6 thoughts on “Lawn People”

1. Hello everyone – my reflections on Lawn People:
   (by Marc)
   I enjoyed reading Lawn People (Robbins, 2007) – I thought it was lucid, clearly structured, and made an important point about the material stakes involved in what are often dismissed as ‘merely cultural’ preferences and practices. As Robbins points out, the arguments made about the lawn here are also relevant to wider spheres of ecological and cultural production/consumption, such as rethinking food economies, driving and home maintenance. Fundamentally, at least in my view, Robbins seeks to unpack the subtle ‘coercion’ that emerges through creation of lawn subjects – some choices become normalised, some risks become passed on to consumers, and so on. It seeks to both explain the politics of the lawn in here (how personal practices form) as well as through various scales out there (industrial practices, law and regulation, imaginaries of citizenship). Decision sets are not arbitrarily realised, they are actively performed and stabilised by an array of interested agents. I have three main areas of reflections on the book – about the problematic positioning culture versus political economy, the paradoxes of a risk society, and the agency of the nonhuman.

   The book sets up what I think is a problematic distinction between ‘culture’ as an apolitical form of explanation, versus ‘political ecology’ which seems to include all relevant aspects of explanation. This forms the ‘gap’ which the book claims to fill. I think that culture is indeed political and that, as Don Mitchell (cited by Robbins, p7) argues, culture is actively made by particular groups and that hegemonic meanings and patterns of meaning-circulation are systematically and asymmetrically influenced by those able to marshal the appropriate resources (finance, legislation, community pressure). Thus acknowledging that all meanings are not created equal opens up a political economy to culture. Industries invest in circulating particular meanings about lawns and citizenship, community and so on. Adding ecology to this allows us to understand the contingencies of the market and the kinds of subjects that need to be formed (seasonality of grasses, regularity of fertilization etc). These things all act together, and the framework of the book does justice to these different aspects, but I still feel the ‘throwing away’ rather than a widening of culture is not quite justified. This causes me to reflect on the ‘author’ subject in general and the nature of book publication, with various pressures to ‘demonstrate a clear gap’ rather than to build more incrementally on existing work.

   The book documents and investigates the risk paradox of Lawn People – those who use more chemicals generally perceive the risks of these chemicals to be higher than those who do not use chemicals. This is a fascinating finding, and while there are exceptions (e.g. within Kingberry Court) it opens up new insights into how people live with risk and make it endemic (rather than optional) to our daily practices. Moving beyond explanations of ‘cognitive dissonance’ (denial of effects we don’t like), the book highlights (to me at least) that paying attention to the infrastructures which stabilize the ‘normalness’ of lawn practices can become so powerful as to get people to act against notions of consumer preference. We can create (cultural) systems of meaning-generation such as neighbourliness and class performance and link these so effectively that they become self-governing in a sense, and thus can seem to ‘pull’ practices toward risky options, without even seeming to come from the ‘industry’ per se. To me however this notion of ‘pull marketing’ is better conceptualised within a framing of ‘investing in the production of cultures’ rather than a culture-less ‘political ecology’.

   Finally, proclamations about the ‘agency of nature’ tend to focus my critical attention – while I appreciated and gained value from Robbins’ discussion of grass types, I am still not quite convinced (this may be my lack, not the book’s) that grasses have agency in this scheme. Sure they have properties in terms of different growth regimes, needs and so on, and these can never be fully ‘known’ and thus surprises happen. But if agency simply means ‘behaviour beyond the expected’ then it could be said that scientific knowledge performs agency away from nature, and thus nature lacks agency if it behaves consistently with our models of it. So yes the properties of grasses (their seasonality etc) shape the nature of the markets created as well as the material livelihoods of industries and lawn people, but are these general characteristics plus ‘surprises’ all there is to assigning agency to the nonhuman?

   Questions – does ‘Lawn People’ really overturn the argument that lawn maintenance is about ‘culture’ or is more consistent to say that it is arguing that there is a political economy to culture?

   Do grasses really have agency, or is this simply a container for what we don’t know about the biophysical?

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2. I was flying over Houston while reading Robin’s book. The landscape I saw could not have been better described than “a single estate with unblocked views and continuous sward of grass.” Seeing all these connected parcels represented well Robin’s idea of a private lawn used for public consumption. I always thought of the lawn as a cultural product of our North American industry-driven society. I always believed that the obsession of homeowners to keep a perfect lawn was due to social pressures generated by our “normative community ethics”. As many North Americans, I grew up in a suburb full of lawn people. I heard many times my parents ask themselves “how will the neighbours react if our lawn is not perfectly green and freshly mowed?” The worst is that this feeling was probably justified. As one of Robin’s interviewee explained: “we get kind of irritated when people don’t do something with their yard.”

