This week we talk about weeds, lawn mowers, and California’s Air Resources Board.
We also discuss ornamental lawns, leaf blowers, and two-stroke engines.
Recommended Book: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant
Transcript
The concept of the modern lawn—a term that originally referred to a somewhat ecologically varied, short-cropped green space that was used for livestock, in contrast to fields that were used for growing agricultural plants—is derived from a variation of the lawns built and maintained by European aristocracy, especially British aristocracy, in the mid- to late-teens centuries, BC.
The concept evolved from a sort of posturing that only wealthy people could manage, back then, before the advent of grass-trimming machinery.
And the flex here was two-fold:
First, here is an expanse of land, which typically would have been put to use, in this case for livestock, but which I, because I'm wealthy, can leave unproductive, untarnished by beasts, and thus for purely beautification and recreational purposes; I can impress people with my sweeping plots of greenery, I can make it uniform and, thus, interesting, in an age in which nature is still being wrestled with and perfection by any standard is rare, and I have enough people working for me that all this maintenance, despite its incredible weight, all that grass in some cases being hand-scythed and sheered by human beings toiling all day long—I can afford to do that. So, look upon my fields, my vast tracts of ornamental land, and be amazed.
So simply setting aside land for this aesthetic-focused purpose was big, but so was maintaining such a thing in a period in which that maintenance was the consequence of long, hard, expensive human labor.
That ornamentality became more accessible to more people with the advent of early mowing machines, the first of which was unpowered, made from wrought-iron, and used a cylinder of blades that would spin when you pushed it.
That was invented in 1830 in England, and from there these Budding Machines, named after the inventor, Edward Budding, were sold to entities with large expanses of land, like the Oxford colleges and Regents Park Zoological Gardens, which in turn helped Budding, mostly financially, evolve his machine, which was then manufactured at a larger scale and licensed to other companies that wanted to make their own version of the same.
Within a decade, these mowing devices had been augmented so they could be pulled by horses, donkeys, and other beasts of burden.
Just over sixty years after that first model was built by Budding, the first steam-powered mower, still pulled by animals, usually, but much more powerful, was patented, and then eventually built and sold, and by 1900 a popular model of steam-powered mower, the Ransomes' Automaton, which is just a wonderful and steampunk name for anything, was dominant in the English market, and the first riding lawn mowers arose around the same time, as seats for operators were added on to the increasingly complex machines.
Mower designs started to show up in patent offices elsewhere around the world around this same time, as the concept of lawns had already spread globally, due to the British Empire's presence and influence, and in the US, the concept of the ornamental lawn was especially appealing: landowners who were gobbling up vast expanses of the—by their standards, basically uninhabited North American continent—were adding these sorts of areas to their growing estates, and the US Civil War meant that some of these landowners were finding themselves with a lot less abundant human labor—of the inexpensive and slave variety, at least—than before, thus the market for mowers, to maintain these brag-worthy lawns, grew quickly from the mid-1860s, onward.
The first gas-powered lawn mowers were produced in Lansing, Michigan back in 1914 by a company called Ideal Power Mower Company, and that same company went on to develop the first-ever self-propelled riding lawn mower, of the sort that would be recognizable today, as it didn't need a horse or other animal to pull it, and this collection of mowing-related innovations, combined with the rapid expansion of suburbs around the United States following World War II—which was partially the consequence of trying to keep war-era manufacturing operating at scale, post-conflict, but also the flood of money that entered the economy as veterans were all but given access to higher-education and cheap loans for houses in rapidly developing city outskirts—that ended up being exactly the right combination of elements to help the lawn spread still further, into a country that was looking to flaunt its wealth a bit, and in which a large number of people were suddenly becoming homeowners, with little patches of lawn all to themselves, adopting the standards of landowners that came before them, including using these patches of non-house land more or less exclusively as decoration.
What I'd like to talk about today is an impending, near-future disruption the lawn care industry faces as a consequence of the global shift toward renewable energy.
