation demonstrates theinstrumental logics of homeowners in pursuit of property values but also points to the moraland community-oriented institutions that enforce and propel high chemical use. The con-clusions point to policy options for dealing with the lawn chemical dilemma but suggest thedifficulties of circumventing the deeply structured roots of the problem. 2001 Elsevier ScienceLtd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: urban ecology, consumption, political ecology

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have notbeen discovered.

(Emerson, 1878) (p 3)

Beautiful lawns don’t just happen

(Scotts Company, 2000)

When Ketha Robbins decided in 1999 to restorethe forest in her back yard in suburban ReynoldsburgOhio by ceasing to mow and pull weeds, she violatedboth the written and unwritten laws of contemporaryurban ecology and was soon censured by her com-munity. In the next few months, her neighbors wentto the city to insist on forcible mowing, took her tocivil court for lowering property values, and finallytrespassed on her property to mow her lawn and pullup the saplings there. While the city found in Ms.Robbins’ favor and did not enforce the 6-inchmaximum lawn height mandated by municipal law,the civil case remains pending in the Environmental

*Corresponding author. Tel.:+1-614-292-6001; fax:+1-614-292-6213; e-mail: robbins.30@osu.edu

369

Division of Franklin County Municipal Court(Crumbley, 2000a,b,c; Crumbley and Albrecht, 2000).

The Reynoldsburg conflict suggests the rancorouspolitics of otherwise peaceful-appearing homeownercommunities on the fringes of urban sprawl. Beyondthis, however, the struggle over this small piece ofland hints at vast forces and land cover transform-ations at work throughout the United States and else-where, indicating the political ecology of urban areas.

Such landscapes are understudied. Eighty percentof people in developed nations are urbanized and halfthe global population lives in cities, where immensesystems of water, energy, and nutrient flows are har-nessed to make life possible for billions of people.Yet, despite an interest on the part of policy-makersand planners, urban ecosystems have received lessthan full attention, particularly in social science andenvironment/society research (Botkin and Bever-idge, 1997).

A central reason for silence on urban ecologicaldilemmas is the staggering complexity of problemsthat are aggregated into large processes but built fromthe disaggregated choices of individuals, each ofwhom is located within intricate physical and social

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

systems. Millions of decisions governing trash dis-posal, automobile use, and home maintenance, com-bine to form the urban environment. Some of thesedecisions are determined by basic economic prin-ciples but many are governed by the apparent vagariesof taste. Some are regulated through managementinstitutions; many are not. Moreover, the very ordin-ariness of these daily decisions makes them easy tooverlook, even as they combine to create large effects.The daunting challenge of urban ecology, therefore,is to understand mundane individual actions, struc-tured in vast cultures and economies, consolidatedinto human and environmental systems with manyparts.

Representative of such problems is the acute ques-tion of urban water quality, which can be viewedthrough the lens of the lawn. While seeminglyinnocuous, lawns represent problems of urban ecol-ogy on a vast scale. In the United States, the toxicchemicals of lawn maintenance — including 2, 4-D,atrazine, glyphosate, diazinon, and dicamba — aresignificant contributors to nonpoint source water qual-ity problems that continue to elude solution almost 30years after the passage of the Clean Water Act (Adleret al., 1993). Lawn pesticides are applied on a scaleto rival agricultural toxins; 23% of the total 2,4-Dapplied in the US is used on lawns; 22% of glyphos-ate, 31% of chlorpyrifos, and 38% of dicamba usednationally is applied to home lawns (United StatesEnvironmental Protection Agency, 1996). Moreover,US lawn maintenance entails heavy use of chemicalfertilizers with their environmentally problematicnitrate loads. In 1984, more synthetic fertilizers wereapplied to American lawns than the entire nation ofIndia applied to all its food crops combined(Talbot, 1990).

Though an historically United States phenomenon,the increasing export of American consumer aesthet-ics makes the expansion of lawns and the high levelsof inputs that support them, an increasingly globalconcern. More fundamentally, lawn chemical inputsrepresent a global class of urban activities that areindividuated, unregulated, and driven by a complexcombination of family economics, consumer culture,housing markets, and contemporary aesthetics pro-duced through saturation advertising. To explore andunderstand the lawn in its ecological, economic, andsocial context then, is to interrogate central questionsin the nascent field of urban ecology. How are indi-vidual environmental decisions of urban dwellersstructured? What key institutional, demographic, andeconomic variables account for environmentally del-eterious behaviors? How do these decisions aggregateto form larger ecological problems?

