EPISODE 4
Hey, this is Buzzkill. I’m
Teresa Cotsirilos. In 2022, some climate activists smuggled two cans of tomato
soup into London’s National Gallery. Two of them popped the tops off … and
splashed the soup across Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Then they pulled out some
glue, squeezed it onto their fingers, and glued their hands to the wall.
News Clip: Are you
more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our
planet and people?
Teresa:
Fortunately, a little soup and glue didn’t actually harm the painting.
These activists were with
the group Just Stop Oil, and these food-related stunts have just kept
happening.
News Clip: There
was no smile for the “Mona Lisa,” the world’s most famous artwork
vandalized.
News Clip: Cameras
are rolling as climate change protesters threw mashed potatoes on a $110
million painting.
Teresa: One of
those activists is yelling, our agricultural system is sick (in French), which
let’s be honest is basically the tagline for this podcast.
So my first reaction to
this was, how does throwing things at art help the planet exactly? Well, this
kind of confrontational direct action might be widely unpopular, but some
social scientists say it can also be pretty effective.
Love him or hate him, the
soup throwers drew attention to a dire problem.
Our planet is engulfed in
multiple environmental crises. There’s been a 69 percent drop in the world’s
wildlife population, and scientists project that the climate and pollution
crises alone could also kill tens of millions of people. The sheer scale of these
crises has mobilized a lot of people. There have been anti-fossil fuel protests
and anti-deforestation protests.
News Clip: Thousands
of German police vans are being deployed to the illegal tree houses in the Hambach Forest this weekend, where people have chained
themselves ...
Teresa: People
are fighting back against the biodiversity and pollinator crises, too.
News Clip: Now, as
soon as we got here, we saw a load of activists in masks. They came and threw
petrol on these barricades that they’ve made, set them on fire …
Teresa: Some of
the actions they’ve taken are big, bold, and dangerous. Other actions are
pretty small scale. All of them have something in common: People who are just
not willing to take no for an answer.
In our last episode, we
brought you the story of an Indigenous community that decided to move away from
industrial farming and draw on their traditions and cultural knowledge to
balance food production and sustainability.
In this episode, we’re
going to leave our very rural food system behind for a bit and travel to the
suburbs of Maryland. Buzzkill reporter Eve Abrams shares the story of a fight
with a homeowner’s association that helped fuel a movement.
From the Food &
Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill, Episode 4, The Lawn War.
Eve: Oh, I
see a lot of flowers.
Siri: Your
destination is on the left.
Eve: Oh
yeah, of course it is. It’s a sunny morning in July, and I’ve just driven into
a leafy suburban neighborhood in Columbia, Maryland. At the end of a
cul-de-sac, I pull up in front of a house whose yard definitely stands out from
its neighbors.
The yard is full of
plants. It’s a storm of flowers, erupting in color. And around me, birdsong and
insects mix with people sounds. The yard is beautiful, but actually, that’s not
why I’m here. I came because this yard is kind of ground zero in a battle playing
out across the country. And it’s a battle over big questions.
About the power ordinary
people have to protect the environment and other species.
Hi. You must be Jeff. Hi.
Hi. So nice to meet you.
Jeff and Janet Crouch meet
me at their front door. They’re around 60. Jeff’s a therapist with long,
graying hair that’s pulled back in a ponytail. Janet works in HR for the
federal government. Her long blonde hair is loose. Her toenails are painted
pink. They show me around their front yard. A lot of their flowers are really
tall. So tall, Jeff can’t even see over some of them.
How tall are you,
Jeff?
Jeff: Uh, six
feet, about. There’s a lot of flowers here. Hundreds and hundreds. That’s
phlox. It’s like a bunch of little flowers, but dozens of them. And the
butterflies, this is it. When they come, this is what they love.
Eve: This is
what the Crouches’ yard is all about. Creating a habitat, a home, really, for
the plants and animals our ecosystem needs. The Crouches’ yard is buzzing with
pollinators. Butterflies, sure, but also birds, bees, wasps, beetles, you name
it.
All browsing on a native
plant buffet.
Jeff: See the
bee?
Janet: We have
a lot of native bees in our yard. They’re ground nesters.
Eve: So you
were saying when you first started planting it wasn’t native plants?
Jeff: We
didn’t know anything about it. This is 20 years ago.
Eve: Janet
and Jeff Crouch bought their house in 1999. It’s on a street lined with oak
trees. Their backyard ends in a county park. When they moved in, their front
yard looked a lot like the others on their street. Grass. But then Jeff started
the garden. Over the years, he kept adding beds, until almost the entire yard
was covered and no longer matched the cookie-cutter look of the neighborhood.
But no one seemed to mind.
And what they were doing, it wasn’t just about aesthetics. Over the years, Jeff
and Janet became passionate about a particular style of landscaping focused on
providing habitat for plants and animals.
Janet: Our
yard is alive with all kinds of creatures, and then you look around, and I
mean, you see striped grass.
Eve: Striped
because of the way it’s mowed. People love their green, pristine lawns, and
that’s fine. But it’s something decorative, not a living, natural environment
for plants and animals. Some scientists think of lawns as an ecological dead
zone. A monoculture, with practically nothing growing other than the grass.
And changing that,
building a habitat, matters a lot to Janet and Jeff.
Janet: You
have a piece of land that you’re the steward of, and you have a responsibility
to yourself, your neighbors, and everyone else, the Earth, the animals, the
plants, because we’re all connected.
Eve: I know
how this might sound, it’s just a yard, really small in the grand scheme of
things. But trust me, this chaotic flower garden is where something big starts,
a story that illustrates how change happens. Janet says everything with their
garden was great, until it wasn’t.
Janet: It was
beautiful and exciting. And we loved it. And then, you know, then the axe came
down.
Eve: The axe
arrived in September 2017 in the form of a letter from Jeff and Janet’s
homeowners association, known as an HOA.
When she opened it, Janet
had no idea this letter would mark the beginning of a yearslong fight. A battle
over native habitat versus the traditional American lawn. It was a standard HOA
letter.
