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Paul Robbins on the American Lawn, Biobanks, and John Muir
50 Plays14 days ago
Paul Robbins is America’s foremost authority on the lawn. He is the author of Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. He is the dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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We discuss:
- Is Paul the Cary Elwes of academia?
- Julie Guthman’s work on pathogens, chemicals, and strawberries.
- What is a “lawn person?”
- Is the American lawn care industry taking advantage of us (and taking our money) because of our lawn guilt?
- Are suburban American lawns… communal?
- Penn Jillette (of “Penn and Teller”) and his show “Bullshit!” Here’s the episode about the lawn.
- Should environmentalists and libertarians unite to regain control over their lawns?
- Should “weed” be the next problematic word that becomes outmoded and ostracized (such as “retarded”) from the English language?
- “A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Are we on the verge of reinventing the American lawn? Or will it be more of the same?
- Redddot Phase 1
- What would it take to build a biobank for all living animals?
- Paul’s article on biobanks and indigenous data sovereignty.
- Is the American chestnut tree resurrection… dead?
- Paul’s co-written essay on John Muir’s Tormented Landscape.
- Is our urge to conserve nature tied to North Americans’ complicity in removing Native Americans?
- I ask Paul, should I think of myself as a “settler?”
- I talk about rolling my eyes at land acknowledgements and Paul makes the case for them.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Out of the Wild' and Guest Paul Robbins
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:19
Speaker
Paul Robbins is America's foremost authority on the lawn. He is the author of Lawn People, How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.
00:00:30
Speaker
He is the dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Paul, hello. Hello. Thanks for having me.
00:00:41
Speaker
ah It's my pleasure. and
Impact of 'Lawn People' and Cultural Reflections
00:00:42
Speaker
We talked a little bit over email, Paul, and you called yourself, and I don't know how to say this guy's name, Carrie Elwes of Academia. um Someone who has, and and this is the referencing someone who has a large body of work, but is kind of remembered for one thing. In the case of Carrie Elwes, it's the Princess Bride.
00:01:03
Speaker
So what's it like being the guy who's published volumes of papers, done all sorts of research on all sorts of things, but is mostly just seen as the lawn guy. It's a huge honor to be remembered for doing anything in your life.
00:01:19
Speaker
So I'm proud of that work. People read it and they get in touch with me and say things like, thank you. And umm now i'm talking to my neighbor. It's a rare, it's pretty rare when an academic can like do geeky academic work and then have people contact them and say, this was important or it helped me in some way.
00:01:39
Speaker
And to have that go on for many years, in fact, to accelerate now more than when it first came out is a blessing. So 100%, the reason I brought up Cary Elway is because I met him not long after he had made The Princess Bride. I was an extra on the set of Disney's The Jungle Book in India.
00:01:56
Speaker
Okay, wow. And I met him and he did not seem happy with The Princess Bride. It was like he felt stuck. And I think that's sort of what... And then you know he went on and had this wonderful career and now he looks back on it and says he's super proud and it was great working with Rob Reiner. and I think that's sort of how I feel is like, I don't think I fully appreciated that that book, in particular, the articles that are associated with it, which focus on the lawn, would have such a legacy. It was sort of a hobby for me on the side of doing work about biodiversity and forests and stuff like that.
00:02:27
Speaker
So I'm honored. You asked me on here. You would never have done that if I hadn't written this book. I guess I should just say thank you to a younger version of myself. you And I should note that I don't remember Kerry Elwes from The Princess Bride. I remember him from, I think he had a role in Glory.
00:02:47
Speaker
i remember him from Robin Hood, Men in Tights. He would appreciate that. Yeah, and I think that says something about his legacy, and and and maybe ah you'll be remembered for the the breadth of your um contributions as well. um Not dead
Ken's Interest and Lawn Politics
00:03:03
Speaker
yet.
00:03:03
Speaker
i'm I'm interested in lawns because, as you know, when this publish when this podcast publishes my New York Times article about lawns, should publish maybe soon after or soon before. And so I've been working for a couple of months just thinking about lawns all the time. You spent probably a couple of years, more than a couple of years thinking about I'm just wondering, what was it about lawns that made you devote such a ah chunk of your career to it?
00:03:32
Speaker
All right. So there's like, it's a great question. i You know, the quick answer is I have no idea what happened. It just kind of happened. But in retrospect, I suppose two things are true about, and i I'm really glad to see people thinking about loans.
00:03:44
Speaker
They're really important and useful to think with. I think ah you sent me a copy of your draft. ah I thought was great. So I think it's great. And I think it's an important topic. So that should be reason enough.