To address these general issues, research describedhere explores the specific case of the lawns in theState of Ohio and the municipality of Columbus, amedium-sized metropolis (1995 pop. 1,377,419)experiencing burgeoning growth and lateral sprawl.Here, lawn chemicals reflect the problem of decentral-

370

ized environmental decision-making and represent aserious water quality threat in their own right. Thisresearch explores the relationship between individualsand their collective ecology, offering a conceptual andmethodological technique to address the ecology ofcities more generally.

The paper begins with a brief survey of the lawnas a water quality problem. This is followed by a sum-mary of the theoretical tools at the disposal in theanalysis of the lawn, understood here as a problem ofurban cultural and political ecology. The third sectionsummarizes the results of survey research that revealthe structural variables (functions of real estate eco-nomics and class) at work in the spread of the lawnand the use of lawn chemicals. The final section con-siders the results of in-depth interviews with lawnowners pointing to the deeper aesthetic and insti-tutional practices of consumer culture driving the useof lawn chemicals. Here, we conclude that the Amer-ican lawn has emerged as a moral landscape that nor-malizes leisure practices in a post-industrial economy.

Water quality and urban lawn chemicalsNonpoint source pollution from farms, sewer over-flows, and urban runoff remains a perplexing policyproblem in the US. Little is known about levels andflows of nonpoint source pollutants, or the social andeconomic mechanisms that drive their deposition. Thediffuse and decentralized decision-structure surround-ing nonpoint sources makes them difficult to model,hard to control, and impairs the formation of waterquality policy.

In an effort to build better understandings of non-point source pollution, a growing body of researchhas turned attention to agricultural chemicals —ammonium nitrate/sulfate, 2, 4-D, atrazine, glyphos-ate, diazinon, dicamba, etc. — and to the logics ofagricultural producers who apply them (Napier andTucker, 1999; Napier et al., 1999). While farmlandremains a major contributor to nonpoint source waterpollution, changes in land use suggest inadequacy inthis range of research and imply new priorities; farm-land is disappearing and the dominant land use inmany areas of the US is urban and residential. InOhio, for example, between 1974 and 1992, 565 thou-sand hectares of farmland, around 5% of the state,were converted to urban land uses. Between 1960 and1990, urban land use in Ohio grew at 4.7 times thegrowth rate of the state’s population (Ohio FarmlandPreservation Task Force, 1999). So, just as nonpointsource pollution has become the focus of attention,its primary research and policy target, agriculturalland, is swiftly transforming into urban space.

The increase in lawn area and lawn chemical usagetherefore poses serious water quality problems.Nationwide, lawn coverage is estimated at between 8and 16 million hectares, far surpassing major exportcrop coverages like barley (5 million hectares), cotton(4.5 million hectares), and rice (1.1 million hectares),

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

and this figure climbs every year (Bormann et al1993). Increased lawn coverage coincides withincreased chemical application; 70 million out of 95million households in the US (74%) use industrialpesticides and fertilizers. Approximately 16 millionkilograms of active pesticide ingredients are sold forhome and garden use annually, a figure that risesannually (Aspelin, 1997). These pesticides and fertili-zers endanger human health and the biological healthof waterways.

Dominant pesticides include slightly toxic sub-stances like 2,4-D and Dicamba, as well as moder-ately toxic herbicides like Glyphosate and Chlorpyr-ifos and highly toxic broad-spectrum insecticides likeCarbaryl. Even pesticides only mildly toxic to humanhealth may be detrimental to the integrity of waterresources, including the biological health of streams,fish, and macroinvertebrates. Diazinon, a prominentlawn pesticide is only mildly toxic for humans (inlimited quantities) but has been given a maximumdaily load criteria by many state offices of the UnitedStates Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as aresult of its toxicity for aquatic life (Ohio Environ-mental Protection Agency, 1999b). With 37% of the436 species listed in the Endangered Species SystemDatabase at risk from the use of pesticides, chemicalapplications clearly contribute to environmental prob-lems, as do fertilizers, which detrimentally effect thebiological oxygen demand in streams (Adler et al.,1993).

The most commonly applied consumer lawn pestic-ides are shown in Table 1 arranged in descending esti-mated quantities of active ingredient used on lawns.The column labeled KOC refers to the organic carbonsorption coefficient of pesticides, which reflects theretention of the substance in soil. Where a pesticidehas a low sorption coefficient (e.g. Dicamba), it threa-tens groundwater through leaching. Where KOC ishigh (e.g. Glyphosate), it persists in surface water run-off (Pepper et al., 1996). Lawn chemicals are foundin increasing abundance in the nations waterways andgroundwater and remain largely unregulated despiteEPA congressional appeals and testimony(Guerrero, 1990).

Thus, as increasing urban development replacesagricultural land with lawns, a growing and pre-viously unexamined population of polluters requireattention. What variations exist in chemical use andwhat explains that variation? Under what conditionsmight alternatives emerge (Pimentel et al., 1989;Korsching and Malia, 1991)?

