Book Review:
Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are
Tiffany Tong
December 10, 2008
The author, Paul Robbins, starts the book off with a strange observation about himself when he moved into a new home with a lawn: “I was becoming a … ‘lawn person.’” (Robbins 2007, xii) The rising population of a lawn person, someone whose life is influenced or dictated by the lawn, is arguably a very American middle class phenomenon (Thompson 2008). This book seeks to unravel the complex relationships behind humans, lawns, and the larger political economy to seek an answer to this persuasive trend. In this book, Robbins tries to apply “political ecology to the fresh topic of the suburban middle classes (Ginn 2007).”