00:03:55
Speaker
The truth is, one is a low, kind of low-minded reason. The other is a high-minded reason. The low-minded reason is i study environmental politics. I think a lot about how the structures of the economy tie our hands and make it harder for us to make good choices.
00:04:11
Speaker
That's true about farmers in India. You know, we all want them to have organic farms and grow all the happy things that we want. And there are lots of structural reasons they can't do that, right? They are in a larger system that that really constricts their choices.
00:04:25
Speaker
And so from a theoretical point of view, from a like a, I'm an academic and this is stuff that's interesting kind of way the lawn like will end itself naturally that if you say like, Well, peasants are peasants in India, peasants, whatever, smallholders, producers.
00:04:40
Speaker
They can't possibly be like me and the rest of Joe Sixpack living in Columbus, Ohio at the time. um Well, this is the high-minded reason. So the high-minded reason is that it gives us a chance to think about how the world works, right? that And that that very much is in touch with the other things that I think about in my work.
00:04:58
Speaker
The low-minded reason, so that's a high-minded reason, like theories. The long-minded reason is I was living in
Personal Anecdotes and Societal Pressures
00:05:03
Speaker
Columbus, Ohio. I was the first time ever an owner of a home. And there was a neighbor who started complaining about my creeping Charlie. And he was he was mean about it and dedicated. And I was like, wow, what set him on? I take these things very personally.
00:05:18
Speaker
Like, oh, I've upset the community. I feel really crappy. And then I put two and two together and I realized that there's a structure to my crappy feeling. That my feelings are structured. by, as are his.
00:05:30
Speaker
We are not villains to one another, although that's how it seems when we're yelling over the fence. We're part of a ah greater machine. And then we did the ah work on figuring out how much lawn there was just by looking at air photos.
00:05:43
Speaker
It's a lot. And that that that was really visceral. That was like an embodied experience to an argument over a fence. So I guess the answer is it's a big theoretical, interesting problem to think with. And it's like part of all our daily lives and it frustrates us. And it's an emotional space we live in.
00:06:00
Speaker
So it turned out to be like a good combination, I guess. Yeah, and I read a ton of articles about the lawns. I went through a couple books about lawns. I tried to do as much research as I could. And yours was was particularly wonderful um because it's not just a history of the American lawn, though it is as well.
00:06:20
Speaker
It's not just a list of the ah chemicals we apply to lawns, though it is that as well. um And it's not just a list of all the problems the American law creates. It's something much broader than that. It's a book that shows you how a custom, any custom, gets passed down and perpetuated, whether by historic precedent, top-down influences, social reinforcement. The law, it's almost like a case study.
00:06:48
Speaker
for just how we get stuck with these less than ideal things that are extremely hard to change. Is that kind of how you see it? That's it. It was supposed to be the first of a trilogy. I was going to find two more objects that behave this way. And there's so many of That's exactly right. Like if the lawn, then like what else?
00:07:06
Speaker
Oh, everything else. Yeah. And so so it's not, what's interesting about the lawn isn't how extraordinary it is. It's like how typical it is of like all of our problems, all of our environmental challenges.
00:07:18
Speaker
Especially the lawn because, and this was the big finding from the survey, maybe we would get to this later, when we did the national survey, I was so amazed at how many people were so unhappy to take care of their lawns.
00:07:29
Speaker
They just didn't want to do it. they didn't They felt they'd inherited it. They felt obligated. There's lots of reasons they did it, but they felt bad about Now, isn't that our biggest sustainability conundrum? It isn't that people hate the environment. It's not like you have to convince people to love the environment. it I think people who think that way are really off base.
00:07:47
Speaker
Part of my environmental community that thinks the problem is that people don't care. They care. It's that the conditions under which they are allowed to care and think about caring are much more structured than we'd like to think because we're like free agents and we get to Jews and this is America.
00:08:03
Speaker
and It's amazing how structured they are. So the lawn definitely is that. And it's not alone. Like it's like everything else in our behavior and in the flow of plastics through our households and through our bodies.
00:08:18
Speaker
They're structured by the same things. One of my favorite other writers, um people I know, Julie Guthman. ah She's at Santa Cruz. I think she just retired. She's done a bunch of books on like ah agriculture and straw but good book on strawberries and a book about organics and how organics actually are really hard to do because they turn out to be a big industry and they're controlled by very narrow interests and they're not such a happy um outcome after all because of the structures that make even good things like taste bad and in the ethical sense.
