Asa heat wave creeping across the United States, state and local governments are scrambling to find solutions to the threats posed by record high temperatures. Washington DC and Philadelphia have declared heat emergencies, activating public cooling centers and other safety measures in their cities, while Phoenix and Los Angeles continue to push programs to plant new trees in working-class neighborhoods with little canopy cover. Many of these short-term solutions depend on water, a dangerous reality given that almost 50% of the country is experiencing some type of drought, with the number of Americans affected by drought rising 26.8% from last month. This looming threat has pushed one state, Nevada, to seek a longer-term solution: a ban on nonfunctional lawns.
grass taking up to 2% of all land in the United States. If it were a crop, it would be by far the largest irrigated crop in the country. Nevada, out of necessity, has taken an obvious but big step to alleviate some of the most immediate symptoms of the climate crisis and has bought more time for other measures. It’s time for the federal government to push every state to do the same and create incentives to ensure it happens quickly and in a way that doesn’t force working-class Americans to foot the bill.
The United States is experiencing the beginning of a water shortage. A 2021 study found the drought in the western US to be the worst the region has ever seen viewed in 1,200 years, and that much of it is the result of the current climate crisis. While lawns aren’t the biggest contributor to climate change, they take up space from plants that could be offsetting carbon or slowing wildfires, while also causing a lot of damage themselves.
According to the EPA, outdoor water use for lawns and gardens accounts for 60% of domestic use in arid areas of the country. And unlike indoor water use, much of that water is lost to evaporation and runoff. In short, American grasses use 3 trillion gallons of water each year, enough drinking water for billions of people annually, plus 59 million pounds of pesticides and 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline by Lawn mowers. These are all relative drops in the ocean given the full scale of the climate crisis, but given the utter uselessness of lawns, that’s too many drops.
The history of grass in the US is deeply rooted in the racism and aristocratic ambitions of America’s ruling and middle classes. In the 18th century, something akin to modern lawns gained popularity among the wealthy elite of France and England, and was imported by founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The difficulty of maintaining lawns made them the preserve of wealthier Americans until they became widespread in the 1950s after federal aid and a friendly credit market made it easier for Americans to buy homes and move to suburbs in growth of the nation.
A confluence of federal housing policies, discriminatory lending practices, and newly created homeowners associations allowed white families to reap almost exclusively all the benefits of this growth. Whites fled the cities and reclaimed their own private white-fenced fiefdoms. The gardens became a symbol of the American Dream, a dream deferred for some. American grass represents the worst of America, wasteful, vain, and full of shit. After all, lawns need fertilizer, which in the United States comes laced with herbicides that kill local plants and pollinators.
This mess of negative characteristics is why Nevada moved to ban nonfunctional turfgrasses in southern Nevada. A committee was tasked with determining what fit that definition and created a list that included everything from condominium gardens to mall dividers, and excluded individual homeowners and places like cemeteries and football fields.
According to According to the New York Times, the state had spent decades pushing half-hearted measures, such as setting water-use limits and creating financial incentives for residents to essentially sell their lawns to the state. But Lake Mead, which supplies 90% of southern Nevada’s drinking water, has become so empty that the responsible agency had to build a new pumping station to pump out what’s left. With this new legislation, Southern Nevada is expected to reduce the amount of water it draws from Lake Mead and another reservoir by 10% this year.
The rest of the country should do the same. While it alone won’t prevent the global disaster we’re already in, it’s the kind of common sense reform that can build support on both sides of the dimly lit aisle, as the bipartisan nature of the Nevada bill demonstrates. The federal government should step in and provide incentives to states to encourage citizens to leave gardens voluntarily, with firmer dates for mandatory site removal that meet criteria similar to those set by the Nevada committee. Congress could also help by subsidizing some of the often expensive lawn replacements with local flora, or step legislation such as the Green Jobs Programs that could offset potential job losses in the lawn care industry, although the latter is obviously unlikely.
There are a number of beautiful proposals to replace modern, old-school lawns. victory gardens – which allowed communities to bundle products and help the government reduce the cost of goods in the midst of World War II – to simply stick with local plants and trees that can provide shade on hot days and absorb some carbon in the meantime .
This may sound like the bare minimum, and that’s because it is. And it’s about time we at least do that.