The paucity of answers to these questions is a resultof both the empirical focus and theoretical limits toprevious inquiry. Empirically, like many decision-making problems, behavior of household pesticideand fertilizer users has only been explored throughaggregate statistical methods or historical study.Research has either summarized pesticide sales fig-ures or examined historical developments of land-scaping (Bormann et al., 1993; Jenkins, 1994; Ohio

371

Environmental Protection Agency, 1999a). This workis compelling but incomplete. To understand urbanecology requires a more thorough empirical survey ofconsumer behaviors.

Theoretically too, urban ecological behavior hasbeen inadequately placed in economic, cultural, andsocial context. Positing the development of the mod-ern lawn solely as a problem of “philosophy” , someresearch emphasizes that the lawn reflects a failure toenvision alternative technical solutions (Bormann etal., 1993). Alternatively, some research emphasizesthe “naturalization” of social practices, pointing tocultural norms that place the lawn beyond criticismand reform (Feagan and Ripmeester, 1999). Theseapproaches provide a foundation for research butoverlook more fundamental issues — the social andeconomic forces that structure human environmentalbehavior and consciousness. By treating lawn care asa more general process, therefore, it is possible to bet-ter explain environmental behaviors.

Thinking about urban ecologyGrowing from research traditions pioneered years ago(White, 1973; Burton and Kates, 1964), a new era ofenvironmental research has begun to focus on urbanareas. Urban environmental justice and racism in thecity (Cutter, 1995; Pulido, 2000), urban agriculture,gardens, and green space (Rocheleau, 1991; Bellows,1996), urban environmental sociology (Catton andDunlap, 1978), and the question of sustainable cities(Capello and Nijkamp, 1998; Haughton, 1999) haveall received increasing attention. In the process, urbanresearch has become more ecologically robust whileenvironmental research has become more comprehen-sive (Hanson, 1999).

Though original and synthetic, work to date hassometimes suffered from attention to behaviors ofurban people in isolation from the economic and cul-tural constraints impinging on environmentaldecisions at wider scales (Foster, 2000). Similarly,current work in sustainable cities takes an admirablyholistic systems approach (see especially Ravetz,2000) but has so far failed to account for the socio-economic context of individual practice.

Conversely, in environmental fields, like culturaland political ecology, where examination has longcentered on the situated environmental behaviors ofland managers, urban and first-world contexts arerarely considered (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Peetand Watts, 1996; Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Bryant,1992; Ellen, 1982). As a result, immediate environ-mental problems of urban America (including sprawl,toxic hazards, and air and water quality) seem distantfrom the worlds of struggling peasants, game parkenclosures, and fuelwood politics typically investi-gated in critical ecology.

On closer analysis, however, the potential contri-butions of a political ecology approach to urbanenvironmental questions are many. In the research

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

Tab

le1

Pes

tici

des

used

onU

Sla

wns

Pes

tici

deM

lbac

tive

aK

OC

(mL

g�1)b

Hal

f-lif

e(d

ays)

Typ

eU

seT

oxic

ity

(EP

A)

Env

iron

toxi

city

2,4-

D7–

920

10Sy

stem

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enox

yhe

rbic

ide

Gen

eral

Slig

htto

high

Bir

ds,

fish,

inse

cts

Gly

phos

ate

5–7

2000

047

Non

-sel

ectiv

esy

stem

iche

rbic

ide

Gen

eral

Mod

erat

eB

irds

,fis

h,in

sect

sD

icam

ba3–

52

14Sy

stem

icac

idhe

rbic

ide

Gen

eral

Slig

htA

quat

icM

CPP

3–5

NA

60Se

lect

ive

phen

oxy

herb

icid

eG

ener

alSl

ight

NA

Dia

zano

n2–

410

0021

Non

syst

emic

orga

noph

osph

ate

Res

tric

ted

Mod

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eB

irds

,fis

h,in

sect

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sect

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2–4

6070

60+

Bro

ad-s

pect

rum

orga

noph

osph

ate

24-h

our

reen

try

Mod

erat

eB

irds

,fis

hin

sect

icid

ere

stri

cted

Car

bary

l1–

330

028

Wid

e-sp

ectr

umca

rbam

ate

Gen

eral

Mod

erat

eto

high

Fish

,in

sect

sin

sect

icid

eD

acth

al(D

CPA

)1–

350

0090

+Ph

thal

ate

com

poun

dhe

rbic

ide

Gen

eral

Low

Bir

ds,

fish

a Mill

ions

ofpo

unds

ofac

tive

ingr

edie

ntus

edin

the

US

(Ohi

oE

nvir

onm

enta

lPr

otec

tion

Age

ncy,

1999

a).

bO

rgan

icca

rbon

soro

ptio

nco

effic

ient

(Wat

son

and

Bak

er,

1990

;E

xten

sion

Tox

icol

ogy

Net

wor

k,20

00).