Janet: You
know, you need to pull weeds and mow your grass. Do seasonal maintenance. I was
not happy, but I thought, okay, well, we didn’t really have many weeds. And so
we thought probably they’re talking about our plants, which are not
weeds.
Eve: Jeff and
Janet had lived in their house for over 17 years at this point. This was the
first time they’d ever heard a complaint. And they weren’t sure how to respond.
Clearly, their HOA didn’t get what they were doing with their yard, so the
Crouches turned to their secret weapon, Janet’s sister.
Nancy Lawson: I’m
Nancy Lawson, and I am a habitat consultant in that I help people transform
their spaces from lawn or something similarly lifeless to wildlife
habitat.
Eve: Nancy
has written a lot about native plant gardening. Her first book is called The
Humane Gardener, another is Wildscape, and over the
years she’s helped Janet and Jeff understand their garden’s potential impact on
the ecosystem.
Nancy: Janet
was very upset, but we talked through it and decided that we were going to
respond with a letter that explained why she had this habitat.
Eve: For
years, Nancy has been teaching people about the many problems with grass lawns.
Here are just a few. First, the species we plant, like ryegrass and Kentucky
bluegrass, are not native plants, and their short roots can’t absorb all the
water we and the skies put on them.
As much as half of that
water runs off, carrying fertilizer and weed killer into our rivers and oceans,
which helps create massive dead zones. Then there’s mowing, which stops grass
from flowering. So basically, there’s no habitat or food for animals, no leaves
or decay for them to nest in or to replenish the soil.
And those gas-powered lawn
mowers? They dump millions of tons of pollutants in our air each year. It’s
important to say, the kind of gardening Nancy advocates for, it’s not new. The
Crouches aren’t eco-gardening pioneers, but the science and philosophy
underpinning Nancy’s work, apparently, it hadn’t made its way into her sister’s
HOA.
Not yet. So Nancy saw an
opportunity for education.
Nancy: I mean,
otherwise, what is the point of promoting this type of habitat if people can’t
actually follow through with it?
Eve: Nancy
helped Janet and Jeff look through their yard for anything that was actually a
weed, and figure out what to say to the HOA.
Janet: So, we
wrote back and told the HOA that Jeff had mowed, we’d picked out some Japanese stiltgrass. And that we had an environmentally friendly
landscape.
Eve: She
hoped that would be that, but it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The people in
homeowners associations have a well-earned reputation for being busybodies. So
much so that the insurance company Geico spoofed them in an ad.
Geico Ad: Oh, we
love our new home. Neighborhood’s great. Amazing school district. The HOA has
been very involved.
Eve: The
camera pans to two HOA representatives, one holding a clipboard.
Geico Ad: These
shrubs aren’t board approved. Thank you. Violation. Violation.
Eve: Then the
HOA rep uses a chainsaw to slice off the family’s mailbox.
Geico Ad: Thanks,
Cynthia.
Eve: HOAs
tend to be controlled by a small group of people, the Cynthias
of the world, who enforce the association’s rules. These rules are often laid
out in a covenant all homeowners agree to. Jeff and Janet’s covenant says each
lot must be “regularly maintained and repaired and kept in a neat, clean,
and sanitary condition.” It also says grass and shrubbery must be “regularly
cut or trimmed.” In November 2017, two months after the Crouches received the
first HOA letter, they heard back.
It was a notice to cease
and desist. Clearly, the HOA was not impressed by the Crouches’ gardening
philosophy. The HOA’s attorney wrote, “You have allowed your lawn to grow into
what you call an environmentally sensitive and wildlife friendly habitat.” He
put those phrases in quotes, by the way. He goes on, “Your yard is not the
place for such a habitat, because it could have a negative impact upon yours
and your neighbors’ property values.”
Janet: This is
our house. This is our property. And immediately I said, No, we’re not going to
do this. You’re not going to bully us in our own home. You’re not going to take
out the garden that Jeff has spent the last years of his life working on for
us, for the community, for, for the Earth. You know, I’ll do everything I can
to, to save it.
I was enraged by that
letter. And hurt and sad and scared. I was terrified.
Eve: Is this
typical for you?
Janet: If, if
somebody, yes. If somebody’s being bullied or somebody’s being harmed, I mean,
I don’t go to extremes. I try to figure out how to fix things. But I don’t like
bullies.
Eve: Janet
got to work. First, she found a lawyer.
Jeff Kahntroff: Janet
and Jeff did what good homeowners are supposed to do, and they tried to resolve
the issue on their own.
Eve: Jeff Kahntroff is an attorney in Crofton, Maryland.
Jeff: And
then when they received a threatening letter from the law firm, that’s when
they reached out to me.
Eve: Kahntroff works for a unique law
firm, he says Maryland’s only firm which specializes in defending homeowners in
disputes with HOAs. And he told me what makes the Crouches unique is they were
willing to fight.
Jeff: But the
Crouches are the very, very, very small percentage. What typically happens is
the HOA sends you a threatening letter. You realize your options are to comply
or to spend money, and 99.99 percent of the people simply comply.
Eve: The
Crouches were not going to simply comply, even though the stakes were
mounting.
Jeff: The
Crouches were threatened with the HOA coming and ripping out their landscaping.
They were facing daily fines and a lawsuit, and what do you do? I mean, you
don’t want to remove your landscaping. You don’t want to be fined and you don’t
want to face a lawsuit. So it’s not like there were good options there.
Eve: Kahntroff wrote a letter to the
HOA’s lawyer on the Crouches’ behalf. The first of many letters that went back
and forth between the lawyers for months.
I reached out to the HOA’s
lawyers as well as the HOA’s president at the time. I wanted to hear their side
of the story. It just seems so extreme, but no one has gotten back to me.
Janet called every nature
advocacy organization she could think of. She made flyers for her neighbors,
attended environmental events, and posted on Facebook, where lots of people
shared support and similar stories. They also offered ideas, like contacting
their local legislators, which Janet also did. More on that later.
It was months before the
Crouches finally learned what started this. One neighbor, their next-door
neighbor, had complained. For years. Beginning back in 2012. Janet keeps all of
the documents related to the battle over their yard in binders. She flips through
one, and pulls out an email this one neighbor sent the HOA’s attorney in August
2018.