00:08:53
Speaker
So yeah, so like that's it. I i think the idea was that the lawn was going to be the first of several objects that
Lawn People Concept and Environmental Implications
00:09:00
Speaker
represent this conundrum. And I'm sure there's a a a few listeners kind of scratching their heads saying, oh I have a lawn. i I put this here, you know, this is kind of normal.
00:09:12
Speaker
They're not, they're, maybe they're not as scrutinizing as, as you and I are. In one of your paragraphs, you talk about all the things that make lawns um required the emergence of a class of suburban developers and real estate specialists who lobbied municipalities for services, directed the extension of transportation and drew the new spacious property lines for construction.
00:09:37
Speaker
the central incentive of these entrepreneurs, needless to say, was to convert as much land as possible from agriculture to home lot. So what you're talking about is, this is something we didn't really choose.
00:09:51
Speaker
It's something we inherited. I mean, could we could go back to 1600s, Britain and France, where the kind of the idea came from. You could point to the the gas mower, you could point to mass produced fertilizers and pesticides and just these houses that we we buy and we don't really get to choose what kind of lawn it comes with. So it's it's not, and and this is what you call a lawn person or a turf grass subject.
00:10:22
Speaker
um Would you like to ah jump in on that? Right. Well, I think I think my point about lawn people isn't to vilify us because I'm a lawn person, too. Not anymore. I don't have a lawn now. I live in Madison and I have this very poorly tended forest all around me. But I was certainly a lawn person for a long time. Don't get to choose whether or not they have a lawn.
00:10:41
Speaker
They inherit it. So the lawn comes first. You come after. And after that, unless you pull it up, and there's lots of reasons that it's that's hard to do that are inherent to the biophysical realities of ah perennial turf grass, but also to like housing restrictions from HOA, homeowners associations and municipal law.
00:11:01
Speaker
If you don't pull it out, then you are its servant. You must mow it. It thrives under mowing. That has an evolutionary advantage of a perennial turf grass. It needs to be fed so it grows more, so you cut it.
00:11:15
Speaker
All this energy you put into it is required of you, actually. That the lawn requires of you what you must do, along with your neighbors and the social conditions the lawn broadly defined.
00:11:26
Speaker
That makes you a subject of the lawn, not the other way around. And that's what I meant, was to invert the notion People make landscapes, which we do, like we make houses, we make lawns, we make things, but the landscapes also make people. And it's a pretty straightforward notion. Most geographers, ah academic geographers would not find that claim crazy or controversial. It's kind of commonsensical.
00:11:49
Speaker
But like when you think about it, like, wow, I didn't choose any of this. Like this was all somebody platted this property. I bought it because I like the house. And now I've got I'm stuck with this object, this living object that I must feed and I must mow. And I and and people just do it every Saturday morning without thinking.
00:12:09
Speaker
For some people, it gives them great joy. i do want to say this, like there's a meditation to mowing. I get that like some people. But a vast that's all true. And I i want to honor your listeners who love their lawn.
00:12:20
Speaker
I love that you love your lawn. All I can tell you is we did a national survey and most people didn't. but see You want your lawn? It's great. A lot of people said, well, I don't want it. i feel like I'm a servant of it instead of its master.
00:12:34
Speaker
Gotcha. And I'm wondering what your kind of emotional relationship um with lawns are. Let me just tell you mine briefly. um so I have a five-year-old daughter. um ah remember once we live in Scotland where lawns aren't so much a thing.
00:12:50
Speaker
ah Once we went home back to Western New York and um my mom took my ah daughter, her granddaughter on a little walk. And they came back and my mom was almost shaking and and crying. And she's like, I think I did something terrible to your daughter because she went, my daughter went and picked a dandelion and there was a sign that had had just been sprayed.
00:13:13
Speaker
And ah I think my mother was overreacting a little bit. She's fine. No severe neurological damage. But as as I was reading your book, I just got so upset and irritated reading about just how much chemicals we use. And I think about the poor lives of the chemical appliers and the pets and the babies um who have these chemicals on their paws and their hands.
00:13:39
Speaker
So the lawn to me is something that evokes a very strong emotion. It's irritation, it's disgust, it's a sense of repulsion um and just the sheer senselessness really bothers me because like I'm in Germany right now. um And like, there's so many like apple trees and palm trees and people's not really lawns, just kind of in front of their house. There's beautiful bushes and flowers. It's just like, why, why are we doing this? It makes no sense. This is just like, just, just completely taking away habitat from the animals and bugs that would enchant our lives. So anyways, that's my little aside.
