Lawn People

Lawn People is a refreshing and overdue reminder that ecology and non-human life are critical elements and agents influencing how we structure our daily lives, our personal economies, tastes, and social relations with one another. Alec Brownlow, DePaul University This book on the influence of lawn cultivation in the United States might justly be subtitled 'the tyranny of lawns.' It dwells on the influence of lawn care on American society, describing how a large segment of the population appears driven to create the 'perfect' lawn. This perfection affects decisions that ultimately influence the economy, politics, and the environment. Author Paul Robbins examines the subject in a very searching text that stresses 'the tension between our many contradictory desires.' Chicago Botanic Garden How can we rethink American lawns? And in doing so, how might we begin to remake ourselves? These are the political questions motivating Paul Robbins's concise and empirically rich Lawn People...Conceptually, Robbins applies the familiar tools of political ecology to the fresh topic of the suburban middle classes...This book clearly demonstrates that new conceptual approaches using metaphors of networks, associations, and relations can be strongly critical and libratory. Environment and Planning A An insightful study of how lawns work and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in past and present landscapes. H-Net This interesting, insightful, and well-written volume provides a look into the complex ecological, economic, political, and sociological relationships of homeowners, their communities, the lawn care industry, pesticide and fertilizer manufacturers, and turf grasses to exhibit the ecological Gordian knot of a landscape phenomenon that insists on battling the natural processes of biodiversity and succession. Robbins's work strives to explain why so much US land and why so many people fall victim and are enslaved by an ostensibly powerless, weak, and vulnerable organism (grass), and what their relationship says about Americans and their fundamental relationship with nature. Summing Up: Highly Recommended. Choice Robbins offers a clever exploration of the political ecology and actor network theory, and a sharp insight into the cynicism of capitalism in the form of the chemical industry. That is a lot for a slim, nicely illustrated and well-written book to achieve, but it does it with style and intelligence... The book is readable and wide-ranging in its arguments...its analysis is relevant wherever suburban values extend... This book should be widely read and discussed. Environmental Conservation Robbins illuminates this relation of [lawn and man] mutual production brilliantly through detailed historical, ethnographic, and survey research. Robbins dispels many myths about lawns held in both popular and scholarly circles... Lawn People is first-rate scholarship, engaging, accessible, theoretically rich, and well grounded. It has had a powerful effect on my thinking about society-environment interfaces and the future direction of the social sciences on this topic.- The American Journal of Sociology, January 2009