372

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

described here, the linking analogy emerges when thelawn is considered as a farming system. Lawn grassesrepresent domesticated crop species of the Graminaefamily, like corn, wheat, and rice. Moreover, lawngrass is subject to the same production limits, requir-ing households to harvest as needed (mowing), andto apply chemical inputs or weed as necessary, andbalancing time, capital, and energy. The lawn, itsmanaging household, and inputs into maintenance are,therefore, a farming system1 (as defined by Brush andTurner, 1987) and can be understood through anapproach that centers on “practical reason,” examin-ing the “choices of allocating time and effort, tools,land, and capital to specific uses, in the context ofchanging climate, resource availability, and markets”(Netting, 1993: 2).

Notwithstanding that urban lawn owners operateunder a different set of production logics than far-mers, driven as consumers of lawns rather than pro-ducers of agricultural goods, they adhere to similarconstraints and choose from a range of input levelsbased on a limited number of structural pressures.These constraints include available capital, landvalue, institutions, input costs, availability of time andlabor, education, and socio-cultural backgrounds.Urban lawn managers face similar problems in pro-duction, for example, where use of industrial fertiliz-ers and pesticides has led to a chemical “ tread-mill”and increased use of inputs is required to sustain thesame levels of productivity over time (Norman, 1978;National Research Council, 1982; Shiva, 1991).

Though there are, therefore, parallels betweenurban lawn care and rural farming systems, there isa key difference. Lawn grass is not cultivated fordirect sale as a crop, but is consumed indirectly asaesthetic, personal, and property values. This suggestsa need for other approaches to urban environmentalbehaviors. Specifically, theories of the historical andeconomic development of aesthetics suggest how thebroader economy mobilizes and produces “ tastes” andnormative views of “nature” (Wilson, 1992). Follow-ing Adorno, the development of a “natural aesthetic”is neither arbitrary nor idiosyncratic. Rather, “ in everyperception of nature there is actually present thewhole of society” (Adorno, 1984: 101) so that theevaluative criteria with which modern people interpretthe environment are linked closely to the economy’sproductive power (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972)and “natural” spaces are created for consumption(Smith, 1996; Katz, 1998).

For lawn care, this process of aesthetic productionis reflected in the transformation of a relativelyobscure style of pre-romantic English garden into themost common and monolithic feature of the urbanAmerican landscape. Industrially produced, thisarchaic landscape form was well suited to post-World

1Defined by Brush as “any level of unit(s) engaged in agriculturalproduction as it is wedded in a social, political, economic, andenvironmental context” (Brush and Turner, 1987).

373

War II technology and management techniques(Jenkins, 1994). It demonstrates, moreover, the mar-keting of an ideal through media imagery that pro-motes lawn perfection as ordered monoculture(Bormann et al., 1993). Ultimately then, the lawnquestion can be seen as a subset of cultural and polit-ical ecology research problems, linking political econ-omy, culture, and behavior to land cover change(Fig. 1).

As such, the questions of lawn management aretwofold:

1. What structural forces are arrayed to support andenable the growth of the lawn? How is the spreadof the lawn linked to urban growth and to whatdegree is chemical use a class phenomenon, drivenby economic logic?

2. What economic, cultural, and institutional conditionscreate the system of aesthetic production and con-sumption necessitating high-input chemical use,including pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers?

MethodTo answer these questions and explain the lawn as aLand Use/Cover problem, the authors conducted apilot survey of 417 randomly selected households inthe State of Ohio (using Random Digit Dialing, sel-ecting for any household with lawn grass) during Mayand June of 2000. The survey instrument queried lawnchemical practices and environmental orientations ofrespondents. The instrument screened for those mak-ing lawn management decisions and was designed sothat home owners needed only to describe the type ofproducts they use, number of applications, and man-ner of use (Nishioka et al., 1996). This technique wascoupled with ongoing informal phone interviews withselected respondents, face-to-face interviews withrepresentative managers, and an analysis of countyassessor’s database to determine changes in lawn sizeover time and space.

The urban lawn: structural forces

Preliminary analysis demonstrates the relationshipbetween urban sprawl and lawn growth. Countyassessor’s data from 79,894 single occupant homes inthe city of Columbus, Ohio2 were used to generatemaps for two measures of lawn size, Potential LawnArea (PLA) and Potential Lawn Ratio (PLR). The for-mer was calculated as sixty percent3 of the size of thelot minus the footprint size of the house [.6 (Ls�Hs)].The latter measure was determined by dividing thehouse footprint size by the lot size [Hs/Ls].

