Unlawning America strives to make ecologically harmful landscaping practices more visible and less ordinary. The artworks, sites and public presentations created for this project celebrate unmowed green space and model alternatives to mowed lawn. This project highlights the enormous amounts of labor and cost, both financial and environmental, that lawn maintenance requires. This illustrates the large amounts of time and money that can be saved by reducing mowed areas, especially for large institutions or business properties who maintain vast areas of underutilized lawn. Lawn care in the U.S. is also a huge industry claiming more than $75 million in annual revenue. All this time and money is for an unused crop that provides almost nothing beyond suppressive control of greenspace and aesthetic conformity. If we could convince people to allow lawns to develop into meadows, there would be immediate ecological benefit with practically no money or labor.
Fortunately, in many countries where people keep lawns, there is not the deep seated, almost religious fervor that people in the U.S. have about their lawns. The concept of not mowing unused lawn area might be an easier sell in these places. In Canada, Australia, U.K. and especially in the U.S. this will be a bigger challenging and require a concerted effort focusing on a cultural shift. As daunting as this is, the ecological benefits of transforming mowed lawn into pollinator habitat are enormous.
Once people get used to the idea of letting go of their mowed lawn space, other environmentally beneficial activities requiring more resources can be developed. These include but are not limited to, increasing native plant diversity and small-scale organic food production. Food production at these sites can include everything from planting cultivated gardens to food forests or simply planting food producing plants that benefit humans and other animals. Once these become established, since they are community based, local residents can feel a tremendous sense of connection and agency when helping maintain them. The environmental benefits of shifting food production from large scale “conventional” farming to small scale organic operations has been well documented. Simply look to the U.N. Trade and Environment Review report from 2013 which promotes the idea that small-scale organic farming is the only way to feed the growing human population. Shifting food production to right around the places we live and work will reduce pressure on large scale farms, creating the potential for those places to return to natural habitat.
The project manifests through a number of elements: photography, video, sculptural objects, design elements, site-based works, an herbarium and Unlawning box kits. The central visual element is the project poster, designed using the source material of Albrecht Dürer’s “Great Piece of Turf,” a watercolor painting made in Germany in 1503. At that time, the first waves of European colonization were underway in the Americas. His painting depicts many plants that we now identify as lawn “weeds” which made it an ideal candidate as a visual art anchor for the project. All of these elements work to reframe our perception of lawn-dominated landscapes with the goal of influencing a cultural shift in the practice of keeping mowed lawns.
Although the project was initially launched in Vermont, where I currently live and work, the idea comes partly from my experiences in the lawn-dominated landscapes of Long Island where I grew up. It is also an expansion of themes explored in other projects I have done over the past 15 years in the Midwest and elsewhere, specifically Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. The project, from its inception, was designed to expand across the U.S., with new elements continuously generated in relationship to the places it is presented.
Ecological concerns
I started this project due to an increasing awareness of the multiple ecological problems connected to maintaining lawns. Of primary concern is habitat loss and the impact it has on species diversity, especially pollinators. Transforming unused or underutilized lawn area into meadow habitat can have a measurable benefit for species in decline, and increase overall numbers of invertebrates, birds and small mammals. These benefits increase when sites are enhanced with native plants to complement the existing introduced and naturalized flowers and grasses that usually grow when lawn transfroms into meadow.
Lawn, in addition to being described as an “ecological desert” to most animals, has been linked to a number of serious environmental problems through the use of herbicides, pesticides, fertilization, water use and pollution from mowing. In more arid regions of the country like Southern California, watering the lawn can make up to 75% total household water consumption. A research study from Purdue University estimated that if all the lawn in the US were irrigated at the recommended 1 inch per week, domestic and commercial consumption would be approximately 200 gallons of water per person per day. The same study shows that urban areas use 30-60% of all fresh water to irrigate lawns.
There is also the issue of water contamination, 67 million pounds of synthetic pesticides and 47 million pounds of herbicides are used on U.S. lawns each year. Much of this is carried away as runoff that ends up in our water. There is also the problem of excess nutrients from grass clippings and fertilizers which contribute to algae blooms and deplete oxygen in the water making it unsafe for recreational use, killing fish and endangering many other species. The transmission of these chemicals is made worse when frequently mowed grass, which does little to slow water runoff, is directly next to water bodies or sewer drains
Mowing with a gas powered mower is one of the most harmful activities related to keeping a lawn. Older, less efficient two-cycle engines release 25-30% of their oil and gas unburned into the air. An EPA study estimates 800 million gallons of gas are used each year for mowing. The EPA also estimates 17 million gallons of this are spilled each year. This spillage evaporates into our air and gets into our water. Mowing also produces very large amounts of air pollution, much greater than cars and trucks. According to the U.S. EPA, one hour of mowing with a new gas powered mower produces more air pollution than 11 new cars driven for the same amount of time. Gas mowers emit hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, particulate matter, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. These chemicals are known to cause cancer as well as damage to lungs, heart, and both the immune and detoxification systems. Ground level ozone and smog also inhibit plant growth.
One issue raising the most alarm with biologists and ecologists is a growing body of scientific research showing insects, which make up over 80% of all animals on the planet, are in decline globally. The list includes pollinators like bees, butterflies, moths, wasps and beetles with cascading impacts on many other species, especially birds and bats. Even iconic species in North America, like the monarch butterfly, are in sharp decline due to a combination of habitat loss, climate change and large-scale use of pesticides and herbicides. A conversation with a biologist led me to understand that although the problems are incredibly complex, there are some simple facts we can address. He told me, “more milkweed means more monarchs, period.” It seems reasonable to extrapolate from this statement that more pollinator friendly habitats can mean more pollinators as well. Imagine if just half of the 40 million acres of lawn became pollinator friendly meadow. One thing the natural world has shown is that is can rebound relatively quickly if given the space to do so.
Historical Context
The American desire for lawn can be traced back to English and French manors where the lawn was a display of wealth. The dominance of lawns in the U.S. is largely the result of a cultural campaign, started in the late 19th century and significantly advanced in the mid-20th, based on constructed ideals of aesthetics and conformity. The success of this campaign, and the negative ecological impacts it has had, are considerable. Occupying more than 40 million acres in the continental U.S., lawn is one of our largest irrigated crops despite the fact that it is not used for food or any other useful products. A majority of this lawn is not used by people at all, other than for aesthetic purposes, and presents an ecological desert for almost all other animals, especially pollinators. By simply not mowing lawns we don’t use for recreation, we can make significant improvements to our local ecosystems. The works created for this project document this cultivated “green” landscape of our built environment and offer alternatives to frequently mowed lawn. Perhaps more importantly, this project is designed to frame non-lawn green spaces as ecologically and aesthetically valuable, challenging our entrenched perceptions and reminding us that they were established through marketed cultural traditions and questionable beliefs.