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It's estimated that about 2% of the total continental US landmass is lawns.
The data on this vary, as this is mostly based on estimates from state-level agencies, which are imperfect, and from entities like NASA which have provided satellite imagery that helps us clarify, with decent resolution, which patches of land are covered by what sorts of materials; but it can only ever really be estimates, because of the nature of what's being measured.
But whatever the specific figure, lawns of the ornamental, just kind of sitting there and not doing anything variety, are immensely popular in the United States, and that's made them popular in many other countries, as well, as just like the British Empire was able to spread their norms globally by throwing around money and military units, US norms and priorities tend to spread through the country's vast and powerful media apparatus—so just like American-style malls and toilets and dating and hamburgers, American-style lawns have popped up all over the place, for better and for worse, though by most metrics, mostly for worse.
And that's because lawns are almost uniquely net-negatives for the environments they occupy and bump up against.
Lawns are typically monocultures, meaning plant-life that doesn't adhere to the visual norms of the prioritized green, green grass of a certain length and shape, is killed, sometimes only at great expense and with much effort, and often at the expense of local species, including pollinators and other food-web staples.
Lawns require substantially more watering than a varied collection of local plant-life.
They also generally necessitate the application of chemicals to prevent or kill-off weeds and other undesirable elements—weeds, of course, being any plant that isn't uniform grass of the kind we want to see.
Turf of the kind typically prioritized for these sorts of lawns also has incredibly shallow roots of less than half an inch, which is part of why they require so much watering—they can't get what they need from the soil, themselves—but this also leads to compacted soils over time, which keeps it from absorbing as much water as it might, otherwise, which leads to more flooding and runoff issues, the soil basically eroding into storm sewer systems, which can clog and block them, compounding flooding issues, rather than helping with them.
Another fairly significant issue inherent in ornamental lawns is the volume of greenhouse gas emissions—alongside pollutants—that are churned into the air by all the equipment people use to maintain them.
According to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency, using a modern gasoline-powered lawnmower for one hour emits about the same volume of nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds—like benzene, formaldehyde, and tetrachloroethylene, all stuff you don't want in the air or environment—as driving a modern car 45 miles.
These lawn care tools are responsible for about 5% of the US's total air pollution, and oil spills associated with filling up lawnmowers and other such equipment tally an estimated 17 million gallons across the US each year, that spilled gas then finding its way into the local ecosystem, impacting plant and animal life, but also the drinking water humans ultimately use and consume.
Now, gasoline does actually make it into these devices, unspilled, and around 800 million gallons of gasoline is consumed through their use, each year, and because many pieces of lawn care equipment are powered by two-stroke rather than four-stroke engines, the fuel blends with the oil used for lubrication, and consequently around a third of it doesn't fully combust—and as a result emissions from tools and vehicles using two-stroke engines are around 124-times higher than from engines without that blending issue.
Four-stroke engines are a bit better than two-stroke, but still not great: a four-stroke engine-powered land mower used for an hour generates emissions equivalent to driving a passenger vehicles about 300 miles.
Leaf-blowers are also pretty brutal machines, in terms of emissions and pollution.
A typical, off-the-shelf leaf-blower releases more hydrocarbons into the environment than a pickup truck, and research from 2017 suggested that gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and other such lawn equipment can produce more ozone-depleting pollution in the state of California than all of the passenger vehicles in the state, combined, leading to an announcement and warning on the issue by the California Air Resources board, that year.
That and similar concerns were the primary motivations behind a recent decision to ban the sale of new gas-powered lawn tools in the state beginning in 2024.
The argument is this:
These types of engines, those that power lawn-care tools, create just a boggling amount of pollution and other emissions, and that's an especially pressing issue in California, which is highly populated, filled with cars, and which has areas that are deserts—like Los Angeles and its metro area—where folks spend gobs of time, energy, and resources, including very finite resources like water, trying to maintain lawns that struggle to survive in the, again, desert where they've been installed.
