Could Your Lawn Be Lethal?

Joe Speeney had never been a lawn geek, that suburban cowboy in the saddle of a candy-apple red Toro, pesticide bottle riding his hip like a six-shooter.

Still, having grown up playing football and baseball on his own childhood lawn, he admired a well-kept swath of green as much as the next guy. And each time he looked at the small patch of turf behind his townhouse in Bernards Township, New Jersey, Speeney was pleased to think that his month-old son, Dan, would have a place to roll around, get dirty, be a boy.

A lawn-care crew tended his entire neighborhood, and Speeney had wondered how the neighbors kept their grass so nice. Then one day four summers ago, his wife called him at work. “They’re spraying something on the lawn and in the trees,” she told him, “and it came through the windows before I could shut them. Our eyes are burning.”

“I hit the roof,” Speeney, 43, says. First, he and his neighbors called the neighborhood association. How could it let the crew fog their homes and not let them know? Then he began to dig—for answers. The green chimera of his son’s future baseball field, he discovered, was maintained with a frightening mix of pesticides (weed killers, bug killers, fungicides) and synthetic fertilizers.

He’d already suspected that. What he didn’t know was the depth to which these powders and pellets were linked to everything from cancer to Parkinson’s disease to ADHD.

He was worried. And pissed off. And determined to know: Was he overreacting, or was the field of dreams behind his home turning into a toxic nightmare?

Since the days when George Washington rolled games on the bowling green at Mount Vernon, the idea of a well-tended expanse of grass has held sway in the collective psyche of the American male. “Nice lawn” is a chest-swelling compliment. It means you’re a man, a provider, an upright citizen. “A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors,” wrote Abraham Levitt, father of Levittown, in laying out his blueprint for his suburban ideal—the box home surrounded by lawn.

That was the time—the post-World War II years—that the love affair with the Perfect Lawn grew into an obsession that now, even in this supposed earth-loving, organic era, propels men to drive to garden stores each spring to load heavy sacks of chemicals into the family SUV.

Today, turf covers more than 60,000 square miles of the United States; imagine a yard the size of Georgia. And a single lawn-care company tends the grounds of more than 3 million residential and commercial customers. Until 3 years ago, it went by a name that is a vestige of a more trusting era: TruGreen ChemLawn.

The blogosphere hums with sites devoted to all things lawn. Books have been written. In the film Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood growls that most famous of old-guy lines, “Get off my lawn.”

And every day, American men stand before the lawn-chemical shelves at Home Depot or Lowe’s and weigh the odds. We know this bag will kill weeds, and that one over there will kill bugs, and here’s one that’ll make our grass grow green and thick. But we wonder, at some level: Will one of these bags trigger an illness or start a cancer that may not appear for years or even decades?

And then, usually, we load up the cart.

When it comes to lawns, our devotion is often utter, unwavering—loony, even. Ted Steinberg found that out firsthand. A historian who grew up in Lawn Guy Land (as some call Long Island), Steinberg couldn’t help but notice the singular devotion his neighbors had to their yards.

Later, after moving to the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, he saw more evidence. “The lawns of some of my neighbors don’t just look like putting greens—they are putting greens, right down to the creeping bent grass, which is kept crew-cut short,” he says. Fascinated, Steinberg wound up writingAmerican Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.

“There’s nothing wrong with a lawn,” Steinberg is quick to say. “I have a lawn. But there is something wrong with the ‘perfect’ lawn.” To achieve what he calls “the Augusta Effect,” we powder our grass with chemicals and spritz weeds with poison. He asks, “We should take a risk with our health and the health of others for that?”