00:14:19
Speaker
I'm wondering what your own kind of emotional relationship with the lawn is. i I'm going to disappoint you by saying I don't and don't really have a strong emotional aversion to them.
00:14:30
Speaker
I see lots of advantages to them. I've got a nine-year-old. We don't have a lawn. He has to go to the park to like have a kind of mat of grass. ah But there's lots of that. We have lots of parks. There's lots of public spaces that are available to him for turf grass.
00:14:43
Speaker
There's his school with huge, beautifully kept turf grass spaces for playing on and enjoying yourself. I think there are real advantages to these open park-like places. um And many landscape architects in the past have noted their advantages for people to picnic and enjoy themselves and socialize in public spaces. But the lawn itself, I define right now simply as the turf grass, but as this private place that requires that we maintain it in a particular way, which is where all the contradictions come in.
00:15:12
Speaker
The chemical inputs, the things, you know, which are really make people feel terrible. So less about how I feel. I will tell you that, again, when we surveyed Americans across the class spectrum and across the regions from the South to the West, you were more likely to say that chemicals were bad for children and other living things if you used those chemicals than if you didn't use those chemicals.
00:15:40
Speaker
which means that people do these things because they have to, but they feel bad. There is an emotional issue here that I think you've identified that there's ah that comes with an aversion or at least a contradictory sense of melancholy that you're participating in something destructive, even though you feel like you have to.
00:15:57
Speaker
Me, I don't respond quite as viscerally to lawns, one way or the other, surprisingly. Um, I'm just too fascinated by them.
00:16:08
Speaker
But i I do feel a sense of indignancy. Is that a word? I do get pissed that people are profiting off of other people's anxiety, off of their sense of social obligation, off of a felt need to support their community.
00:16:30
Speaker
All these things are captured when we talk to people about why they maintain their lawns and somebody is selling them chemicals that are not bad, are not good for children and fertilizer that is ah basically a raw petroleum, processed petroleum product that comes out of the global carbon economy.
00:16:50
Speaker
i that That gets pissed. that gets me pissed Like if you want where my frustration comes from, it's the way people's emotional sense of obligation, community, love for nature even is exploited in the most obscene way by
Private Property vs. Communal Expectations in Lawn Care
00:17:06
Speaker
those that are essentially maintaining a surplus at the expense of your guilt.
00:17:14
Speaker
That your emotional space has basically been carried off to market. That pisses me off. Yes. So I do have an emotional investment in this. Does the lawn itself get my back up? I don't know. you know mean I grew up with them. I mowed them as a kid.
00:17:29
Speaker
They're too much a part of my... I'm a lawn person, I guess. I'm happy not to have one, though. I didn't have one when I moved to Tucson. We had rocks and giant sguaro. And now I live in Madison. i I'm in this forest, and I do not miss the lawn. I'll tell you that.
00:17:43
Speaker
So if that tells me anything about the emotions, I'm happy to have my little woods around. And you mentioned community earlier and and guilt. And we often we feel we feel this guilt because of our neighbors and how we're perceived and we have we have to kind of live up to this ideal of ah of a perfect emerald green carpet.
00:18:03
Speaker
And let me um read something that that you wrote. American lawns are an outward unconscious expression of American collective psyche.
00:18:14
Speaker
The unbroken, unfenced openness of the front yard parkland connecting household to house load with no borders is ultimately a form of common property, the maintenance of which is part of a normative institution of community care.
00:18:29
Speaker
participation in maintenance is a practice of civic good. Disregard for lawn care is, by implication, a form of free riding, civic neglect, and moral weakness. And I think this is all true.
00:18:43
Speaker
um And contigu in contiguous lawns are a neighborly thing. But the interesting thing about all this is that they're actually not all that neighborly, I find there's nothing really communal about them. You can't wander onto someone's lawn unless, you know, there is your immediate neighbor and your good friends.
00:19:01
Speaker
You probably feel ah very uncomfortable if your dog takes a shit on someone else's lawn, even if you have one of those little baggies. You can't play ball sports on other people's. you can't You can't walk through someone's lawn to get to a nice forest or a stream. So it's surprising that it has this kind of communal history to me, but there's nothing communal in the present about it.
00:19:24
Speaker
Right. I love that. I see it for me. That's like, yes, yes. First of all, yes. Well put. Second of all, That is a lovely contradiction. That's the kind of thing that a political ecologist loves.
00:19:36
Speaker
Here we've got the greatest primacy of private property you could possibly imagine, American home ownership. The home is the castle of the owner. You can do whatever you want.
