Lawn fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides were both readily adopted and heavily pushed in the post-war era. While lawn hobbyists had been using lead arsenate, sulfuric acid, kerosene, ammonia sulfate, copper sulfate, and iron sulfate as weed killers (Jenkins 1994, 104), the use of chemicals sold at a hardware store, purchased at the advisement of gardening articles, could never become as mainstream as the application of commercialized lawn products. The plethora of advertising and branding masks and normalizes the potential danger of ritualistically covering ornamental turf with heavy metals, acids and biocides to promote “healthier”lawns. The monocultural ideal of lawns, birthed by earlier nineteenth century garden advocates, was cultivated by the emergent lawn-care industry. As Robbins points out, “left alone, grass will do just fine”—assuming that uneven growth, dead patches, weeds, and seeding can be tolerated (Robbins 2003, 37-38). Obviously, the natural landscape of grass could not be accepted by the sellers of lawn-care products, who needed consumers to consider a polycultural and seasonally brown lawn distasteful. To this end, many post-war lawn-care companies offered free brochures on how to grow a lawn (Jenkins 1994, 67), with the Scott Company giving out free two-year subscriptions to its newsletter Lawn Care (Jenkins 1994, 75). In marketing fertilizer, Swift & Co glorified the “cool, velvety carpet of lawn,”induced anxiety about this perfection decaying as “ugly bare spots develop, [and] weeds thrive,”and selling its fertilizer as the food necessary to sustain paradise (Swift & Co 1933, 53). New and extremely effective insecticides and herbicides, DDT and 2,4-D, were developed in the 1940s (Robbins 2003, 52-53), and were quickly capitalized; lawn-care companies aggressively marketed these new chemicals in combined fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide concoctions (Jenkins 1994, 107). The trade names of pesticides gave “no hint to their nature,”hiding their poisonous ingredients and possible deleterious ecological effects behind brands advertised as food for healthy lawns (Carson 1962, 80).
The negative health and ecological effects of pesticides and fertilizers are daunting. Pesticides are by definition toxic chemical agents, and may be classified as biocides (Zacharia 2011, 130). Their deleterious effect is most notable in birds and aquatic life; an estimated 72 million birds are poisoned each year by pesticides (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services, 2002), and toxic contaminants “bioaccumulate and biomagnify through the aquatic food chain”(Sethajintanin, et al. 2004, 114). Meanwhile, fertilizer runoff is directly responsible for explosive algae growth in water systems, or eutrophication (Robbins 2003, 64). The Willamette River in Portland has suffered from pesticide, fertilizer, and industrial runoff greatly; decades of industrial activity (including multiple waterfront pesticide plants) and dumping of raw sewage and runoff have led to the creation of a superfund site stretching ten miles along its banks (Sethajintanin, et al. 2004, 114-16). Indeed, the Willamette receives the highest amount of runoff per square mile of any major river in the United States (Sethajintanin, et al. 2004, 114). For humans, chronic pesticide exposure is associated with a dizzying array of cancers and neurological disorders ranging from “nonspecific symptoms, including headache, dizziness, fatigue, weakness, nausea, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, insomnia, confusion, and difficulty concentrating”to depression, increased incidence of Parkinson’s disease, and deficits in cognitive function (Alavanja, et al. 2004, 176-79). Though the agricultural sector is the largest user of conventional pesticides, roughly 71 million pounds of pesticide—9% of the total U.S. pesticide market—are purchased for lawns and gardens annually (Grube, et al. 2011, 12). Chemical lawn inputs are also applied at a significantly denser rate than agricultural pesticides (Robbins and Sharp 2003, 432). When viewed against this abundance of negative ramifications of lawn-care chemicals, one wonders why this lawn treatment persists. A immediate theory, based on an individualist viewpoint, might consider that people are simply uneducated about the risks of pesticides. However, use of a lawn-care company or fertilizer is highly correlated with education and a belief that lawn-care services and practices have a significant negative effect on water quality (Robbins and Sharp 2003, 434). It seems that mere aesthetic values and a desire to conform are sufficient to subdue the anxieties of millions of Americans about the environmental impacts of lawn care.