I am thrilled that someone finally shed light on this plague on humanity! If anything returns us to the primitive it will be plastic lawns. Bravo!

“Can you imagine any child delighting in the artificial crunch of plastic under their feet over the sensory stimulation of real, natural grass…….?”
I can’t even imagine children in my neighbourhood going outside. There are children around somewhere but I never see them. Things are far too dangerous in the outside world – nasty old people,school bullies, the rays from the sun, exercise, the impurities in the air (Dyson toys welcomed in my area, especially if it’s on the NHS – as one poster points out), dirt from the ground, insects which bite, viruses which can give you a runny nose. It is just not safe for children to venture outside.
But they could have artificial grass in their bedrooms, as well as bonsai trees. And the grass doesn’t even have to be green.

Great article, very well articulating another user friendly fad, which ultimately damages the environment while pertaining to mimic it.

The article correctly says that plastic grass is ugly, therefore pointless. But the article does not go into the huge pollution problems from plastic as it breaks apart and moves into waterways. It is not toxic like some chemicals, but it still is causing serious problems for creatures like fish.

the eco freaks are already trying banning fur and other natural fibres! They don’t realise most polyester and artificial materials are by products of oil!!! And recycled polyester cannot never degrade! Just like the net zero terrorists we are warned and berated for using natural energy. Renewables are renewable, nor sustainable.

Is it just me or are the caliber of comments on Unherd degenerating?

Thank you James. I was toying with the idea of replacing my lawn and you convinced me otherwise. Living in Lisbon I’m sure the temperature would easily surpass the 60C mark. At the moment we are experiencing heavy rainfall and problems draining the water (I always abjected to the idea of having a swimming pool but mother nature had a different idea). I will keep my lawn, I have to come up with a solution for watering the damn thing during spring and summer.

Well, despite the simplicity (or merely simplistic?) of this article, the subject is complicated. From a 2010 article published by Columbia University’s Climate School:
“Today, American lawns occupy some 30-40 million acres of land. Lawnmowers to maintain them account for some 5 percent of the nation’s air pollution – probably more in urban areas. Each year more than 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled during the refilling of lawn and garden equipment—more than the oil that the Exxon Valdez spilled.
Homeowners spend billions of dollars and typically use 10 times the amount of pesticide and fertilizers per acre on their lawns as farmers do on crops; the majority of these chemicals are wasted due to inappropriate timing and application. These chemicals then runoff and become a major source of water pollution.Last but not least, 30 to 60 percent of urban fresh water is used on lawns. Most of this water is also wasted due to poor timing and application.”
The writer seems to assume water is not a scarce resource, yet draws on statistics that are heavily influenced by water-parched areas of the world. He also writes about “astro turf” of a previous generation despite significant changes in design, manufacturing and installation that make the experience significantly different today that that he describes (most new artificial lawns -properly installed- are aerated, for example). After wuite a bit of study, we installed a patch of artificial lawn in our wet climate in Canada (water availability was not the issue) along with a rock garden and plants due to those cute birds the author mentioned (in our case, flocks of crows) annually ripping up entire lawns on the street and nothing but moss growing in the shaded areas. Regarding the author’s assertions about product deterioration: judging the wear of an artifical lawn on the basis of a sport stadium’s use makes as much sense as judging regular grass replacement and maintenance based on what happens at Wimbledon stadium during a certain two weeks a year.
I do not suggest those artificial lawns are the perfect answer for all but the very soft, aesthetically pleasing, draining artificial lawns provide (based on the Columbia article and many other reviews) some material environmental benefits overlooked in this article.

I’ve only ever seen astro turf installed in places such as blocks of flats with communal courtyards that get little sunlight. I’ve never heard of it being fitted in regular housing in place of grass lawns so I’m not sure how widespread it actually is

I hear, but if you are a Lefty Liberal do not get excited just yet as we have to see if it plays out yet, but I hear a bunch of Gasht-e Ershad may shortly be out of work – you know the old ‘Prevention of Vice, Promoting Virtue’ Cops from Iran.