00:19:47
Speaker
Don't get on my lawn. Stay off my property, you kids. I'm sitting on the porch with a gun. I mean, the the American imaginary of its own fortress mentality, the home. And yet,
00:19:59
Speaker
Like if somebody mows, so I can't tell you the dozens and dozens of people who told us this story, the neighbor raced out and made sure they mowed the next day to make sure that, right, the aesthetic matched.
00:20:10
Speaker
Like you have to be, that carpet has to be maintained. That's a desired outcome is to look like your neighbors. How, how you reconcile one with the other is like, I think when you unlock that, you've unlocked something about the bittersweet nature of the American experience.
00:20:28
Speaker
So, I think there's something hidden under there that's quite profound and quite disturbing, that that it is a collective. It's the only collective. It is one of the great collectives that's left.
00:20:39
Speaker
And it is, of course, absolutely encased in the property lines of and primacy of of the private realm. So, like, you've named it, but that doesn't solve it.
00:20:50
Speaker
um It is still a collectivity that cannot be enjoyed collectively, except through property values and through the aesthetic. Aesthetic collectivity with property exclusivity.
00:21:04
Speaker
like That's how Americans solve their problems, I guess. and And one of the other big paradoxes is that you know we Americans, we take pride in our our freedom and our liberty and our nonconformity and our rugged individualism.
00:21:21
Speaker
But the truth is, we're just were're terrified of a dandelion and we're terrified of an awkward conversation. with our neighbor. And maybe that's not completely fair because you have other substantial ah barriers, namely um home ownership associations, which, you know, really will get in the way of kind of wildlife friendly gardening. But again, we're land of the free, but we can't grow a posy.
00:21:48
Speaker
So one of the interesting things about this, i mean, I come from, so your listeners understand, I i guess I come from a fairly traditional left economic position, which is, ah believe in things like environmental regulation. And I think we can oversee the pesticide industry with some standards that are promulgated from state and federal authorities.
00:22:11
Speaker
This is an increasingly controversial position to take, but growing up, it was sort of normal. I mean, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act. um that You know, this sort of a normal notion of regulation. And so when I write something like this, you would think it would come from this left position.
00:22:27
Speaker
So coming to your point, One of the groups of people that has been most enamored with the argument, right, are Cato Institute style freedom lovers.
00:22:38
Speaker
Like libertarians? Libertarians. That's right. So sorry, the Cato Institute is a ah ah very reputable research institute dedicated to private property freedom. you know theyre they're They're not they're not the the way I described my kind of traditional regulatory way of seeing things.
00:22:56
Speaker
And I was asked, actually, how much how how much attention has this work received? Penn and Teller had a TV show called Bullshit. And they put the book on there.
00:23:08
Speaker
And it's because Penn Jillette bless his heart, is a real dyed-in-the-wool libertarian. Like, leave me the hell alone. That is, yeah he was a prominent, for those of you who don't know him, he was ah a prominent celebrity magician, actually, and a debunker of things and and ah and funny.
00:23:25
Speaker
But he was, you know, like Ayn Randian in his freedom agenda, which is not like mine at all. And yet there's a place where that bend back around and it touched him because I think that's because itt it that identifies what you've named.
00:23:40
Speaker
that in a culture that is ostensibly about total freedom, we are manacled quite heavily by not only the social stigmas, but the regulatory and quite frankly, the aesthetics marketed back to us by for profit organizations so that we are not as free as we think we are.
00:24:00
Speaker
And this reality does not land well on Penn Jillette, I guess, or a lot of other libertarians. like To hell with that. It's my property. I can do whatever i whatever the hell I want, but you really can't, can you? You really can't.
00:24:12
Speaker
And that's I think that that's interesting. That's again another contradiction. As you pointed out, that's another contradiction. It's a contradiction of the notion of American freedom ah versus its sort of collective quiet collective agreement in sociability.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah. And that's why the the lawn is such a fascinating subject because there are just these incredible contradictions and paradoxes. We've already named the weird communal, but not really communal nature of lawns. We're talking about um American freedom and you can't, you know, do whatever you want in your lawn.
00:24:50
Speaker
But also like, I don't know how this fits in, but this fact is just kind of should be staring us all in the face. There's actually nothing wrong with a weed.
00:25:00
Speaker
And we're just like, ah Apart from a few like truly like toxic weeds or invasive, like a kudzu, like, yeah, let's get let's get rid of the kudzu. But there's actually nothing ugly or hazardous or or wrong with with most weeds. And I feel like maybe the average American just hasn't quite stared that fact in the face yet.
