In the 1837 edition of his Guide for Emigrants to the West, a Baptist missionary called John Mason Peck described the process he had watched in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Michigan for nearly 20 years. His account will apply in broad outline to the great movements that cleared all the continents of the earth.

"Three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation . . . and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn [maize] and a 'truck patch' . . . a rude garden .... The next class . . . purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses . . . occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school houses, court houses, etc., and exhibit the pictures and forms of plain, frugal, civilized lives. Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come .... The small village rises to a spacious town or city .... All the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, and fashions are in vogue . . . ."

Here, in miniature, is the history of agricultural man.

Cultivated space is also the history of urban man. In Schrebergärten in Germany today we see some evidence community gardens that were first developed as a social program in nineteenth-century Berlin.  Residents were allotted plots in green belts at the periphery of the city, giving them the opportunity to seek respite from the confines of their urban lives by traveling a short distance to work in a food and flower garden. On each plot they would construct a small cottage, and many relocated to these tiny shelters after the city was bombed during World War II. Visiting these gardens, which can still be found throughout Germany, is like stepping into either some agrarian past or a utopian future. This observation was made by Fritz Haeg in his book, 'Go for an edible estate: the case against lawns'.

In contrast, the American lawn he said is an almost entirely symbolic. Aristocratic English spectacle and drama which has degenerated into a bland garnish for our endless suburban sprawl and alienation. The monoculture of one plant species covering our neighborhoods from coast to coast celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity. An occasional lawn for recreation can be a delight, but most of them are occupied only when they are being tended.

Today's lawn has become the default surface for any defensible private space. If you don't know what to put there, plant grass seed and keep watering. Driving around most neighborhoods you will see lush beds of grass being tended on narrow unused strips of land. In the United States we plant more grass than any other crop: currently lawns cover more than thirty million acres. Given the way we lavish precious resources on it and put it everywhere that humans go, aliens landing in any American city today would assume that grass must be the most precious earthly substance of all.

Yet the lawn devours resources while it pollutes. It is maniacally groomed with mowers and trimmers powered by the two-stroke motors that are responsible for much of our greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrocarbons from mowers react with nitrogen oxides in the presence of sunlight to produce ozone. To eradicate invading plants the lawn is drugged with pesticides and herbicides, which are then washed into our water supply with sprinklers and hoses, dumping our increasingly rare fresh drinking resource down the gutter.