Janet: Okay.
“My blood pressure rises every time I look at his property. Property values
will decrease due to the mess around his house.” Can you keep going? “I have
never complained to the owner of 10895 about his lawn …”
Eve: The
neighbor says he complained for five years anonymously. And then two more
signing his name.
Janet: “I
couldn’t take it anymore. He needs to pull everything out of the ground and
plant grass. It’s supposed to be a lawn, not a jungle.”
Eve: A lawn,
not a jungle. The neighbor never spoke to Janet or Jeff about his concerns, and
he wouldn’t speak with me either. I called this neighbor many times, wrote him
a letter, even rang his doorbell, but he never responded.
In September 2018, a full
year after the HOA’s first letter arrived, the Crouches got a chance to present
their case in a hearing. It was organized by the HOA, with the HOA’s attorney
presiding.
It took place in a
conference room of their HOA’s management company. They sat around a big table.
Janet and Jeff didn’t feel comfortable, but they knew this was the next step in
the process, and they came prepared.
They brought testimonials
from neighbors who loved their yard, and pictures of other yards in their HOA.
Also with plants other than all grass. Nancy, Jane’s sister, the landscaping
expert, she spoke. Their attorney pointed out there was no HOA rule requiring
only grass.
And then again, they
waited. Months later, the Crouches found out they lost the hearing. They
weren’t surprised. They talked over their options. Filing a lawsuit is when
things get expensive, typically costing tens of thousands of dollars, says
their lawyer, Jeff Kahntroff.
Jeff: It’s a
lot at stake. So you need a really strong, principled homeowner who’s willing
to take a lot of risk to even fight any of these battles. And the Crouches were
those rare property owners.
Eve: This is
the point where most people give up. But the Crouches, at least for the moment,
decided to spend even more money and fight. They called Kahntroff
and told him, go ahead, sue the HOA.
Janet: I was
happy because things were finally progressing. But then the other shoe did drop
because they countersued us.
Eve: This was
not what the Crouches had hoped for, and now they were learning the risks of
pursuing a resolution through the legal system.
Jeff: They
could do anything to us, a judge, if he loves grass.
Janet: Yeah,
so it just, it became clear that it was more of a crapshoot than we realized.
And one of the things that was hanging over our head the entire time was that
if we lost in court, we could be ordered by the judge to pay their legal fees.
Jeff: One
hundred thousand.
Eve: The
HOA’s legal fees: $100,000.
Janet: And so
we couldn’t sustain that. We couldn’t do that.
Eve: And so
finally, in December 2020, they settled. But after all that, it turns out,
really, Crouches kind of won. They got to keep their garden. In return, they
agreed to leave several feet as a buffer between their yard and their next-door
neighbors’ yards. Which, turns out, they already had. And they agreed to take
out one flower bed. Janet points to where it used to be.
Janet: This
was all a flower bed.
Eve: Right
along the sidewalk.
Janet:
Yes.
Jeff: So we
had to take that out as part of the settlement agreement. That’s the only thing
we took out though. That’s the only thing they got.
After they paid $100,000,
we paid 60 for them to get four feet.
Eve: $60,000
in legal fees. All for a debate over why we garden and what we plant. But the
Crouches also got something in their settlement, something they fought for, something
that mattered to them more than the money: the right to tell their story.
Janet: And
there are a lot of these stories out there, but people aren’t allowed to tell
them because they sign an agreement that says that they can’t speak about it.
But I insisted that we have something in the agreement that said that we can
speak about it. So, we have the ability and opportunity to let other people
know that there is hope, that you can fight back, and that you should fight
back. Because you can help other people.
Eve: This
insistence, that she and Jeff be able to talk freely about their case, it’s one
reason the fight over their yard ended up fueling something much bigger.
Earlier in this story, I
mentioned that the Crouches reached out to their local legislators. That’s how
they came in contact with Terri Hill, their representative in the Maryland
House of Delegates, and also Hill’s legislative director, Mary Catherine Cochran.
Eve: Do you
remember the email?
Mary Catherine Cochran: I do, I
do remember. I can’t tell you, I can’t quote it, but I remember seeing it and
saying, oh, that, that, I know where that neighborhood is.
Eve: Cochran
grew up on an old farm, not far from where she lives now in Ellicott City,
Maryland. When I met her there, I quickly saw how fortunate it was that the
Crouches found her. Cochran took me out to her back deck and showed me her
yard.
She recently stopped
mowing a small section of it. Native persimmon, oak, and maple trees are
springing up. Volunteering, as it’s called. And she’s letting them. But
gradually, so her neighbors can acclimate.
Mary Catherine: Folks
on one side have children, and they worry about [00:23:00] ticks.
People that didn’t have that same experience that I did, that kind of entitled
experience of being out in nature, they’re creating these little fortresses of
yards around them.
Eve: Little
fortresses of yards. I’ll come back to Cochran, but first let’s take a moment
to talk about these fortresses. Because what she’s describing has quite a
history. I mean, where did this idea even come from? That our green spaces
should be grass. Well, Europe. In medieval times, castles were surrounded by
grasslands rather than trees, because it was important to see who was coming,
for safety.
By the 17th century, it
was fashionable for English landowners to surround their estates with short
grass, often grazed by sheep. This showed off their wealth. Like, I am so rich,
I can leave this land just for my animals. When colonists came to North America,
think the forebears of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, they brought these
aesthetics with them.
Jefferson, in particular,
loved the look of a controlled landscape. Like Versailles’ carpet of green in
his beloved France. Jefferson is famous for replacing all sorts of native
plants with species from other ecosystems. And the people he enslaved did the
yard work to keep his grounds looking lush. In a book called Crabgrass
Frontier, about the suburbanization of the United States, historian Kenneth
Jackson writes:
By 1870, the yard was
expected to be large and private, a barrier. A kind of verdant moat, separating
the household from the threats and temptations of the city.
Only the rich could afford
this in England, but in the U.S., a well-tended lawn became “the mark of
suburban respectability.” After World War II, U.S. suburbs, and grass, took
off. The epitome of this was the planned development Levittown.