00:25:24
Speaker
Not at all. Yeah, exactly. So we, I mean, dandelions were brought over on the Mayflower as one Scott's had wisely pointed out that they were important, important with the grasses that came over the dandelions, not from North America, any more than from Kentucky bluegrasses. They're all Euro Asian domesticates or, or wild ah mixed in with domesticates.
00:25:43
Speaker
um So these weeds, there's nothing wrong with them. They don't hurt anybody. Dandelions don't do you any harm. Creeping Charlie is an interesting case. I actually never thought of it as bad until my neighbor got angry about it. It has a kind of minty smell.
00:25:57
Speaker
um ah So no, like weeds are simply plants out of place. And what is in place and out of place is an entirely social determination. It has nothing to do with anything about ecosystems or nature, right? So what is a weed or not? There's no natural category for weed.
00:26:12
Speaker
Weed is a cultural and social category. So that's true of of almost all these Weeds are non-natural things. They're perfectly natural.
00:26:22
Speaker
They want to grow there. they Biodiversity is a much more, think of biodiversity as a hard thing to get. We have to protect forests for biodiversity. We need to put up fences. We have to restrict roads. That's all true.
00:26:33
Speaker
But actually, if you just let your lawn go, you're immediately going to get biodiversity. ah That's good. And then maybe pollinators and then all kinds of positive things. It takes a lot of work to maintain a monoculture, a huge amount.
00:26:46
Speaker
I feel like it's the word... Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I mean, the amount i like all this labor to produce something that we don't actually claim that we want. We all want biodiversity, right? So why are we extinguishing it?
00:26:58
Speaker
And these aesthetics then, i think a psychoanalytic reading, if you'll indulge me, would say that once you've established the aesthetic of purity and associated it with the lawn, then the weeds become very Icky to us, right? That we get an affective. It's not natural. We weren't born with that. It's socialized into us, right?
00:27:16
Speaker
But once it's socialized as icky, you'll see it and you'll get a bad feeling. And that will get you out with your spray gun quickly. And the industry loves that. The industry wants you to emotionally internalize the aesthetic and the expulsion of that which is different from the clean blanket of the lawn. That's good for somebody.
00:27:39
Speaker
And that's One last point I would make, always ask the question, who is this good for? That's a good question i always ask about everything. The lawn care industry. Who is this good for? and in this case, you know the industry benefits from your having this aesthetic, which is by no means born to you, but rather grafted into you as a homeowner.
00:27:59
Speaker
You know how some terms they become outmoded and offensive you know from for from one generation to the next, you know like the word like retard, you know that and we don't use that anymore, it's offensive.
00:28:12
Speaker
I feel like weed needs to go through that process as well. I feel like weed, not as in the marijuana, but weed
Future of American Lawn Culture
00:28:20
Speaker
as in you know a flowering plant,
00:28:23
Speaker
needs to need to get rid of that word and and reinvent it with something else because we we just um um negative there's only a negative associations with that word. No question. And it goes way back. I mean, um I think I have a quote in the book.
00:28:38
Speaker
it Maybe it's Emerson. One of the transcendentalists has a has a line of poetry about weeds are merely plants that we haven't discovered their value. their What's wonderful about them?
00:28:50
Speaker
um That's from you know probably the eighteen forty s or 1850s. ah So clearly people have been working on this problem for a while. And not much has changed. And that's, yeah. And that's my next question is, you know, I think you wrote your book in around 2006 or so. And, um you know, I live in the UK now, but I come to the US a couple times a year in my 42 years.
00:29:16
Speaker
I haven't really seen that much change in the direction I'd like things to change. What what is your sense? What is the state of the American law? And do you, Do you think we're scrutinizing it more? Are we doing different things or is it just going to be a lot more the same for a long, long time?
00:29:32
Speaker
ah So two things. One, I think people are raising questions about it. Otherwise I wouldn't keep getting calls every spring to talk to Florida newspapers where there's a lawsuit between two homeowners.
00:29:43
Speaker
Um, Like the this is the legacy of my book is that Florida newspapers call me. ah walk Okay. Florida man does something. if They call the law. That's your next book. Florida man. Yeah. florida man So, so obviously something is churning underneath the surface of these contradictions. And I think that that trends towards change.
00:30:05
Speaker
If you look around us here in Madison, which of course is a bubble filled with groovy lefties and all the rest of that to some degree, but the degree to which people are interested in ah from all ends of the political spectrum in restoring native ecologies and their diversities, which requires some effort because you've got to set fire to things and you need to reintroduce certain kinds of indigenous seeds and its It takes work. it's a so You can let your lawn grow and you won't get a prairie. There's a real interest around here in restoration, and trying to bring back ecosystem function.