Fig. 2 shows the distribution of Potential Lawn

2Excluded here, are homes from most recent sales dates (in the lastyear) for which records were incomplete.3The sixty percent figure was based on a conservative proportionreported in a phone survey of 417 respondents.

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

Figure 1 The lawn problem viewed through the lens of cultural/political ecology

Figure 2 Potential lawn area by census tract, Franklin County, OH, USA

Area in the Columbus metropolitan area aggregatedby census tract. The properties with the largest overalllawns (in hectares) dominate the suburban fringe ofthe city, areas of new housing starts and recent sub-division. Fig. 3, showing the ratio of the lot poten-tially covered by lawn, demonstrates that not only arelawns bigger in suburban areas of recent growth, butthat the ratio of the lawn to the house is also greater,with as much as 96% of the property potentiallydevoted to cultivated grass.

374

Thus, as cities grow and come to consume otherland uses, specifically agricultural land, a growingproportion of land is covered by lawn, an intensivelymanaged monoculture. Based on a survey of lawnowners, 16.1% of those interviewed used a lawn carecompany to apply pesticides and fertilizers, while33% did it themselves. About 50% of this rapidlygrowing land cover received, therefore, the appli-cation of nitrates, pesticides, or other inputs. Thedemographics and motivation of lawn chemical

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

Figure 3 Potential lawn ratio by census tract, Franklin County, OH, USA

applicators further reveals the structural dynamics ofthe problem.

Demographics of chemical inputsConventional wisdom, following formal work inEnvironmental Sociology, with its traditional concernfor anthropocentric versus ecocentric thinking and itsconcentration on an increasingly environmentallyaware educated consumer class (see Foster 2000)might suggest that environmentally externalizingbehaviors (the use of chemicals and fertilizers onlawns) would be lower among individuals with highereducation and stronger “environmental conscious-ness” . A simple test of this agency-oriented hypoth-esis undermines such assumptions, however.

Table 2 shows the explanatory variables that sig-nificantly crosstabulated with any kind of chemicalapplication on lawns, either personal or by a lawncare company. The use of any kind of chemicals orlawn care company correlates most strongly with theapproximate value of the house, income and age.

375

With regard to income, 67.2% of respondents with aincome of more than $75,000 use chemicals, whileonly 28.6% of respondents with a income of $20,000and less do so. Out of the respondents who are 60years and older, 54.9% use chemicals, while ofrespondents in the age group of 18 to 29 years, 21.6%uses chemicals. Of respondents who graduated fromcollege, 53.3% apply chemicals, while only 24.1% ofthose who did not graduate from high school do so.Of the group of respondents who state a known nega-tive environmental effect of their own lawn practices,73.8% use chemicals, while only 41.1% of therespondents who acknowledge that chemicals have noeffect, actually use chemicals.

These results are suggestive. Rather than corre-sponding with low education and low awareness ofthe effects of chemical inputs, well educated peopleand those who acknowledge and recognize the exter-nalizing effects of chemicals were, in fact, more likelyto use chemical inputs than those with lower incomeand less awareness. Lawn chemical users acknowl-

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

Table 2 Significant explanatory variables for chemical inputsa

Variable X2 Cramer’s V

High value of home 30.74 0.305High income 23.32 0.263Age 16.78 0.202Lawn care practices have a negative effect on water quality 15.84 0.197Companies that provide lawn care services have some effect on water quality near 12.04 0.176my neighborhoodEducation 11.00 0.163

aAll significant at P�0.95.

edge and recognize the negative effects of theiractions but choose the inputs nevertheless.

Property and lawn behaviorInstrumental defense of property values inspires someof these inputs, especially in middle-to-upper housingvalue areas. Of respondents with a house value ofmore than $250,000, 70% use chemicals on theirlawn, while 28.6% of respondents with a house valueof $80,000 or less use chemicals. In part this simplyreflects the limited purchasing power of householdswith lower incomes. Inputs are also viewed, however,as capital investments and property values and lawncare are clearly linked. One respondent challenged,“what if you go to sell your house and your neigh-bor’s house is poorly kept?” As one Columbus-areaestate agent reminds her clientele, “a green lawn isan important signal to any potential buyer” .