News Clip: Home
brings a sense of security to a man. And to every woman, her home means a
setting for gracious living. And now let’s go to Levittown, a modern garden
community in Long Island, New York.
Eve: William
J. Levitt famously said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a
communist. He has too much to do.” Levitt handed the homeowners literature on
how to maintain their grass and their neat rows of bushes.
News Clip: Each of
the Levittown home lots has 34 pieces of shrubbery. Multiply that by 16,000 and
you have a job …
Eve: These
days, in so many suburban neighborhoods across the U.S., lawns still basically
look like this. If you google lawn care tips, you’ll find video after video on
how to maintain your own personal carpet of grass.
Google Clip: That’s
when you want to start regular mowing good practices, and that just means mow
at least once a week. Twice a week is really best …
Eve: Today,
landscaping is a $314 billion-dollar industry, an industry invested in
maintaining grass as the cultural symbol of the good life, upstanding and
controlled. Even Jeff Crouch told me he once thought that way, too.
Jeff: The
mindset is that grass is everything. It’s beautiful. And I call it being
brainwashed. Everybody is brainwashed that only thinks of grass as a
possibility. We grew up that way. How else are you supposed to think?
Eve: This is
the culture and tradition the Crouches’ HOA believed it was upholding. But
Jeff’s sister-in-law, Nancy Lawson, says this tradition has wreaked havoc on
our ecosystem. We need a culture shift, something which starts just by seeing
yards like Jeff and Janet’s.
Nancy: You
know, there’s been research showing that once you get three people on a street
doing it, then that is sort of like the critical mass that’s needed for more
people to consider it.
Eve: I found
a bunch of surveys showing more and more people are definitely considering and
purchasing native plants. On top of that, communities around the country are
requiring native plants in public landscaping, as well as encouraging,
sometimes even subsidizing homeowners planting natives. This trend is
significant because private land is where so much change should happen.
Mary Catherine Cochran,
the legislative director, understands that. Standing on her back deck in
Maryland, she quotes this statistic.
Mary Catherine: You
know, something like 86 percent of the land east of the Mississippi is in
private hands. And so if we as private citizens don’t start doing a little bit,
or what we can, you know …
Eve: Cochran
trails off, but her point is clear. If we’re going to protect habitats for
pollinators and all the other creatures in our ecosystem, we are going to need
private citizens, like the Crouches, to be good stewards of their land and to
fight for that right. So when Cochran got that email from the Crouches back in
2019, she went to her boss, Terri Hill.
I sat down with Delegate
Hill in a park near her house.
Terri Hill: She
brought the letter to my attention and said, I think there may be something you
can do to fix this. And so I said, well, let’s, let’s have at it then.
Eve: Cochran
and staff started researching, looking for laws they could use as a model. They
found laws protecting the rights of homeowners and HOAs to install solar
panels, and other laws, in hot, dry places, granting homeowners the right to
plant cactuses or have rock gardens, rather than grass lawns, which require a
lot of water.
As far as pollinator
health, there are a bunch of laws restricting things, like using harmful
chemicals. They couldn’t find a law specifically allowing homeowners to plant
pollinator gardens, or native plant gardens. But they’d found enough to build
on. An important part of the process was just defining what they were talking
about.
Here’s Delegate
Hill.
Terri:
Low-impact landscaping. It means landscaping techniques that conserve water,
lower maintenance costs, provide pollution prevention, and create habitat for
wildlife.
Eve: Low-impact
landscaping. The bill moved through committee.
Mary Catherine: And we
really were pretty certain that the HOAs were not going to let this go through
the lobby. We thought that we’d get a pretty big battle from them, but we
didn’t. They put in a little softer language that left them with a little bit
of control. And even sort of the, the curmudgeonly, uh, Republican old guard,
you know, that can be just to get bad against anything, sometimes we’re like,
Oh yeah, who wouldn’t want to save the bees, you know? So I was like, okay. So
it, it, it went through surprisingly easy.
Eve: Janet
Crouch and her sister Nancy went to the capital, Annapolis, to give testimony.
One of Hill’s Republican colleagues suggested an amendment requiring
maintenance. Basically, you can’t just let your garden run wild. Hill added it.
Terri: You
know, you can’t just have a random wild garden that’s going to have vermin and
cause the rats to come into the community. But I think it’s pretty clear that
what it says is this is a good thing, and you need to figure out a way to allow
homeowners to do sustainable gardening. So what we’re really saying, it can’t
be about your aesthetics.
Right? You can’t just say
it, it doesn’t look good. I mean, what are aesthetics? It’s subjective.
Eve: Mary
Catherine Cochran.
Mary Catherine: And our
practices of how we landscape, you know, comes from the old white guys from
Europe, right? Who wanted to bring Europe here and have these manicured lawns
and these specimen trees. And it’s not the way this area of the world should
be. And we can’t maintain it that way if we want to survive.
Eve: Which
might sound dramatic, but Cochran pays attention to what’s happening with our [climate
and our ecosystem.
Famed ecologist E.O.
Wilson called insects the little things that run the world. And these animals
are not doing well, because humans are poisoning them and destroying their
habitat. To Cochran, this legislation was a step, a small step, but a step
toward righting our ecological ship. In 2021, the bill passed. Almost no one in
either chamber voted against it. Just like that, Maryland established the first
state law enshrining a resident’s right to landscape their yards for
biodiversity. And it all started because one couple refused to cave.
And then, it spread.
Mattie Daughtry: The
bill idea actually came based off of, uh, my father was following a couple in
Maryland who had tried to do the same thing and were blocked by their
homeowners association.
Eve: This is
Mattie Daughtry, a state senator from Maine. Her dad is a soil scientist, and
he sent her a New York Times article about the Crouches and the new Maryland
law. Daughtry got excited. And then she got to work, writing her own bill, and
adapting it to where she lives. On the coast of Maine.
Mattie: And one
of the things we talked about actually to sort of root it back to the district
that I represent, which is my hometown of Brunswick, we have one of the most
important habitats for clams.
And last year we had a
huge clam die-off in the clam flats. And one of the things that they were
actually able to track it to was runoff from lawn fertilizers and pesticides.
