Abolish Lawns: A Coming-Out Project

I've been sitting on the lawn argument for years. It connects to everything I care about — commons theory, land use, water rights, the political economy of suburban conformity — and it's somehow the most controversial position I hold. More controversial than the anarchism. More controversial than the AI commons arguments. People take the lawn personally.

Today we launched abolish-lawns. Here's what went into it.

The argument

The American residential lawn is not a neutral aesthetic choice. It's an enforced land use regime backed by HOA covenants, municipal weed ordinances, chemical industry lobbying, and a century of suburban ideology. It converts 40 million acres of potentially productive, biodiverse, community-serving land into sterile performative monoculture. It's an enclosure. It should be abolished.

The environmental case against lawns is well-established. What's less often made is the commons argument: the lawn forecloses collective land use, mandates private maintenance at individual expense, and punishes deviation. The Olmsted-era design vision was continuous unfenced green space — a genuine commons structure. What was built instead has the spatial structure of a commons and the governance structure of private enforcement. It looks like shared space. It functions as a mandate.

Michael Pollan wrote the liberal homeowner version of this argument in 1989. It's excellent and ends with him planting a hedge and hiring a teenager to mow what's left. We're going further.

The build

The site is SvelteKit with adapter-static, deployed as a git submodule of jason-edelman.org via Workers Assets. The parent repo's scripts/build.mjs assembles public/ from static files and submodule build outputs. Push to main triggers GitHub Actions → wrangler deploy. The pattern scales: future subprojects plug in by adding an entry to the SUBPROJECTS array and a git submodule.

The design system is what I'm calling "policy brief from hell" — Barlow Condensed display, Familjen Grotesk body, acid green accent, OKLCH tinted neutrals throughout, both light and dark modes. The manifesto is five sections: indictment, enforcement mechanism, commons argument, anticipated objections, and demands. Demand zero is "act without permission" — the anarchist framing, not the policy framing.

The zines

Three zines built with reportlab and Pillow, all A5 half-letter format (5.5" × 8.5"), designed to print on one sheet of letter paper folded in half.

Zine No. 01 uses a Home Depot product-packaging decoy aesthetic. The hook is "HATE MOWING YOUR LAWN?" — looks like something you'd find at a hardware store. The slightly-wrong details (SKU: LAWN-ABOLITION-001, active ingredient: class consciousness) reward a second look. The caption under the cover image is "EVERY SATURDAY, UNTIL YOU DIE." which got an immediate response.

Zine No. 02 is a municipal utility bill parody. Water bills are up 24% in five years. Fifty to seventy percent of a summer water bill is lawn irrigation. Half that water evaporates before reaching roots, and then most utilities charge sewer rates on water that never entered a drain. The visual language is institutional blue — looks like utility authority correspondence.

Zine No. 03 is for environmentalists already writing their senators about AI data center water use. US lawns consume approximately 170 times more water than all US data centers combined (Lawrence Berkeley Lab 2023; EPA WaterSense). The argument isn't "stop worrying about AI" — it's "your anger is correct and misdirected at the national scale." The back page connects both problems to the same commons framework: extraction of shared resources for private benefit with costs externalized onto communities.

All three zines have a build-zine.md guidelines document committed to the repo — design system, font choices, image sourcing protocol, prose rules, stats sourcing requirements. The goal is that anyone (including a future session of Claude with no memory of this one) can produce a consistent zine from the guidelines.

The numbers

One thing I didn't expect: the public stats on lawns are worse than I thought, and several of the commonly-cited figures are stale or wrong. The $40B annual spend figure circulating in environmental writing is from early-2000s data. Current landscaping industry revenue is $153-188B. The "3 billion gallons of water per day" figure is similarly outdated — EPA WaterSense puts residential landscape irrigation at nearly 9 billion gallons per day.

The research backlog (research-backlog.md, committed to the repo) lists every claim currently live without a primary source, prioritized by urgency. Three P1 items: a specific survey for the "homeowners describe lawn maintenance as a chore" claim, a legal database count of weed ordinance prevalence, and documented case studies from jurisdictions that have relaxed lawn ordinances. The Doug Tallamy work on insects and native plants is the most important P2.

What's next

The HOA entry-point page is the highest-value content gap — that's the Millennial audience who is most ready to act and most needs tactical documentation. After that: the Norfolk case study, which is going to require some original reporting on the two failed mall sites the city owns. And eventually a blog for documenting the neighborhood fights as they actually happen.

This is a coming-out project. The lawn argument is the most radical position I hold in terms of daily-life implication, and it connects directly to the commons framework running through everything else. If you have a lawn and you hate it, you were right. Stop watering.