The agricultural economy of the urban household,therefore, has its own “operational logic” , fitted to thedemands of a local social economy (following Chay-anov, 1986). Lawncare can be seen, in this way, toreflect investment in “ landesque capital” (Blaikie andBrookfield, 1987) that, though a source of regionaldegradation, realizes value over time, externalizingcosts into the ambient ecosystem, where degradationof groundwater, riverine environments, and wetlandsall become public costs of private accumulation. Thelawn problem is in this way similar to that of otherurban common property systems, like auto emissionsand unregulated garbage disposal, in that disaggre-gated private decisions and value-maximizingbehaviors accumulate as systemic costs to society.

Producing and consuming the lawn aesthetic

But to explain the lawn in purely instrumental, econ-omic, and rational terms would be to overlook farmore powerful and subtle forces at work on the urbanlandscape. For chemical use to become normal lawnpractice, a normative aesthetic must be produced, dis-seminated, and enforced in the communities where itis to thrive. This aesthetic is intentianally crafted bypowerful firms. The aesthetic is further promulgatedand cemented through mutual observation, pressure,and normative disciplinary practice amongst residentsof urban neighborhoods.

376

Producing the aestheticA handful of chemical producers dominate the lawncare chemical market. A single brand (here referred toas the Dominant Firm) leads US lawn care chemicalproduction with a majority of the market share andhas flourished by producing a lawn ideal dependenton chemicals. Sales of the Dominant Firm rose from200 to 1700 million dollars between 1988 and 1999through an espoused strategy not only to introducenon-users to the benefits of chemically-based mainte-nance, but also to increase the number of chemicalapplications made by already-applying “Do-It-Your-selfers (DIYs)” , who make up 55% of the public. Infiscal 1999, the Dominant Firm spent more than $26million on direct media advertising and the DIY cate-gory grew 19% in 1999 increasing consumer lawnproduct sales by 25%. Over the last decade, the com-pany has moved in this way from being a marginal,faltering, and contracting firm, to one notable for thespeed and extent of its growth. By producing andextending the monocultural lawn, the Dominant Firmhas created new demand for its products and set theaesthetic “bar” for the landscape of urban America.

Consuming the aestheticBut the production of that aesthetic does not automati-cally translate into its diffusion and enforcement.Only through more subtle cultural and social nor-malization can the ideal become realized as a formof consumption. This normalization of consumptionpatterns is notable, moreover, in the degree to whichit is conspicuous, and visible to neighbors and othercommunity members. Lawn labor and its enjoyment,no matter how visceral and real, is a form of “con-spicuous leisure” (following Veblen, 1899), dis-tinguished from other forms in its particularly emulat-ive and normative characteristics, and marked bevisible and invisible pressures on individualbehaviors. In extended interviews with lawn man-agers, for example, while few respondents reportbeing harassed for their own management, but manyreport having told and warned neighbors about poorlawn care. Such normative pressure can be seen inboth the formal and informal institutions that enforcecompliance to the lawn aesthetic.

Formal institutions include both municipal lawsthat enforce minimum standards for lawn care and

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

more extensive codes used in sub-developments andgated communities dictating the manner and extent oflawn care. The former are ubiquitous and usually takethe form of maximum length standards commonly setby municipal health boards or state departments ofnatural resource management. As was the case inReynoldsburg, these rules are usually no more explicitthan six to twelve inch maximums on grass heightand they obligate nothing more than weekly mowingof lawns. Rules set by subdivisions, neighborhoodcommunities, and gated communities, on the otherhand, can be significantly more exacting. Often theycall for the mandatory use of a lawn care companyand landscaping firm, and explicitly lay out thechemical packages required for lawn care.

Informal institutions, though harder to track, areequally common, and influence lawn care more pro-foundly than law. Interviews with lawn managersreveal both “positive” and “negative” norms for lawncare that suggest a relationship between urban monoc-ulture and normative notions of community partici-pation and civic virtue.

“Positive” norms center around the association ofintensive lawn care practices with a feeling of positiveneighborhood cohesion. Respondents report thatkeeping up their lawn is a sign of respect for theneighborhood and reflect a form of “participation” incivic life. In this vein, “positive” sanctions alsoinclude the “volunteerist” sense of community lawncare espoused by many respondents, who repeatedlypointed out their willingness to help out their com-munity by providing lawn care for their neighborsshould their lawns get too long or unsightly. Commonstories include those wherein people returned homefrom a day or two away to find their lawns mowedby neighbors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this willingnessappears more common amongst those who use chemi-cals and high input systems on their own lawn. Mostof these respondents further described their feelingthat such actions reinforced the “sense of community”in their neighborhood and served to hold the neighb-orhood together.

“Negative” institutions, on the other hand, are thosethat associate non-intensive lawn care practices — let-ting the lawn grow long, brown, or weed infested —with poor character and lack of civic virtue. Manystudy respondents associate poor relative lawn carewith poor character and emphasize the obligation thathomeowners have to their neighbors, especially if thevalue of their neighbors house is relatively high. Asone respondent insisted, it would be one thing in alow-income neighborhood to let your lawn go, but“ if the guy next door has a hundred-seventy-thousanddollar house, you owe it to him to keep your lawngreen” .