And it killed over four acres of soft-shell clams. And so when we’re working on
this bill, we saw firsthand how the stuff that was being used to keep our lawns
green was bigger than just the grass. It was literally killing off a very large
industry. And I mean, in Brunswick alone our shellfish industry is worth $13
million. And so even though some people tease me, you know, it’s just a B bill
and it’s just about people’s lawns, it’s a lot bigger than that.
Eve:
Daughtry and her staff modeled their bill after Maryland’s, and then they
presented it to the Maine legislature. Daughtry even used the Crouches’ stories
to help sell her bill.
Mattie: Yep, we
quoted them right off in the beginning of our testimony. Literally, the first
thing we led off with the committee is talking about what the Crouches went
through.
Eve:
Daughtry also passed out that New York Times article about the Crouches, their
court case, and the Maryland law. And her bill passed by a comfortable margin.
It went into effect in July 2023.
Mattie: It is a
mouthful. So, it is “An act to promote water conservation and water quality and
create habitat for wildlife, including pollinator species, by protecting
low-impact landscaping.”
Eve: So,
we’ve gone from one family in Maryland who refused to give in to its HOA, to a
law that covers all of Maryland, and now to a law in Maine. It’s spreading.
Turns out, there’s a name for this.
Joshua Basseches: Policy
diffusion is a concept that political scientists invented.
Eve: Joshua Basseches is an assistant professor of environmental
studies and public policy at Tulane University.
Joshua: You
know, we have 50 states. Louis Brandeis called them the laboratories of
democracy. They’re actually really important, and they pass a ton of policies
that affect our everyday lives. And they sometimes are in silos, but more often
than not, there’s some coordination and communication, which then results in
policy diffusion.
Eve: This
term describes how lots of laws spread, but Basseches
says policy diffusion has been especially important for environmental policy.
Joshua: The
action had been at the state level entirely until President Biden passed the
Inflation Reduction Act. And so for decades, the only climate policies that
were on the books in the United States were at the state level. And in the
environmental area, more and more of the things that are going to need to
happen in order to transition to a cleaner energy economy are going to happen
at the state level, because that’s where they have happened.
Eve: And the
so-called diffusion continues. Also, in July of 2023, Minnesota passed a law
protecting natural landscaping. And there’s another law like this in the works
in New York. And it’s not just politicians spreading these ideas. Mattie
Daughtry, the senator from Maine, says regular folks and social media are part
of the policy diffusion.
Mattie: One of
the things that I’ve actually found really interesting is the bill has been
getting a lot of traction on Instagram through a lot of seed companies. And
more and more gardeners are finding out about it. So, it’s sort of happening on
a grassroots level as more people are learning about it. And it just passed, so
I think we’re just sort of starting to try to get more states to take it on,
too.
Eve: So, is
that something you’re actively doing, is trying to diffuse?
Mattie: A
little bit. I think any lawmaker and policymaker, one of the most satisfying
things is when you see other people work on that same idea. It all comes back
to word of mouth and stories and seeing the impact on a human level, because,
you know, the Crouches’ case showed what it’s like in a homeowners association
and what they are hoping to be able to do as individual citizens. And then for
me, I was able to take that story and think about my own experience planting
like this, but then also seeing the impact of fertilizers and lawns on the
shellfish industry here. And so that was how it became my story.
And I can’t wait to read
about the next state and another legislator having their own personal
experience to bring to it.
Eve: Back in
Maryland, in the Crouches’ neighborhood, where all this diffusion started, the
HOA has a new president, and it seems a culture shift is underway. He has
stopped the HOA’s landscaping company from mowing along the streambeds in order
to create wildlife meadows.
The bigger picture, Janet
says, climate change, species loss, it’s overwhelming. But her and Jeff’s
garden, filled with native plants and pollinators. It’s tangible.
Janet: When
you see what happens in your yard, and you see your yard come to life, you want
to do more. And you learn more. You see more new things that you’ve never seen.
The hummingbird moth, for example. The dogbane beetles. The new discoveries are
exciting.
Eve: This is
where she believes she can make a difference. By focusing on what’s close to
home.
Janet: I think
we all have these opportunities to do things in our lives, to help, to help the
planet, to help your yard. And you feel like maybe you can have some impact
there. Maybe you can make a change there. And so that’s how we focus, even
though the focus is always this much bigger thing.
Teresa Cotsirilos: A quick
update to this episode. This past summer, Illinois passed its own law
preventing homeowners associations from banning native plants. These policies,
inspired by the Crouches’s Lawn War, are still
spreading.
This episode was reported
by Eve Abrams and produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer, Alyssa Jeong Perry.
Additional reporting by me, Teresa Cotsirilos. Special thanks to Cara Buckley
at the New York Times. Buzzkill is a production of the Food & Environment
Reporting Network and is distributed by PRX.
Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy are Buzzkill’s
executive producers. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by
Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi Barr is our fact
checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation.
And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
Thanks for listening.
Hey, this is Buzzkill. I’m
Teresa Cotsirilos. In 2022, some climate activists smuggled two cans of tomato
soup into London’s National Gallery. Two of them popped the tops off … and
splashed the soup across Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” Then they pulled out some
glue, squeezed it onto their fingers, and glued their hands to the wall.
News Clip: Are you
more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our
planet and people?
Teresa:
Fortunately, a little soup and glue didn’t actually harm the painting.
These activists were with
the group Just Stop Oil, and these food-related stunts have just kept
happening.
News Clip: There
was no smile for the “Mona Lisa,” the world’s most famous artwork
vandalized.
News Clip: Cameras
are rolling as climate change protesters threw mashed potatoes on a $110
million painting.
Teresa: One of
those activists is yelling, our agricultural system is sick (in French), which
let’s be honest is basically the tagline for this podcast.
So my first reaction to
this was, how does throwing things at art help the planet exactly? Well, this
kind of confrontational direct action might be widely unpopular, but some
social scientists say it can also be pretty effective.
Love him or hate him, the
soup throwers drew attention to a dire problem.
Our planet is engulfed in
multiple environmental crises. There’s been a 69 percent drop in the world’s
wildlife population, and scientists project that the climate and pollution
crises alone could also kill tens of millions of people. The sheer scale of these
crises has mobilized a lot of people. There have been anti-fossil fuel protests
and anti-deforestation protests.
