What’s Wrong With Plastic Lawns?

Published: April 11th, 2011

By Keith Kloor

In 1973, two seminal works appeared that scared the hell out of people. One was the movie Soylent Green, in which all the fears of the day (pollution, overpopulation — even a permanently scorched planet!) were rolled up into the mother of all dystopian futures.

Credit: brianjmatis/flickr.

The other was a provocative, widely discussed essay published in Science, entitled, "What's wrong with plastic trees?" by Martin Krieger, who is today a professor of urban planning at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. In his essay, Krieger recognized that landscapes were embedded with social meaning and that humans have long been manipulating nature. Thus,

What we experience in natural environments may actually be more controllable than we imagine. Artificial prairies and wildernesses have been created, and there is no reason to believe that these artificial environments need be unsatisfactory for those who experience them.

In 1973, Krieger's essay was met in some circles with as much shock and horror as the movie Soylent Green. Later that year, Hugh Litis wrote in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America:

Every planner, landscape architect, or human ecologist should read Martin Krieger's "What's wrong with plastic trees" if he wishes to catch a glimpse of the nightmare future that technology is preparing for man and nature."

Which brings me to this story in yesterday's New York Times, about Phoenix, Arizona homeowners painting their lawns green (a low-tech nightmare?). These desert dwellers, reinforcing Americans' reputation for being obsessive about their lawns, also reminds us just how much central Arizona's natural landscape has been remade (think golf courses, swimming pools, strip malls, and yes, backyard lawns) in the last fifty years to accommodate American recreational and lifestyle habits. If you're an ecologist who cares about preserving native flora and fauna, that strikes me as the real nightmare.

Of course, if you're a city official in Phoenix, the stuff of your nightmares involves water. In recent years, city planners with their own jittery fears have tried convincing themselves that they are charting a path to sustainability. Not everyone buys into that delusion. The challenge Phoenix faces is similar to many other parts of the Southwest — increasing populations combined with scarce water resources, and the likelihood that climate change will contribute to future drought conditions.

But let's not be discouraging. Forward progress has to start somewhere. In a city of 1.5 million people (with 4.2 million living in the Phoenix metro area) smack in the middle of a desert, painted lawns and artificial grass should count as one step closer to sustainability.

They just have many miles to go.

Posted in Climate, Extremes, Drought, Flora & Fauna, Society, United States, Southwest, Frontier Earth

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Comments

By Alexander Harvey
on April 11th, 2011

Courtesy of some old BBC radio broadcast, I recall that there is a parallel story of urbanisation at Pheonix, the management of water resourses, and eventual abandonment through suspected climatic changes some centuries ago. I wish I could recall more, but it tied in new urban developments with the accompanying discovery of the old urban developments and some fairly obvious comparisons were drawn.

Alex

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