Hey podcast listeners, this week's episode comes from our archive. It's part of a series

we call Stupid Stuff. The other episodes in this series include How Did The Belt Win

and These Shoes Are Killing Me. This one in honor of the unofficial beginning of summer

is called How Stupid Is Our Obsession With Lones. Thanks for listening.

Where I Live in the Great Northeast of the United States, Spring has finally gone full bloom

and summers right around the corner. When you get outside it's beautiful, the trees, the flowers,

and of course the lawns. Who doesn't love a good lawn? It looks good, smells good, feels good.

For a lot of people, a lawn is the perfect form of nature. Even though, let's be honest,

the lawns we like don't actually occur in nature. Even though the process of producing such a lawn

is full of the most unnatural activity. Even though this unnatural slice of nature requires so many

inputs, the water, the fertilizer, the weed killers, the mowers and trimmers and the leaf blowers,

the fuel to power all this machinery, the fuel to power the trucks to transport the people who

run the machinery all in pursuit of the perfect lawn.

From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the

hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

Give me briefly as you can a history of the lawn. If you go look at the Oxford English Dictionary

and try to find the word lawn, you'll see that it dates from the 16th century from Old English for

an open space, or what was called the Glade. Ten Steinberg is a history and law professor at

Case Western Reserve. I am the author of several books including American Green, the obsessive

quest for the perfect lawn, and these lawns, as it were that existed back in 16th, 17th, 18th century

England were typically found on estates. Now talk about how America got into lawns and the degree

to which they up the game. So lawns go way back in American history, Washington and Jefferson,

...