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America’s unhealthy obsession with the common lawn

California is now in its fourth year of a record-breaking drought. Call it climate change, call it the result of an abnormally persistent high pressure ridge, call it the wrath of God for all I care, but California and much of the western United States is dry.

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Luckily for us, there is no shortage of water in Princeton. Half of the water supply in New Jersey comes from groundwater, which is regularly replenished with rain. Just recently we all got a taste of Hurricane Joaquin and the simultaneous nor’easter that brought a couple days of continuous rain to the East Coast, which must have filled the underground aquifers nicely.

This all means that the University, as opposed to other universities further west, does not really have to worry about water usage. But we should.

There is no excuse for wasting water, even if we have enough at the moment. Theoretically, I could go to Wawa, buy a loaf of bread and throw it in the trash can. Of course I won’t, since everyone recognizes how much of a waste that is. People on meal plans do not purposely dump food into the compost bin, even though they could, since we all recognize that wasting is bad.

It’s really as simple as that. Wasting is bad. Yet water is an incredibly wasted resource. For some reason we have decided as a culture that an integral part of “natural” beauty is the lawn. Lawns came to America with the British. That is the biggest part of the lawn problem. England’s climate is great for lawns. America’s is not. And yet, this country has an obsession with them.

How much of an obsession? A recent NASA study estimated that there may be more than than 70 million square miles of turf grass in America. That is 140 acres of grass per person, more than three times the next largest crop, corn. Just imagine the water needed to maintain all of that.

Actually, you don’t have to, since the same NASA study did. Their estimate was 73-95 billion cubic meters per year. That number is so absurdly oversized that it is hard to understand how big it is. For reference, that is about one Olympic-sized swimming pool of water dumped onto American lawns per second. It is five times the flow rate of the entire Hudson River.

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Many lawns are never used for sports or relaxing, and could easily be replaced by more water efficient plants. A large part of the grass in America is just filler space anyways, like highway medians and the berms in front of sidewalks.

That grass could be replaced by virtually any other plant, preferably one native to this continent and adapted to this environment.

College campuses are often filled with grassy areas, and the University is no exception. We all benefit from our lovely green spaces, but the University needs to consider the impact of maintaining all of those acres of grass.

I am not saying that the University has to abandon the Ivy League look and tear out all of the quads. Those quads are used for all sorts of productive activities, from setting up Reunions tents to playing frisbee to just relaxing. That said, we need to stop thinking of grass as this material that just sits around and does not cost anything.

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Perhaps some of those grassy spaces could be replaced with other plants that use less water. Maybe some of the sports fields could be replaced by artificial grass, which obviously needs no water at all. At a bare minimum, types of grass that need less water could be phased in and watering the lawns could be reduced.

I’m not sure what the best way to balance our desire for lawns with their huge impact on water resources is, but the current American balance is not reasonable. At a time when a huge part of the country is in drought, dumping so much water onto the ground is absurd. Every household needs to have a serious discussion about its use of grass and the water it requires.

The University also needs to be having that discussion. In general, it is committed to sustainability. There are compost bins in the dining halls, LED lights in many of the buildings, and all of the toilets have a low-flow flush option. Considering how committed Princeton seems to be to environmentalism, rethinking our grassy areas is just the next logical step.

At the very least, Princeton should probably turn off their sprinklers during hurricanes, something that I noticed they failed to do during Joaquin.

Beni Snow is a freshman from Newton, Mass. He can be reached at bsnow@princeton.edu.