By Sam Moon, Des Moines
Some of you may have seen that this year in May, the mayor of Des Moines asked citizens to not mow our lawns, for the sake of pollinators and local wildlife. If you’re a tree hugger like me, this excited you quite a bit. Think about it: not hearing the grinding whirr of lawn mowers throughout the city even for just a little bit, seeing bumble bees and butterflies around homes again for what may be the first time in years for some people. But in May I ended up seeing way fewer people than I thought I would going along with this proclamation. I enjoyed the few I walked past that let the prairie that was once here re-emerge from our monocultured manicured lawns. I know very well that there are people that think letting nature do its thing in the city capital of the state is unsightly and that think overgrown lawns are a sight for sore eyes compared to everyone’s flat green carpets. There are many reasons for this way of thinking. HOA laws. Neighbors complaining. But at the root of it all is why we continue to maintain turf lawns in the first place.
Turf lawns were and are above everything else, a status symbol. They gained popularity with the monarchy and the nobility in Europe, showing off that they had enough man-power to flatten entire acres of grasslands with scythes and trimmers pulled by hooves and feet and hands way before lawn mowers were invented. Yet even then, they made more of an effort to take care of the nature in these flattened areas than most common folk here ever have. They fertilized these areas naturally. They planted chamomile and thyme and different types of ground cover to make it easier to maintain. Many people in the U.S. aren’t even aware that the most common kind of grasses we use to landscape with were brought over by immigrants and aren’t native to the country. Even then, only areas that were already grasslands were used and maintained by nobility out of ease.
This all changed drastically with industrialization. Immigrants here wanted to show off that they came from nobility or worked up to their status by mimicking the evergreen flat grasslands that were so iconic to status there. Of course, this was not good for biodiversity or nature here. Every area in the US has different biomes and different plants that grow there because they evolved to grow there. The sheer amount of non-native plant introduction around the world would never be able to be summarized in one article by a guy who is just passionate about letting nature do its thing. The turf we maintain here takes so much water and irrigation to maintain because it does not belong here, and never has. We parch this land and cause it to crack and dry and crumble by only letting turf grasses with one-inch roots grow, and the drought will only get worse as the planet heats up. I won’t even get started about the fact that Walmart sets out RoundUp on the shelves right by the front door, urging people to kill and poison the only distinguishable life in their yards. Don’t buy RoundUp.
I could go on and on about what lawn culture has done to life on Earth, but what I really want to focus on here is, why only May? Why shouldn’t we want to let pollinators and life here thrive all year, every year? Why isn’t it easier for homeowners and citizens to just let nature thrive in their yards? Why does the HOA decide what grows in every city instead of nature itself? The people that work in/for the HOA are not conservationists. They are not biologists, they are not botanists. They are businessmen who want to use every bit of this land we live on for profit and if you don’t do it exactly the way they want you to, you’ll get fined. They do not have nature in mind, they have status in mind. If there is an empty plot of land downtown that people “neglect” and it grows into a mini oasis for the Midwestern life we’ve pushed away, they move as fast as they can to mow it completely flat, hidden garbage and all, and put a For Lease sign up.
To me, lawn culture is an epidemic that needs to be extinguished. There is no reason we should still be following suit on a trend from the 1600s that we shouldn’t have started in the first place. It is unsustainable and wasteful. What grows here, belongs here — or, that’s how it should be. We need more trees in cities, of which I am glad I can call Des Moines a Tree City USA. But we also need more “neglected” land. We need more prairie oases. We need to leave nature to claim the sides of highways we do not tread on. Des Moines needs more paid volunteer work options that focus on conservation instead of focusing on building another new chain restaurant. We must focus on clearing out invasive species and rebuilding the forests and plains that are here and were well loved and cared for by native peoples long before we decided we should replace it all with turf. There is always a better option.
These beliefs are a core part of my relationship with Earth and the state I have called home for 24 years. Anyone and everyone can and should get involved. If you feel overwhelmed by this movement and think there’s way too much grass and invasives to identify and eradicate to make enough of a difference, you’re wrong. Start with your own backyard and look closer at the tiny worlds that call your yard home, whether you like them to or not. Don’t go to the store and buy a plant to take care of. Let the beauty of the prairie spring up in your own yard and observe what creatures frequent them. You wont regret it.
A shorter version of this letter was published in Little Village’s July 2023 issue.