News Clip: Thousands
of German police vans are being deployed to the illegal tree houses in the Hambach Forest this weekend, where people have chained
themselves ...
Teresa: People
are fighting back against the biodiversity and pollinator crises, too.
News Clip: Now, as
soon as we got here, we saw a load of activists in masks. They came and threw
petrol on these barricades that they’ve made, set them on fire …
Teresa: Some of
the actions they’ve taken are big, bold, and dangerous. Other actions are
pretty small scale. All of them have something in common: People who are just
not willing to take no for an answer.
In our last episode, we
brought you the story of an Indigenous community that decided to move away from
industrial farming and draw on their traditions and cultural knowledge to
balance food production and sustainability.
In this episode, we’re
going to leave our very rural food system behind for a bit and travel to the
suburbs of Maryland. Buzzkill reporter Eve Abrams shares the story of a fight
with a homeowner’s association that helped fuel a movement.
From the Food &
Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill, Episode 4, The Lawn War.
Eve: Oh, I
see a lot of flowers.
Siri: Your
destination is on the left.
Eve: Oh
yeah, of course it is. It’s a sunny morning in July, and I’ve just driven into
a leafy suburban neighborhood in Columbia, Maryland. At the end of a
cul-de-sac, I pull up in front of a house whose yard definitely stands out from
its neighbors.
The yard is full of
plants. It’s a storm of flowers, erupting in color. And around me, birdsong and
insects mix with people sounds. The yard is beautiful, but actually, that’s not
why I’m here. I came because this yard is kind of ground zero in a battle playing
out across the country. And it’s a battle over big questions.
About the power ordinary
people have to protect the environment and other species.
Hi. You must be Jeff. Hi.
Hi. So nice to meet you.
Jeff and Janet Crouch meet
me at their front door. They’re around 60. Jeff’s a therapist with long,
graying hair that’s pulled back in a ponytail. Janet works in HR for the
federal government. Her long blonde hair is loose. Her toenails are painted
pink. They show me around their front yard. A lot of their flowers are really
tall. So tall, Jeff can’t even see over some of them.
How tall are you,
Jeff?
Jeff: Uh, six
feet, about. There’s a lot of flowers here. Hundreds and hundreds. That’s
phlox. It’s like a bunch of little flowers, but dozens of them. And the
butterflies, this is it. When they come, this is what they love.
Eve: This is
what the Crouches’ yard is all about. Creating a habitat, a home, really, for
the plants and animals our ecosystem needs. The Crouches’ yard is buzzing with
pollinators. Butterflies, sure, but also birds, bees, wasps, beetles, you name
it.
All browsing on a native
plant buffet.
Jeff: See the
bee?
Janet: We have
a lot of native bees in our yard. They’re ground nesters.
Eve: So you
were saying when you first started planting it wasn’t native plants?
Jeff: We
didn’t know anything about it. This is 20 years ago.
Eve: Janet
and Jeff Crouch bought their house in 1999. It’s on a street lined with oak
trees. Their backyard ends in a county park. When they moved in, their front
yard looked a lot like the others on their street. Grass. But then Jeff started
the garden. Over the years, he kept adding beds, until almost the entire yard
was covered and no longer matched the cookie-cutter look of the neighborhood.
But no one seemed to mind.
And what they were doing, it wasn’t just about aesthetics. Over the years, Jeff
and Janet became passionate about a particular style of landscaping focused on
providing habitat for plants and animals.
Janet: Our
yard is alive with all kinds of creatures, and then you look around, and I
mean, you see striped grass.
Eve: Striped
because of the way it’s mowed. People love their green, pristine lawns, and
that’s fine. But it’s something decorative, not a living, natural environment
for plants and animals. Some scientists think of lawns as an ecological dead
zone. A monoculture, with practically nothing growing other than the grass.
And changing that,
building a habitat, matters a lot to Janet and Jeff.
Janet: You
have a piece of land that you’re the steward of, and you have a responsibility
to yourself, your neighbors, and everyone else, the Earth, the animals, the
plants, because we’re all connected.
Eve: I know
how this might sound, it’s just a yard, really small in the grand scheme of
things. But trust me, this chaotic flower garden is where something big starts,
a story that illustrates how change happens. Janet says everything with their
garden was great, until it wasn’t.
Janet: It was
beautiful and exciting. And we loved it. And then, you know, then the axe came
down.
Eve: The axe
arrived in September 2017 in the form of a letter from Jeff and Janet’s
homeowners association, known as an HOA.
When she opened it, Janet
had no idea this letter would mark the beginning of a yearslong fight. A battle
over native habitat versus the traditional American lawn. It was a standard HOA
letter.
Janet: You
know, you need to pull weeds and mow your grass. Do seasonal maintenance. I was
not happy, but I thought, okay, well, we didn’t really have many weeds. And so
we thought probably they’re talking about our plants, which are not
weeds.
Eve: Jeff and
Janet had lived in their house for over 17 years at this point. This was the
first time they’d ever heard a complaint. And they weren’t sure how to respond.
Clearly, their HOA didn’t get what they were doing with their yard, so the
Crouches turned to their secret weapon, Janet’s sister.
Nancy Lawson: I’m
Nancy Lawson, and I am a habitat consultant in that I help people transform
their spaces from lawn or something similarly lifeless to wildlife
habitat.
Eve: Nancy
has written a lot about native plant gardening. Her first book is called The
Humane Gardener, another is Wildscape, and over the
years she’s helped Janet and Jeff understand their garden’s potential impact on
the ecosystem.
Nancy: Janet
was very upset, but we talked through it and decided that we were going to
respond with a letter that explained why she had this habitat.
Eve: For
years, Nancy has been teaching people about the many problems with grass lawns.
Here are just a few. First, the species we plant, like ryegrass and Kentucky
bluegrass, are not native plants, and their short roots can’t absorb all the
water we and the skies put on them.
As much as half of that
water runs off, carrying fertilizer and weed killer into our rivers and oceans,
which helps create massive dead zones. Then there’s mowing, which stops grass
from flowering. So basically, there’s no habitat or food for animals, no leaves
or decay for them to nest in or to replenish the soil.