   However, Robin shows that the assumption of a simple causal relationship between culture and the lawn is misleading. By historically describing different aspect of the lawn (e.g. its biology, chemicals and pesticides, their impact on the environment, the lawn industry, alternatives), he concludes that lawn people face multiple interconnected pressures to conform. Reading this book made me realize that our society (including people in my hometown) takes for granted that lawn has to be taken care of (e.g., mowed, watered, fertilized). These activities represent a normal, unavoidable part of our daily life. Whenever lawn needs something, it ‘communicates’ it very clearly. This implies that homeowners are trapped in a cycle where the lawn’s biological needs force them to provide it with pesticides, fertilizers, time and energy. Robin does not disregard the importance of culture, economy and law in explaining the overwhelming presence of lawn in our cities. Nevertheless, I believe he is right when saying “the lawn, an object, helps to constitute the subject (lawn people).” Our function, at least in the lawn’s ‘perspective’, is to provide for all its needs. In that way, our lawn, which now dictates part of our life, domesticated us. Following this logic, I agree with Robin that the lawn conditions our actions and beliefs, particularly about our neighbours and ourselves.

   I find very interesting (and scary) the idea that non-human (in this case the lawn) have the power to shape our behaviour and actions, especially when it brings us a feeling of anxiety and wariness. Robin rightly puts in that we have to reconsider the role and impact of non-human in our society’s economic system and culture. It is only by realizing how we became slave of our lawn that we will be able to change our behaviour. As Robin concludes, it appears that our society will have to negotiate “a [new] relationship with these companion grasses, dandelions, and soils (which we have created and which have created us) that is sustainable, sensible and less toxic.”

   Reading Robin’s book also made me think about our conception of the natural world, and how it shapes our perspectives and our relationship with the environment. Is lawn part of nature or purely man-made? Is our desire for lawn linked with our willingness to live with wilderness and nature? I would argue that lawn represents a socio-natural construction that connects the human (e.g, chemical input, labour) with the non-human (e.g., insects, grass). It represents a comfortable zone between ‘wildlife’ (at least how we perceive it) and our world. Therefore, lawn gives us a feeling of control over nature.

   Questions
   What is the impact of non-human on the way we perceive and shape our environment? Are we really responding to the lawn needs?

   How should we theorize, and interpret, nature and society? Is lawn a product of human, or should it be considered part of nature? Is our interest for lawn related to our willingness to live with ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature’?

   How can people be motivated to stop using unnecessary chemicals and pesticides? Would it be possible to change social norms? Could we bring society to see green lawn in summer as a sign of “civil neglect and moral weakness” because of its negative impact on health and the environment?

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3. Reflection of Lawn People by Paul Robbins – Colin Sutherland

   I could not help but picture my mother while reading Lawn People by Paul Robbins (2007). I could see her weeding the lawn, mowing the lawn, looking into alternatives to ‘grub’ control, and literally chasing black squirrels out of our garden. Robbins’ book did not really surprise me in terms of how chained we are to our lawns and the culture built around them, or which they produce, but his description of the lengths lawn people will go to for their idealized landscape was chilling. I think this normalization of environmental destruction is not unique and that we can also find it in other discussions taking place in today’s world.
   I found his analysis of the lawn itself well executed. At the beginning of this book I was worried that the book would fall into the trap of environmental determinism. Yet he explains, in my view successfully, how the lawn itself is able to trap us. As I read I found myself questioning myself to see if the lawn, the idea of it anyways, had any control over me. As someone with a background in the ecology of my local area and who is also a bit of a cynic when it comes to yard work, I couldn’t help but hope that when the day came for me to have a lawn I would not fall into the trap. Yet, Robbins’ did make me question if I opposed and contested this culture enough. I may agree that the lawn and the maintenance that surrounds it is not best for the environment, there must be something that stops me from protesting against it. I think to a point it has been enshrined in how I think about home, the suburbs of Ottawa, and into my image of what normal looks like. I guess to a point I’m just a slave to the aesthetic.
   I thought that this book gave a great intro to the more general way our social constructions can take on a life of their own without coming off too deterministic. For my personal academic interests it made me wonder how our conception or invention of the Arctic region can impact our relationship with Arctic related issues. I think the most obvious example is the idea of an ‘empty’ Arctic. Like the lawn this idea is reinforced by popular culture, art, politics and the lack of personal authentic experiences we have with this space. Like the lawn people, citizens are in some ways encouraged to accept a certain understanding of what the Arctic is and that idea impacts the way we understand grander issues. This internal conversation has provoked me to propose the following questions: What other non-human actors can we think of exist that force us to make environmental choices that not only harm our environment but us as well? Also, are we convinced that human actors are so limited in their agency? And, does agency exist when a cultural trend is the norm?
   These questions aside, I also found that Robbins spent a great deal of time laying down the context of the lawn and the players involved. He explained the chemicals used, its history and even the ecology of the lawn. Even with this entire context I found he spent very little time going over the other reasons that the opposition use to defend their case for lawn. Instead of presenting the various health and rodent issues that people had tied to untidy lawns, at least politically, he did not spend a great deal of time analyzing these claims. I would ask why he left these out, and what an analysis of these explanations could have brought to his analysis?