00:30:39
Speaker
People don't even use those words. They just want the land back in some other way. there's, I think, a real enthusiasm for that around the country. And these things are partly about the sustainability imagination and partly about aesthetics and partly about, but I think there's a shift. So that isn't going to be a land rush shift.
00:30:57
Speaker
And that's a shift in people's preferences. But it is my strongest opinion, and I hope the book demonstrates this, that what people think is not usually much of a predictor of anything, of their behavior or of how the world works.
00:31:11
Speaker
I mean, if If the environmental movement is predicated on the notion that if we could just change everybody's minds about stuff, if to the degree that the environmental movement is predicated on that, it's a doomed movement.
00:31:24
Speaker
Because one, what people think and what they do are not easily aligned. And two, changing people's minds, they can change it back. All kinds of things change. I do think we're getting a trend, but I do think you have to look. If you want change, you got to look for the structural forces that cause change.
00:31:40
Speaker
What is the structural force that gave rise to the lawn? Lots of cheap subsidized inputs, right? The chemicals, however expensive they are, actually pretty cheap for a homeowner.
00:31:52
Speaker
ah The water that comes to them for the most part is undervalued outrageously, especially where it is scarce in the West. um As long as the structural conditions continue to make the inputs cheap, there's very little impetus for change.
00:32:07
Speaker
But if you notice, there is a structural change in the availability of water everywhere west of the 100th meridian in the United States. Water is much scarcer than it was when I was growing up. And when I was growing up in Colorado in the 70s, we had watering restrictions on our lawns.
00:32:23
Speaker
Once every three days, there's a symbol-coded calendar, which would hang up in my house in the late 70s, maybe 1980. um Even then, water was scarce, right? Now, much scarcer.
00:32:36
Speaker
Development has continued to pace. Most the Ogallala Aquifer throughout ah the center to that central part of the West is depleted. There's just not the water for this stuff anymore. And if that's true, then you're going to see changes in behavior.
00:32:50
Speaker
when when like it gets expensive and it gets difficult you see change in behavior so when that drought hit in california a few years back this must have been seven years ago uh five years ago there was a pretty sizable uh drought what you saw is people calling in on their neighbors complaining that they were watering interesting right okay so it's the opposite they exactly they were shaming them for the reverse behavior because it was ah clearly ridiculous waste of a scarce resource.
00:33:20
Speaker
And it angered them, especially if wealthy people were doing it. you know Some celebrity out in California watering their lawn and I don't get to. i mean, damn it, call them the police. So that's interesting.
00:33:32
Speaker
So I would say that look for the structural forces that set the conditions in which people can make choices and what they think and care about will articulate itself. But in a world where like the major structural forces don't change, nothing nothing's going to change.
00:33:46
Speaker
So that's my answer is things are changing. People's aesthetics are changing, their vision, their desire to see pollinators, all kinds of good things are happening in the United States, believe it or not. around these things.
00:33:58
Speaker
Like from the ground up, there's a desire for more rich, vibrant, and beautiful landscapes filled with natives and ah indigenous plant life.
00:34:09
Speaker
That's not fake. That's real. I just don't think it has the kind of momentum as running out of water does. yeah That's kind of like, bang. And if both of those are happening, then I think you can see change. Okay, that's a much more hopeful and optimistic answer than I was expecting. So yeah that's a full god that's a good thing. Yeah.
Beyond Lawns: Other Projects by Paul Robbins
00:34:27
Speaker
um Well, you're not a one trick pony, Paul. You've you've done a lot of stuff. So let's let's move on to some other stuff um that we talked about over over email. You sent me this one project called ah Red Dot Phase One about the preservation of genetic material. And this is interesting to me because I'm always interested in things like de-extinction and stuff like that.
00:34:50
Speaker
And this one is taking a look at Red Fox's and pine martins. And as I understand it, these populations are not in trouble at the moment. And as I understand you're going to collect some genetic data because either these animals could be vulnerable someday, or is this just to kind of learn about the process that you can so that you can aim your focus on truly vulnerable species?
00:35:14
Speaker
The pine martin is vulnerable population in Wisconsin, a super interesting one, and it's cute as a button and people love it. mean, if there's anything I've learned, it's... try to conserve charismatic things and people will care.
00:35:25
Speaker
So we are interested in those species, but I think the real test for it is, chen what would it take to build a biobank of tissues of all the wildlife and possibly of the supporting ecosystem contributions of plants and other life forms?
