Right, like cutting lawns is brutal.

And that is, make meadows and not lawns.

Five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns.

And if we look at the history of lawns, it's actually rather tragic.

I want to say this not because I'm opposed completely to mowing lawns.

Americans spent, in 2001 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns.

And so it's incredible the amount of resources we've spent keeping our lawns, which are these useless biosystems.

I think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale, and I think we're encouraged to do that.

I'm a dupe. I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight.

Now, not all of us have meadows, or lawns that we can convert, and so you can always, of course, grow a meadow in a pot.

But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing.

I had thought always and in fact, had written this in my first book this was a book about gardening that lawns were nature under culture's boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex.