Great Green Lawns: The Next Backlash?

The "incredible, edible" garden at the House of Obama has been all over the news in the past week as we've heard from Alice Waters and Michael Pollen and other locavore disciples about the plethora of benefits that come from eating organic, local food.

Published today in newspapers across the country, Ellen Goodman's column, "In the Garden of Eatin'" explores a new idea (at least to me) she coins the "grass-roots anti-grass movement." As if we needed anymore, this seems like yet another substantial benefit to add to the slow food, local gardening movement.

I am not the only one who looks at lawns -- including my own -- as a populist enemy. The low grassy surface has its roots in the English aristocracy, among folks who had so much food and land they didn't have to farm it, they only had to display it.

Today lawns cover 40 million acres, making them the largest agricultural sector in America. They consume 270 billion gallons of water a week, or enough for 81 million acres of organic vegetables. They suck up $40 billion a year on seed, sod and chemicals, leading one historian to compare them to "a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs."

We mow the lawn, we fertilize it, we pesticize it, we water it, for the absurd purpose of keeping this useless patch in a deliberate state of arrested development.

She asks, "Is it possible that along with local, organic food, the First Garden can promote the thoroughly subversive idea that this symbol has seen its day?"