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4. One of the things that I really appreciated about Lawn People was the way that Robbins addresses and complicates assumed binaries. Straight from the beginning he confronts the idea that the standard divides of urban/rural, educated/uneducated, white collar/blue collar etc. directly correspond to lawn chemical use. In fact by bringing this to the fore at the outset he demonstrates the necessity of questioning any presumption regarding the lawn. The unexpected fact that the societal groups with the greatest environmental awareness and concern correspond almost inversely to those that use the most chemicals, is a thread that runs throughout the book.

   I was particularly interested in another binary addressed by Robbins, that of nature/ culture. A lot of my research in art history has considered this divide. Whether from the perspective of modernist painters who figured females as aligned with the natural to the male culture, this apparent opposition continues to play out in visual culture and there has been some fascinating writing on the way that, what many think of as paradigmatically “natural”, like national parks, are not entirely so and indeed quite strongly constructed and read through visual tropes. However I had not thought to push this line of thinking even further, to the fact that everything is constructed. Though indigenous practices may have been better environmentally, there was, nevertheless, a manufacturing of nature. Taken further forward, the notion that things were simpler even earlier in the 20th century belies the fact that incredibly harmful chemicals were developed in concert with military technology, the same technology intended for chemical warfare.

   On the other hand, I have been guilty of reductively aligning urban environments to the culture camp, ignoring that this is also too simplistic. In this case I was fascinated by Robbins assertion that in some ways “cities are nothing but natural”(12). Immediately I recalled the common sight of grass pushing up through cracked sidewalks, and sightings or stories of animals making habitats in cities. Of course our contemporary cities try to engage the natural whilst still controlling it, as in the case of neighborhood parks. It was useful for Robbins to look back at the park planning of Olmsted and others. It is in parallel to the idea of urban parks that lawns are revealed for their bizarre character, a character which bridges the public and private. Lawns are “private property” (with all of the weight and baggage that term holds in the United States) and yet as Robbins shows again and again, the idea of “community”is invoked again and again in the call for lawn care. As explained on page 26, early lawns involved suburban “no fence”agreements, marking an “unusual combination of exclusive and collective values.”

   The problem of the communal/individual was particularly fascinating in the chapter dealing with the lawn resistance movement, where companies fight to keep their chemicals on the market citing rights, while neighborhood associations demand cut, short and green grass from every lawn in their area. Numerous other binaries are addressed throughout the book and while these divisions obviously affect everything, they seem to be particularly convoluted in relation to the lawn.

   Question: Robbins points out that much scholarship on the lawn has done the disservice of making it seem inevitable, as though North America was always headed towards this feature. (19, etc) Of course this is not so, but I wonder if Robbins’ contention at the end of chapter 1 that it may be “the grass itself” that calls lawn owners to action, may have similar pitfalls? Is this similarly deterministic, or not?

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5. Overall, I found that Paul Robbins’ “Lawn People” was a fascinating and enjoyable read. Robbins’ looks beyond understandings of the lawn as a cultural object to argue that lawns are also “meaningful expressions of political and economic forces.” I was particularly interested in the history of the lawn and the role of landscape architects in designing landscapes that foster a particular kind of urban citizen. The fact that a mundane object such as the lawn can have so much hidden history is a little mind-boggling; one wonders what other stories similar objects might tell.

