Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-Centered Planet on a 5-star scale.

Today we'll be reviewing Kentucky Bluegrass and the practice of Googling strangers.

Let's begin with Kentucky Bluegrass, by which I mean the plant species, not the four-star

music genre.

Poe pretenses its scientific name is ubiquitous the world over.

Much at the time you see a soft green expanse of lawn in Europe or Asia or the Americas,

you're looking at least in part at Kentucky Bluegrass.

The typical shoot of Poe pretenses has three to four leaves, shaped like little canoes,

and if left unmoan it can grow to three feet tall and sprout blue flower heads.

Of course it usually isn't left unmoan, at least not in my neighborhood where I believe

it is technically illegal to allow your grass to grow more than six inches long.

If you've ever driven through my home state of Indiana, you've seen mile after mile after

mile of corn fields.

Amber waves of grain are enshrined in the song America the Beautiful, and yet more land

and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to

corn and wheat combined.

There are around 128,000 square kilometers of lawn in the United States greater than

the size of Ohio or the entire nation of Italy.

About a third of all residential water use in the US, clean, drinkable water is used to

water lawns.

To thrive, Kentucky Bluegrass often requires fertilizer and pesticides and extensive watering

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