It’s spring here in suburbia, which means my neighbors were all out this weekend hastening the doom of the planet by running their gas-powered lawn mowers. Not me– I was, um, paying our neighbors’ teenage son to mow our lawn. With a gas-powered lawn mower.
OK, I’m not exactly staking out the Moral High Ground, here, and anyway, the amount of gas burned in lawn mowing is pretty trivial, all things considered. But it did occur to me to wonder about how we got to where we are with this, and what will happen in the future. Could it be that the widespread use of gasoline powered mowers and trimmers will be just a historical blip, a curiousity of the late 20th century for future anthropologists to discuss? With gas running $3/gallon, and everybody saying things are only going to get worse, purely mechanical push mowers start to look a whole lot better…
Of course, even better would be dispensing with the whole lawn mowing thing. Which makes me wonder where it started in the first place– how did it happen that large expanses of neatly trimmed grass came to be a definitive indicator of civilization?
There’s probably a Smart People Book in this for someone– a look at the long history of different concepts of “lawn” through the centuries, from the ancient Roman custom of scattering sharp rocks and broken shards of pottery over every open space (I’m making this up) down to the current American obsession with making every suburban yard look like the eighteenth green at Augusta National. You could call it something like Grass: A History, and rake in the dough from all sorts of really confused hippies…
But if somebody knows a short version, and could leave it in the comments, I’d love to know more.