2021-07-01
27 分钟Nearly two percent of America is grassy green. Sure, lawns are beautiful and useful and they smell great. But are the costs — financial, environmental and otherwise — worth the benefits?
Hey there, podcast listeners.
This week's episode comes from our archive, which now includes more than 450 episodes, all of which you can get free on any podcast app.
This one goes all the way back to 2017.
It's called how stupid is our obsession with lawns.
Hope you enjoy where I live in the great northeast of the United States.
It is finally summertime.
When you get outside, it's beautiful.
The trees, the flowers, and of course, the lawns.
Who doesn't love a good lawn?
It looks good, smells good, feels good.
For a lot of people, a lawn is the perfect form of nature, even though, let's be honest, the lawns we like don't actually occur in nature, even though the process of producing such a lawn is full of the most unnatural activity.
Even though this unnatural slice of nature requires so many inputs, the water, the fertilizer, the weed killers, the mowers and trimmers and the leaf blowers, the fuel to power all this machinery, the fuel to power the trucks to transport the people who run the machinery, all in pursuit of the perfect lawn.
This is Freakonomics radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.
Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
Give me, briefly as you can, a history of the lawn.
If you go look at the Oxford English Dictionary and try to find the word lawn, you'll see that it dates from the 16th century, from Old English for an open space, or what was called the Glade.
Ted Steinberg is a history and law professor at Case Western Reserve.
I am the author of several books, including American Green the Obsessive Quest for the perfect lawn.
And these lawns, as it were, that existed back in 16th, 17th, 18th century England, were typically found on estates.
Now talk about how America got into lawns and the degree to which they upped the game.