"The Turfgrass Subject"

"[W]hereas the aesthetic of the lawn may be old, indeed ancient, the turfgrass subject is new: the urban person who is concerned about nature but uses chemicals, who supports the Kyoto Protocol but drives an SUV, who recycles fervently while constantly wasting more and more,"

writes leading political ecology writer Paul Robbins in his book, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, and continues,

"Rather than condescendingly dismissing such inconsistencies as 'cognitive dissonance' as is common to apolitical critique, the book advances an alternative, which emphasizes the range of constraints on our alternatives and that stresses the way the biochemical machines we make increasingly make us who we are."