And those gas-powered lawn
mowers? They dump millions of tons of pollutants in our air each year. It’s
important to say, the kind of gardening Nancy advocates for, it’s not new. The
Crouches aren’t eco-gardening pioneers, but the science and philosophy
underpinning Nancy’s work, apparently, it hadn’t made its way into her sister’s
HOA.
Not yet. So Nancy saw an
opportunity for education.
Nancy: I mean,
otherwise, what is the point of promoting this type of habitat if people can’t
actually follow through with it?
Eve: Nancy
helped Janet and Jeff look through their yard for anything that was actually a
weed, and figure out what to say to the HOA.
Janet: So, we
wrote back and told the HOA that Jeff had mowed, we’d picked out some Japanese stiltgrass. And that we had an environmentally friendly
landscape.
Eve: She
hoped that would be that, but it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The people in
homeowners associations have a well-earned reputation for being busybodies. So
much so that the insurance company Geico spoofed them in an ad.
Geico Ad: Oh, we
love our new home. Neighborhood’s great. Amazing school district. The HOA has
been very involved.
Eve: The
camera pans to two HOA representatives, one holding a clipboard.
Geico Ad: These
shrubs aren’t board approved. Thank you. Violation. Violation.
Eve: Then the
HOA rep uses a chainsaw to slice off the family’s mailbox.
Geico Ad: Thanks,
Cynthia.
Eve: HOAs
tend to be controlled by a small group of people, the Cynthias
of the world, who enforce the association’s rules. These rules are often laid
out in a covenant all homeowners agree to. Jeff and Janet’s covenant says each
lot must be “regularly maintained and repaired and kept in a neat, clean,
and sanitary condition.” It also says grass and shrubbery must be “regularly
cut or trimmed.” In November 2017, two months after the Crouches received the
first HOA letter, they heard back.
It was a notice to cease
and desist. Clearly, the HOA was not impressed by the Crouches’ gardening
philosophy. The HOA’s attorney wrote, “You have allowed your lawn to grow into
what you call an environmentally sensitive and wildlife friendly habitat.” He
put those phrases in quotes, by the way. He goes on, “Your yard is not the
place for such a habitat, because it could have a negative impact upon yours
and your neighbors’ property values.”
Janet: This is
our house. This is our property. And immediately I said, No, we’re not going to
do this. You’re not going to bully us in our own home. You’re not going to take
out the garden that Jeff has spent the last years of his life working on for
us, for the community, for, for the Earth. You know, I’ll do everything I can
to, to save it.
I was enraged by that
letter. And hurt and sad and scared. I was terrified.
Eve: Is this
typical for you?
Janet: If, if
somebody, yes. If somebody’s being bullied or somebody’s being harmed, I mean,
I don’t go to extremes. I try to figure out how to fix things. But I don’t like
bullies.
Eve: Janet
got to work. First, she found a lawyer.
Jeff Kahntroff: Janet
and Jeff did what good homeowners are supposed to do, and they tried to resolve
the issue on their own.
Eve: Jeff Kahntroff is an attorney in Crofton, Maryland.
Jeff: And
then when they received a threatening letter from the law firm, that’s when
they reached out to me.
Eve: Kahntroff works for a unique law
firm, he says Maryland’s only firm which specializes in defending homeowners in
disputes with HOAs. And he told me what makes the Crouches unique is they were
willing to fight.
Jeff: But the
Crouches are the very, very, very small percentage. What typically happens is
the HOA sends you a threatening letter. You realize your options are to comply
or to spend money, and 99.99 percent of the people simply comply.
Eve: The
Crouches were not going to simply comply, even though the stakes were
mounting.
Jeff: The
Crouches were threatened with the HOA coming and ripping out their landscaping.
They were facing daily fines and a lawsuit, and what do you do? I mean, you
don’t want to remove your landscaping. You don’t want to be fined and you don’t
want to face a lawsuit. So it’s not like there were good options there.
Eve: Kahntroff wrote a letter to the
HOA’s lawyer on the Crouches’ behalf. The first of many letters that went back
and forth between the lawyers for months.
I reached out to the HOA’s
lawyers as well as the HOA’s president at the time. I wanted to hear their side
of the story. It just seems so extreme, but no one has gotten back to me.
Janet called every nature
advocacy organization she could think of. She made flyers for her neighbors,
attended environmental events, and posted on Facebook, where lots of people
shared support and similar stories. They also offered ideas, like contacting
their local legislators, which Janet also did. More on that later.
It was months before the
Crouches finally learned what started this. One neighbor, their next-door
neighbor, had complained. For years. Beginning back in 2012. Janet keeps all of
the documents related to the battle over their yard in binders. She flips through
one, and pulls out an email this one neighbor sent the HOA’s attorney in August
2018.
Janet: Okay.
“My blood pressure rises every time I look at his property. Property values
will decrease due to the mess around his house.” Can you keep going? “I have
never complained to the owner of 10895 about his lawn …”
Eve: The
neighbor says he complained for five years anonymously. And then two more
signing his name.
Janet: “I
couldn’t take it anymore. He needs to pull everything out of the ground and
plant grass. It’s supposed to be a lawn, not a jungle.”
Eve: A lawn,
not a jungle. The neighbor never spoke to Janet or Jeff about his concerns, and
he wouldn’t speak with me either. I called this neighbor many times, wrote him
a letter, even rang his doorbell, but he never responded.
In September 2018, a full
year after the HOA’s first letter arrived, the Crouches got a chance to present
their case in a hearing. It was organized by the HOA, with the HOA’s attorney
presiding.
It took place in a
conference room of their HOA’s management company. They sat around a big table.
Janet and Jeff didn’t feel comfortable, but they knew this was the next step in
the process, and they came prepared.
They brought testimonials
from neighbors who loved their yard, and pictures of other yards in their HOA.
Also with plants other than all grass. Nancy, Jane’s sister, the landscaping
expert, she spoke. Their attorney pointed out there was no HOA rule requiring
only grass.