So all that being true, it makes sense to try to temper at least some of this issue by making it more difficult to acquire and use these highly polluting tools, forcing people to either spend less time, energy, and resources on these unproductive, decorative spaces, or to just buy electric versions of the same, which are, today, widely available, and which can be powered by electricity that is generated cleanly, by solar, wind, etc.
This ban is not without controversy: folks who have these sorts of devices already will be able to keep using them, and it's not a big issue to acquire a new gas-powered whatever if you really want to do so, but it will likely have some effect in that it makes it more difficult to casually acquire one, and in that it makes alternatives like electric versions of the same, and bigger changes like xeriscaping one's yard—using local plants and rocks and things like that, instead of generic green grass, in areas that are short on water—more thinkable for more people.
What it does, in other words, is marks a moment at which a transition in this norm might be kicking off, and that's alarming for business entities that make these sorts of tools and which haven't transitioned their catalog over to electric versions, yet, but also for folks for whom the electrification of things has become a culture-war issue, and for whom—for instance—the idea of not being able to install new gas stoves or buy new gas-guzzling cars feels like an overstep, like oppression, on the part of regulators and other government ne'er-do-wells.
There's also the noise element to this discussion: lawn-care equipment with gas-powered motors are incredibly loud, and there's an ever-growing body of evidence that this kind of noise is bad for animals, bad for human stress-levels, and can itself be partially ameliorated by the far, far quieter electric versions of the same, which tend to be something like 15-20 decibels quieter—and with every 6 decibels sound difference, the volume of noise doubles, so that's a pretty substantial change, even if big electric lawn mowers are far from silent.
All that said, gas mowers are the more developed and iterated technology, and they'll tend to be cheaper up front, and at times more powerful and convenient in some ways; and the same is broadly true across the arsenal of available lawn tools on the market, today.
So even though electric versions tend to be massively better in terms of environmental and public and personal health, and far superior in terms of the noise they generate, the amount and cost of maintenance, and the ease of handling, gas versions are still cheaper and sometimes more powerful, and likely will remain so for some time—though bans like this impending one in California make it more likely that costs on the e-versions will come down quickly, as the market expands, competition picks up, and norms shift, leading to more iteration, more cost-savings, and more overall power for these tools, as well.
California is just one state, of course, but their regulations tend to spill-over into other states, as they often opt for stricter regulations on things like passenger vehicle fuel efficiency and the use of potentially cancer-causing chemicals in products, and because their market is huge and on average quite wealthy, which means companies don't want to be left out of the California market, but it also seldom makes sense to produce two versions of every product, one for California and one for the rest of the US, so those tighter restrictions often inform the shape their products take, elsewhere, as well.
And though these sorts of tools exist everywhere around the world, these days, North America makes up about 58% of the $25 billion global power lawn- and garden-equipment market, so if this ban is implemented successfully, and then informs the state of things across the US, there's a good chance this industry could shift relatively quickly, in its entirety, leading to a far more rapid than would be the case, otherwise, transition away from inefficient and loud motors, to a cleaner version of the same, and at a more basic level, maybe more consideration for decorative lawn alternatives in relevant regions, as well.
Show Notes
https://www.des.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt341/files/documents/2020-01/ard-22.pdf
https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/5/11/law-maintenance-and-climate-change
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/james-fallows-leaf-blower-ban/583210/
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/zero-emission-landscaping-equipment
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/carb-approves-updated-regulations-requiring-most-new-small-road-engines-be-zero-emission-2024
https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/lawn-mowers/gas-vs-electric-lawn-mower-which-is-better-a1057954260/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/gas-lawn-care-ban-in-california-tests-electric-leaf-blower-appeal
https://archive.ph/XCJNI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-bad-for-the-environment-are-gas-powered-leaf-blowers/2013/09/16/8eed7b9a-18bb-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-american-obsession-with-lawns/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_mower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
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