Spraying pesticides on a lawn.
If your neighbors have a green, treated lawn, you may be likely to have one too: a space dedicated to fertilizers, pesticides and regular watering. That’s according to a National Science Foundation-funded study. Which makes you wonder: Maybe the opposite could be true. If you become a pioneer of sorts and let your lawn go wild, maybe your neighbors will too.
That may be wishful thinking. You may want to get a group of neighbors together before you go that route, and check your local regulations. Maybe you’ll need a group of neighbors to lobby local leaders and allow for yards made up of wildflowers instead of fertilizer- and pesticide-fed grass.
The NSF study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests peer pressure may be linked to increases in yard fertilization and irrigation across diverse U.S. regions: Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Lots of Lawns
More than 7,300 households were surveyed, asking people about using fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation on their yards, along with their age, household income and the number of neighbors they know by name.
More than 80% of respondents had irrigated their yards within the previous year, while 53% had applied pesticides. Of course, households in hot, dry climates were especially likely to water their yards. But irrigation also was linked to higher household income, along with using fertilizers and pesticides.
Speaking of wildflowers, researchers found that U.S. households use almost four times as much land area as farmed corn (the country’s leading irrigated crop), suggesting that even small changes to individual properties could lead to big environmental change. A-ha!
Wildflowers grow in a field during a 'super bloom' in Borrego Springs, California.
In the survey, households where owners knew more neighbors by name were 9% more likely to irrigate and to fertilize their lawns.
Doug Levey, a program director with NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology, calls the results “eye-opening” in a statement, adding, “If neighbors expect this of each other, more and more lawns will be treated in these ways. The ecological and economic costs would also increase."
The authors, including Dexter Locke from the US. Forest Service, say the study provides initial insights about yard care practices across the United States, but it’s not possible to determine causation from the associations found and that in-depth surveys and interviews across different regions will be important in future research.
They add in an abstract: “Our findings may guide policies or programs seeking to mitigate the potentially deleterious outcomes associated with water use and chemical application, by identifying the subpopulations most likely to irrigate, fertilize, and/or apply pesticides.”
Positive Peer Pressure
Still, peer pressure can work in positive and negative ways. A bunch of university neighbors at the University of Central Florida are behind an organization called Lawn to Wildflowers, funded by a Pollinator Health Fund grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. Their goals include enabling people throughout the country to convert grass lawns to native wildflowers and to create a platform for collecting data on the effectiveness of lawn-to-wildflower plots.
In late May, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also approved a $900,000 program to help homeowners turn traditional lawns into wildflower havens to slow the collapse of the state’s bee population.
Could bees, along with being accepted in your neighborhood, be a pathway to environmental change?
A front yard adorned with a wildflower garden.