Most respondents were also quick to point out thathomeowners talk with one another and that a littlepersuasion was good for neighborhood values interms of both community and property. The inter-ventions of Ketha Robbins’ neighbors, therefore —

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which included not only demanding intervention fromthe city, and implementing a law suit, but alsoentering her property to forcibly mow her lawn — areonly dramatic examples of normative practices atwork throughout communities in Ohio. These providethe “stick” to sanction anti-social behavior and bringthe behaviors of diffuse individuals into line with nor-mative aesthetic produced by the Dominant Firm andother chemical producers.

In such an institutional atmosphere, the compliantlawn care behavior of homeowners is assured. More-over, such behavior is signified as an overall good, aboon to community, and an active element in com-munity participation. Arguably, such a discursivefusion of the externalizing behavior of chemical depo-sition with civic virtue is made all the easier giventhe disappearance of other forms of social capital incontemporary suburban America over the last twentyyears. As formal systems of civic development, fromPTAs to bridge clubs, begin to vanish, the hunger forcivic participation has not waned. The vacuum ofcommunity action, therefore, can increasingly befilled with individuated actions, like lawn care,Christmas tree lights, and other aesthetic signifiers. Inan era where people increasingly “bowl alone”(following Putnam, 2000), alienation from urbancommunity is channeled into the disciplinary prac-tices of competitive and conspicuous consumptionsuch that consuming correctly gains not only socialbut moral authority.

Thus, while many respondents describe their enjoy-ment of doing lawn work, they simultaneouslyexpress a feeling of obligation and social responsi-bility. Consumption of the lawn, therefore, can beunderstood not simply as an escapist or pleasurableactivity (though many individuals do enjoy the activi-ties of lawn maintenance), but, following Baudrillard,also as a “collective and active behavior, a constraint,a morality, and an institution” . The pleasure associa-ted with the production of the lawn, therefore, is anobligation — “an enterprise of pleasure and satisfac-tion” , where financial credit and significant expendi-tures become the hallmarks of proper consumptionand, by association, enjoyment (Baudrillard, 1970).

One 31-year-old survey respondent is indicative.He has mortgaged his house for a $10,000 loan tocover the expenses for the purchase of a ridingmower, push mower, weed whacker, leaf blower,hedge clipper, chainsaw, tree pruner, hoses andattachments, roto-tillers (including walk-behinds andtractor models), broadcast fertilizer, and other equip-ment. This package is designed to manage his 2-acreall-grass lawn, into which he puts approximately 12hours a week during the growing season. His inputchoices include weed and feed mixes of 2, 4-D andnitrogen as well as doses of Grub-ex , which he usesto drive off moles. The active ingredient of this lastproduct is imidacloprid, a systemic, chloro-nicotinylinsecticide that is moderately toxic to humans and hasbeen shown to be toxic to upland game birds, very

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

toxic to aquatic invertebrates, and a hazard to beesand other benign non-target insect species.

The logic behind his efforts are consistent with thatof most consumers; he describes direct increases inhousing value from the health of his lawn but alsonotes the community value of his efforts and his ownjoy in the product of his highly public work. Theresulting landscape is, therefore, a moral one, whereconsumption is imagined to create a greater publicgood. More generally (and more radically), the lawnreflects Debord’s notion of a general post-industrialtransition from “being into having” leading to a “gen-eralized sliding of having into appearing” (Debord,1983: Sec 17, emphasis in original). This, in turn, isa function of a larger transition in the cultural econ-omy from industry, where labor was rationalized andcapital mobilized as the moral force of production, toa post-industrial context where credit and socialnorms are mobilized for normative consumption.High-input lawns colonize old land use regimesthrough a complex combination of instrumental econ-omic logics and socialized norms of moral behavior.

Towards policy: how to manage the ecologyof cities?In sum, the question of lawn aesthetics and theexpanding land covers and externalities to which theygive rise can be viewed through the lens of politicalecology to provide insights not otherwise evident intraditional forms of urban analysis. They also openonto possible avenues for policy and the pursuit ofalternatives. These include improved information,restriction of the most noxious chemicals, and bettermunicipal legislation to encourage the use of alterna-tive land management practices.