00:35:46
Speaker
of the entirety of the Great Lakes region, given that climate change is catastrophically going to move to two degrees without question. And then most of the habitat throughout the region has migrated north already, right?
00:35:59
Speaker
So we're already talking around the world about assisted migration, which is picking species up and moving them. And if that's true, then we should also be talking about biobanking the diversity of a species before it's gone.
00:36:12
Speaker
The point here isn't to do it before it gets extinct, but rather to do it before it's a genetic bottleneck. So the example that is usually used is the black-footed ferret. So this is a species that was, whose numbers dwindled, it's critically endangered Colorado species.
00:36:27
Speaker
And ah the species is untroubled, both because it doesn't have habitat, but even if you restored all the habitat, you got all of the landscape back and you protected these animals, they'd probably die out because the bottleneck in their genetic material is much too narrow.
00:36:42
Speaker
which is to say the ones who remain in the wild and in captivity all come from a pretty similar gene pool. And most of the other members of the species that had other gene pools died because of habitat loss and because of people.
00:36:59
Speaker
And so there's limits to what you can do as a conservationist to bring them back unless somebody was smart enough or crazy enough to have put that critter from this other line on ice in the 1990s. And you know what?
00:37:13
Speaker
Somebody did. So the black footed ferret experiment, ah which is out of um some of my colleagues on the West Coast, they were able to clone back from banked material, genetic living
00:37:28
Speaker
ferrets from a genetic line that had been deceased that in theory down the line, they haven't done this yet, could be reintroduced to actually build a more robust gene pool to bring the species back from the bri the brint the brink of extinction.
00:37:40
Speaker
So to my point about that is before anything goes disastrously wrong, we need to build banks that actually have that to give us that choice. Somebody was smart enough to do that. We need to be smart enough to do that across the board.
00:37:54
Speaker
that's the first thing that this project is about is like, let's face it, change is happening. Let's protect what we can so that we can, so we'll have it later. So let's pause there just so I can understand that. So it's kind of an a Noah's arc of genetic material, even though some of these animals still might be existing, they don't need to be completely extinct for you to
Conservation and Genetic Material Collection
00:38:15
Speaker
collect. You just want to,
00:38:16
Speaker
collect as much genetic ah specimens as possible to help with some future restoration. That's right. That you want your bank is to have diversity available in the future. We do this for seeds all the time already, right? The Svalbard seed bank has all these seeds of all these domesticated varieties of potatoes and everything.
00:38:36
Speaker
And it's in the ice in in this remote island in the Arctic. um So this isn't a crazy idea. the idea that you would do it for wildlife and maybe you don't collect as much genetic material as possible. What you do is you get smart about what is the diversity of genetic material within population of this species of concern?
00:38:54
Speaker
How many samples do you need to reach across that so that if you needed it later, that doesn't mean a million specimens. You may be able to do it with 1500, right? If you understand the genetic diversity and ah you have a sampling strategy.
00:39:07
Speaker
So this is puzzle number one. Can you build a bank and can you collect materials in a way that are non-invasive, inoffensive to people, to say nothing of the species so can you do it from hair can you do it from skin can you do it off of a skin punch of a fish can you can you punch their tail do you have to kill it because in the old days not more than 40 years ago you'd actually need reproductive organs you need eggs and stuff now you don't need that right now you just need the genes right that's a huge step forward in not
00:39:40
Speaker
non-invasive ways of of collecting these data. My colleague, Francisco Pellegri, the chair of the genetics department here at UW Madison goes down with his students to Costa Rica every year and they collect, they're looking for endangered cats and their are genes.
00:39:57
Speaker
And you know where they are looking for the genes, stick with me. Where are they finding the genes?
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:40:03
Speaker
Hey folks, there's still another 25 minutes or so left in the podcast. If you want access to it, please become a paid subscriber. Go to my Substack page. There you have access to all of my podcasts, all of my essays and whatnot. This conversation with Paul took an interesting turn. We started to talk about his work on um John Muir and kind of how he ignored Native Americans and the exclusion of them from the national parks he championed.
00:40:33
Speaker
And it just created an interesting conversation. Should i consider myself a settler? We talk about that. I share some of my preliminary kind of unformed thoughts about the land acknowledgement.
00:40:49
Speaker
And Paul and I, we kind of talked that through. So that went in an interesting direction. So yeah, go ahead and become a paid subscriber. Otherwise, you next time.
00:41:13
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis. Original music by Duncan Barrett.