The End of Our Lawns?

I grew up in an exurban setting, where as a boy I had to learn how to mow lawns. In those days, we pushed hand mowers. Nobody thought much about it. The grass was just there to mow. Such praxis is still widespread, especially in American suburbs, although now more often than not it’s accomplished with high-tech, gasoline-driven mowers, some of them even large enough to mount.

I credit lawn mowing with helping me to get through my seminary years. I once had a job mowing the grass of a sizeable estate that was bounded by a four-feet tall stone wall, not far from the theological school I attended in Philadelphia. There I regularly and proudly pushed a huge machine-driven mower around more than an acre of lush green grass.

Truth be known, that mowing not only helped me to support myself, it also gave me a way to get away from it all. I loved the aroma of the freshly cut grass and found a kind of spiritual solitude in contemplating it all after I had finished. Indeed, on occasion, I would think of myself not as that memorable sower in Jesus’ parable, who went out to sow, but as some ecstatic mower who went out to mow, in a way that felt biblical to me.

But anyone who knows about these things today is well aware that, over all, American lawns are a huge problem. They require enormous – and wasteful and polluting – amounts of gasoline. Environmentally – and theologically – indeed, what good are they? Many critics have addressed this kind of question in recent years, convincingly in my view.*

I’m not totally opposed to lawns. But they surely should be cultivated with the greater public good in mind, in well-designed, easily accessible parks, say, or as essential features of humanely designed and maintained public housing developments. Couldn’t many private lawns also be transformed into more sustainable meadows for wild flowers or into gardens for vegetables, even if that might cause some controversy?**

Which brings me to some theological reflections, a God’s-eye point of view, as it were. Over the years, I have kept proposing that it’s best to think of nature generally as having three dimensions; (1) fabricated (e.g. roads, buildings), (2) cultivated (e.g. private lawns, public gardens, farms), and (3) wild (e.g., some of the larger of our national parks). As cultivated nature, lawns – imaginatively designed, with attention to aesthetics and to ecological setting and to justice issues in urban, suburban, and rural areas – surely can be a blessing, right? But do we really need so many of them?***

*Among these is the recent NY Times essay, “Let Your Garden Grow” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/lawns-mowing-wildflowers.html).

** https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/native-plants-lawn–long–island-woman-fined/

***See, further, Mark Richardson, “Our Lawns Are Killing Us. It’s Time to Kick the Habit,” Native Plant News (New England Wild Flower Society), Spring-Summer, July 15, 2017.