Sprinkler“Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.” — Author Unknown

This weekend as the temperatures moved above 80 degrees in Newport Beach, it was time to increase the timer on the lawn sprinklers. This always makes me consider how much money we are spending and wasting on water just to keep the lawn green and pretty like the Yard of Jones next door.

Daniel Wood had similar thoughts recently in an article he wrote for enRoute magazine: a Canadian publication found tableside in the boutique hotel where we stayed in Montreal. He makes some good points about our North American cultural obsession in his article entitled: Green, Green Grass.

He writes, “How is it that North Americans spend more on grass than the entire world spends on foreign aid? How is it that during the continent’s increasingly dry summers, over 60 percent of drinking water goes to quenching the thirst of fundamentally decorative turf? How is that the typical North American homeowner spends 150 hours on lawn care annually and 35 hours on sex?”

Actually, the few hours each year that the average homeowner dedicates to sex sounds like a more captivating topic for a Monday morning, but back to the discussion at hand: green grass.

Wood continues, “Lawns helped democratize conspicuous consumption. It wasn’t long before North American landscapers could be heard touting, ‘Nothing spells class like a good stand of grass.’ And millions bought the sales pitch.”

“For several decades in the mid-20th century, pop psychologists sought the basis of this suburban obsession. The lawn as therapy? The lawn as male one-upmanship? The lawn as proof of belonging? The lawn as pet?”

“Unlike Europeans, who never succumbed to the lure, North Americans found in lawns a marriage of their continent’s twin egalitarian illusions: the rustic frontier (grass) conquered by civilizing utopianism (mowing). Lawns, like Disneyland, became an expression of the continent’s idealistic soul.”

“North Americans spend an estimated $100-billion annually on lawns. In value, grass is, by far, the most important agricultural crop on the continent.”

But what are we to do? Until there is some cultural shift, we are forced to continue this uniformity with the neighbors and turn up the sprinkler a few notches, which equals time & money. And for what? All for green grass.

Personally for me, I would rather fill up the yard with native, drought tolerant plants, throw down some good looking pea gravel or decomposed granite and cut off the sprinkler system. Think what we would save on our monthly water bill!