   I thought that Robbins’ use of Althusser’s concept of interpellation was a useful mechanism for framing the discussion of subjectivity. Acknowledging that Althusser does not discuss nature in his work, Robbins expands on interpellation, asking “In the case of vast ecologies, who does the interpellating?” To be honest, I never found a clear answer in the text. Throughout the book, Robbins’ references lawn people as both turfgrass subjects and lawn subjects, which I found confusing. Are we lawn subjects or turfgrass subjects? Is there a difference? Are the demands of the turfgrass different than those of the lawn?

   Seeking clarification, I turned to Joel Wainwright’s review of “Lawn People.” He states: “…it turns out that there really is no such a thing as the lawn ‘itself ’, because it already involves us and other things that are not usually considered part of the lawn. So, no, grass does not hail. The lawn hails us as a socio-natural ensemble…To say this differently: no, the lawn as such does not knock on the door. Rather, the lawn is a becoming-space of subjection, a space that exists and surrounds lawn people. It is that which surrounds us and thus opens up to our being what we are. The lawn is not Althusser’s policeman who hails, “Hey, you there!” It is the ‘there’ at the end of that hail where we find ourselves today, as lawn people, such that we may be hailed” (199). What are the consequences of thinking of the lawn as a “becoming-space of subjectification”? Is that somehow different than saying, as Robbins does, that the lawn interpellates the subject? In addition, if we choose not to take ‘lawn people’ as an undifferentiated category, how does thinking about the lawn as a ‘becoming space’ allow us to imagine different subjectivities enacted and experienced by different lawn people?

   On another note, it seems that few of us were at the Latour lecture on Monday. Speaking quite generally, Latour stated that there seems to be a general trend that we are cognizant about climate change, and yet not acting on that knowledge. I wish I could recall the term he used; I think it was something to the effect of “quietism.” Something similar seems to be at work in lawn people, who continue to use lawn chemicals despite some degree of knowledge and concern of the risks involved. Robbins is hopeful that the presence of this anxiety may be useful: “Anxious subjects need not be docile.” Robbins is clear that although anxiety is not emancipatory in and of itself it could act as a signal to recognize our own subjectivity. How does this argument extend more broadly than the American lawn? What other spaces exist in which anxiety could act as an inroad to recognizing subjectivity?

   J. Wainwright. 2010. “Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We are, P. Robbins,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 1(2010), 197-200.

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6. 9/24/2013
   GEOG 514
   Victoria Padilla
   Reflection
   Robbins, P. (2007) Lawn People: How grasses, weeds, and people make us who we are. Temple
   University Press.

   Paul Robbins’ “Lawn people” is a thoughtful analytical survey of the North American lawn and the people that tend to them. The book unfolds by presenting a number of other important aspects, actors and events that historically and contextually define what could be called the North American turfgrass system.
   Robbins begins by stating that the purpose of the book is explaining lawn people –North American homeowners that keep inefficient and hazardous monocultural turffgrasses in their yards. This is, Robbins claims, an approach to an urban ecological topic from a political ecology perspective that allows him to move towards incorporating individual decisions and the economic and sociopolitical context in which said decisions are made. However, Robbins goes even further and argues that the real motivator behind those decisions is the lawn itself. He claims that the lawn produces a specific type of individual, the so-called lawn person.
   As his perspective from political ecology calls he takes into account the coercion, suggestion, power and exploitation that exist behind individual decision making. In this sense Robbins paints and complex picture of the lawn system yet somehow continues to ascertain the supremacy of the actual grass as the main actor in this process. As he brings into the picture capitalism, culture and politics as the cause of individual’s actions and desires he removes the agency solely from humans and allows for non-human agency, mainly lawn agency. However, throughout the unfolding of the book the complex web of social processes that Robbins argues are involved in the turfgrass system remove the role of actor from nature and place it on shifting and varied political and economic forces. These forces end up defining the concept of the North American laws, and against his argument (of the lawn as the subject maker) those forces are what define the behavior and decisions of lawn people.

   Questions:
   Is it possible to formulate complex well rounded arguments regarding socio-ecological processes that while taking into account the complexities of human affairs manage to incorporate and give real agency to non-human elements? Is that even desirable or is it to some extent removing responsibility from humans? Furthermore, how can we build arguments that go beyond the binary opposite disposition of human/nature and explain the inextricable complex relationship between them and its consequences?

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