First, it is clear that much of the information avail-able to homeowners is incomplete or poorly com-municated. The risks associated with various lawnproducts are generally devalued or misunderstood andimproved education and information would serve todecrease unnecessary chemical applications. Manyusers are, for example, confused about or unaware ofchemicals in products they commonly use. Onerespondent reported that they use no weed killer ontheir lawn shortly after explaining their use of a“weed and feed” treatment — a product that containsnot only nitrates but also a range of herbicidal chemi-cals. Relying solely upon the information provided bychemical vendors makes such misunderstandingscommon.

Even so, this initial study demonstrates the poorrelationship between information and behavior.Chemical users are often fully aware of the exter-nalized risks of chemical application but use high-input strategies nonetheless (mirroring other discrep-ancies between ethics and action, see Tuan, 1968).Regulation and restriction, therefore, are necessary forthe most noxious household chemicals. The US EPAhas halted the manufacturing of Diazanon, as a promi-

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nent example, with a scheduled elimination date in2003 (United States Environmental ProtectionAgency, 2000). Reported stockpiling of the chemicalby retailers and consumers, however, reveals the inad-equacy of simple bans, however, and the enthusiasmfor the most potentially harmful products. Policyoptions should, nevertheless, include extending bansto the most serious chemicals, especially includingorganophosphates and carbamate insecticides.

But given the deeply structured forces that propeland perpetuate chemical use, urban policy optionsmust expand to include legislation that enables andencourages the uses of alternatives. Current municipalcodes, especially those that require certain qualitiesand lengths of lawn, make alternative choices difficultand provide levers for social discipline (as in the caseof Ketha Robbins) that perpetuate extant problems.Beyond removing such restrictions, alternative land-scaping options might be fostered through communityextension and outreach that encourages low-inputoptions, xeriscaping, and native species plantation.

These policy options should mark the beginning ofefforts to deal with consumer-driven urban exter-nalities. The seriousness of the problem extendsbeyond these preliminary solutions, however. Thestructured vertical linkages in the political economyof the chemical industry, as exemplified by the Domi-nant Firm are demonstrative. The company’s growthfrom a borderline company in the early 1990s to oneof the fastest growing firms in the US came throughan aggressive strategy. The addition new productdivisions, including pesticides, has become anincreasingly important part of the company’s strategysince the acquisition in 1999 of several independentherbicide and insecticide producers and products. Theproblem of urban nonpoint source water problems istherefore tied to the aggressive turn-around of thismultinational company with its tremendous advertis-ing clout and lock on the public imagination. Byunderstanding the urban decision-maker to beoperating in the context of these vast forces, itbecomes clear, as Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) (p.83) suggest, that “many other decisions are madewhich provide the context in which direct decision-makers operate” (Fig. 4).

Here, individual consumer practices, create, usingEscobar’s terminology, “postmodern forms of eco-logical capital” , whose value lies in their marketingand consumption as a “complex cultural construc-tion” . The cultivation of the American lawn clearlyfits such a description, linked as it is to the consumed“green” aesthetic that requires high levels of con-sumption, reinforced by a discourse of stewardshipand husbandry. Thus the lawn opens a window ontolarger issues for study of the urban environment ingeneral. As a marketed form of ecological capital, theaesthetic of the lawn becomes a structured constrainton the rational decision-making homeowner, embed-ded in an instrumental real estate regime and a disci-plinary social milieu of alienated communities.

Lawns and Toxins: P Robbins et al.

Figure 4 The institutional context of urban ecology

Viewed as land cover decisions, the specific practicesof individuals come to appear less a reflection ofenvironmental “values” than an embodiment of moraleconomics institutionalized over space and time.

This then, might provide the most viable avenue forreform and control of undesirable externalities. Thestrongly moral and communitarian character of lawnaesthetic enforcement might itself be inverted to achi-eve the reverse: a moral economy that eliminates orreduces high-intensity management and the conspicu-ous practice of conservation-oriented behavior. Argu-ably, these are the forces that have revolutionized vol-unteer-driven consumer recycling and trash control inthe US (Ackerman, 1997).

For what other urban ecologies might such anunderstanding also hold? Auto-driven air pollution,garbage deposition, and recycling come to mind. Asdoes any problem that shares a common core centeredon the tension between disaggregated decision-mak-ing by individuals and homogenizing tendencies ofthe contemporary economy, and between the environ-mental ethos of consumers and the externalizing prac-tices of household economics. The possible discoveryof the “virtues of the weed,” as recommended byEmerson, or any other environmental alternative forthat matter, is absolutely foreclosed until analysis ofthose tendencies, economies, and practices become apart of an emergent urban ecology.

Acknowledgements

The research described in this paper was made poss-ible through funding by the Environmental PolicyInitiative of The Ohio State University and by a grantfrom the OSU Center for Survey Research. Thanksgo to Julie Sharp and Sarah Moore for detailed

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suggestions and to the anonymous reviewers of anearlier draft.

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