Lawn

A cultural history of the lawn encompassing political, botanical, aesthetic, and ecological dimensions in the context of climate change and the sixth mass extinction.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landscaping, the lawn is now at the center of a climate change controversy. The large carbon footprint maintenance, its unquenchable thirst for fertilizers, weedkillers, and water, and the notorious unfriendliness towards all forms of wildlife have recently attracted criticism and even spurred an anti-lawn movement.

Lawn untangles the colonial-capitalist threads that keep our passion for mown grass alive despite mounting evidence that we’d be better off without it. The lawn is aesthetically and ideologically versatile. From museums and hospitals to corporate headquarters and university campuses, it has become the verdant lingua franca of institutions of all kinds. Its formal homogeneity and neatness imply reliability, constancy, and solicit our trust. But beneath the lawn lies a stratification of intricate ideological and ecological issues that over time have come to define our conception of nature.