What could be more perfect than hiring on a couple squads of them and getting them right on this astro-turf thing? Surely this is right in their perview, as is all the Carbon/plastic, CO2, oil, gas, coal – ESG* (*Environmental, Social, and Governance) ethical vice/virtue stuff.

I mean it is a vice to have this worm killing fake grass, and throwing a can of soup over it just does not do much. No. What is needed are ESG Morality Police, and the Gasht-e Ershad have shown themselves to be very good at this kind of thing. Gretta would approve. Problem solved.

There are several lessons to be drawn from this article, none of which is the message the author intended. First, it shows how American culture was exported everywhere else for the past fifty or so years. The front lawn is largely an American invention from the 1950s, when the first suburbs were built outside American cities, which brings us to the second lesson. It was the widespread availability of automobiles to middle and lower class workers than enabled them to move farther from their place of work and commute the distance in a reasonable time, allowing suburbs to be economically built and profitably sold away from urban centers where there was still cheap land available. In all those old advertisements for the cookie cutter houses there’s always a car in the driveway. It wasn’t just the automobile of course, but other things like washing machines, vacuums, electric lights, heating and air conditioning, and a host of other inventions that made modern lifestyles possible. Before this time, home ownership was limited to the affluent who could afford servants to maintain houses and to rural family units which often housed multiple generations under one roof and who usually had enough children and elderly to keep up the family property (and feed the chickens and slop the hogs and weed the garden and so on). The whole concept that the author spends several paragraphs romanticizing is actually a fairly recent invention. Well groomed front lawns were always unnatural, always sterile, always a symbol of humanity’s dominion over nature, always required constant maintenance, and always caused problems. Entirely manufactured lawns for whatever purpose private or public are, at worst, only marginally more so. Depending on where one lives and the availability of water, if you MUST have a lawn to satisfy some romantic notion from your childhood, an artificial lawn might make a good option. As we can see just from the comments in this article, what’s best for ‘the environment’ is debatable, and also entirely subjective. Debating what’s best for ‘the environment’ and what humanity’s ‘proper’ relationship is to the environment has become a hobby of modern romantics and their sentimental attachments to their own ideas and a colossal waste of intellectual resources. We’ve quite enough to worry about learning to properly and respectfully relate to one another.

I love our artificial lawn… looks great and the kids can finally play outside without turning what was a horrid little patch of grass into a mud-pit.
In terms of being unnatural… we’d already gone down that route with a tarmac drive, LVT kitchen floor and carpets throughout the rest of the house. Purists would probably reject the render finish on our external walls and carp (pun intended) about the poor fish held in eternal captivity within their glass prison.
On the plus side, we have one of those natural gas powered central heating systems instead of a filthy log-burner.

You know, I think this sort of attack on the plebs would sell better at some wokey lefty virtue-signaling organ of the educated gentry.
Dull dogs like me say: well, artificial lawns are not quite out of the top drawer, old chap. But peasants gotta peasant.
Now, since you mention the Dutch, we may all quail at the very idea of Dutch farmers adding to the methane in the atmosphere, at present a shattering total of 0.00018% — as against oxygen at 21%. That is what fills me with terror and outrage.

We have a 20’ x 20’ lawn at our house in the middle of the city. With two big dogs peeing on it several times a day, at least half of the grass was dead, so essentially it was just mud – especially in the winter, which is most of the year in Canada. Last June we put in artificial grass and we couldn’t be happier with the result. Yes it smells like pee in dry spells. Yes we disrupted the ecosystem of a small patch of ground. But for the love of god is it really worse than pavement? And it cost us $7000 – at that price it’s never going to be as widespread as the author fears. Note to anyone ‘civic minded’ tempted to take the author’s advice and vandalize our lawn: we will let the dogs out, and happily observe the unrestrained forces of nature take their course!

Who cares? Get a life and find something else to whine and purge about