And then again, they
waited. Months later, the Crouches found out they lost the hearing. They
weren’t surprised. They talked over their options. Filing a lawsuit is when
things get expensive, typically costing tens of thousands of dollars, says
their lawyer, Jeff Kahntroff.
Jeff: It’s a
lot at stake. So you need a really strong, principled homeowner who’s willing
to take a lot of risk to even fight any of these battles. And the Crouches were
those rare property owners.
Eve: This is
the point where most people give up. But the Crouches, at least for the moment,
decided to spend even more money and fight. They called Kahntroff
and told him, go ahead, sue the HOA.
Janet: I was
happy because things were finally progressing. But then the other shoe did drop
because they countersued us.
Eve: This was
not what the Crouches had hoped for, and now they were learning the risks of
pursuing a resolution through the legal system.
Jeff: They
could do anything to us, a judge, if he loves grass.
Janet: Yeah,
so it just, it became clear that it was more of a crapshoot than we realized.
And one of the things that was hanging over our head the entire time was that
if we lost in court, we could be ordered by the judge to pay their legal fees.
Jeff: One
hundred thousand.
Eve: The
HOA’s legal fees: $100,000.
Janet: And so
we couldn’t sustain that. We couldn’t do that.
Eve: And so
finally, in December 2020, they settled. But after all that, it turns out,
really, Crouches kind of won. They got to keep their garden. In return, they
agreed to leave several feet as a buffer between their yard and their next-door
neighbors’ yards. Which, turns out, they already had. And they agreed to take
out one flower bed. Janet points to where it used to be.
Janet: This
was all a flower bed.
Eve: Right
along the sidewalk.
Janet:
Yes.
Jeff: So we
had to take that out as part of the settlement agreement. That’s the only thing
we took out though. That’s the only thing they got.
After they paid $100,000,
we paid 60 for them to get four feet.
Eve: $60,000
in legal fees. All for a debate over why we garden and what we plant. But the
Crouches also got something in their settlement, something they fought for, something
that mattered to them more than the money: the right to tell their story.
Janet: And
there are a lot of these stories out there, but people aren’t allowed to tell
them because they sign an agreement that says that they can’t speak about it.
But I insisted that we have something in the agreement that said that we can
speak about it. So, we have the ability and opportunity to let other people
know that there is hope, that you can fight back, and that you should fight
back. Because you can help other people.
Eve: This
insistence, that she and Jeff be able to talk freely about their case, it’s one
reason the fight over their yard ended up fueling something much bigger.
Earlier in this story, I
mentioned that the Crouches reached out to their local legislators. That’s how
they came in contact with Terri Hill, their representative in the Maryland
House of Delegates, and also Hill’s legislative director, Mary Catherine Cochran.
Eve: Do you
remember the email?
Mary Catherine Cochran: I do, I
do remember. I can’t tell you, I can’t quote it, but I remember seeing it and
saying, oh, that, that, I know where that neighborhood is.
Eve: Cochran
grew up on an old farm, not far from where she lives now in Ellicott City,
Maryland. When I met her there, I quickly saw how fortunate it was that the
Crouches found her. Cochran took me out to her back deck and showed me her
yard.
She recently stopped
mowing a small section of it. Native persimmon, oak, and maple trees are
springing up. Volunteering, as it’s called. And she’s letting them. But
gradually, so her neighbors can acclimate.
Mary Catherine: Folks
on one side have children, and they worry about [00:23:00] ticks.
People that didn’t have that same experience that I did, that kind of entitled
experience of being out in nature, they’re creating these little fortresses of
yards around them.
Eve: Little
fortresses of yards. I’ll come back to Cochran, but first let’s take a moment
to talk about these fortresses. Because what she’s describing has quite a
history. I mean, where did this idea even come from? That our green spaces
should be grass. Well, Europe. In medieval times, castles were surrounded by
grasslands rather than trees, because it was important to see who was coming,
for safety.
By the 17th century, it
was fashionable for English landowners to surround their estates with short
grass, often grazed by sheep. This showed off their wealth. Like, I am so rich,
I can leave this land just for my animals. When colonists came to North America,
think the forebears of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, they brought these
aesthetics with them.
Jefferson, in particular,
loved the look of a controlled landscape. Like Versailles’ carpet of green in
his beloved France. Jefferson is famous for replacing all sorts of native
plants with species from other ecosystems. And the people he enslaved did the
yard work to keep his grounds looking lush. In a book called Crabgrass
Frontier, about the suburbanization of the United States, historian Kenneth
Jackson writes:
By 1870, the yard was
expected to be large and private, a barrier. A kind of verdant moat, separating
the household from the threats and temptations of the city.
Only the rich could afford
this in England, but in the U.S., a well-tended lawn became “the mark of
suburban respectability.” After World War II, U.S. suburbs, and grass, took
off. The epitome of this was the planned development Levittown.
News Clip: Home
brings a sense of security to a man. And to every woman, her home means a
setting for gracious living. And now let’s go to Levittown, a modern garden
community in Long Island, New York.
Eve: William
J. Levitt famously said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a
communist. He has too much to do.” Levitt handed the homeowners literature on
how to maintain their grass and their neat rows of bushes.
News Clip: Each of
the Levittown home lots has 34 pieces of shrubbery. Multiply that by 16,000 and
you have a job …
Eve: These
days, in so many suburban neighborhoods across the U.S., lawns still basically
look like this. If you google lawn care tips, you’ll find video after video on
how to maintain your own personal carpet of grass.
Google Clip: That’s
when you want to start regular mowing good practices, and that just means mow
at least once a week. Twice a week is really best …
Eve: Today,
landscaping is a $314 billion-dollar industry, an industry invested in
maintaining grass as the cultural symbol of the good life, upstanding and
controlled. Even Jeff Crouch told me he once thought that way, too.
Jeff: The
mindset is that grass is everything. It’s beautiful. And I call it being
brainwashed. Everybody is brainwashed that only thinks of grass as a
possibility. We grew up that way. How else are you supposed to think?
Eve: This is
the culture and tradition the Crouches’ HOA believed it was upholding. But
Jeff’s sister-in-law, Nancy Lawson, says this tradition has wreaked havoc on
our ecosystem. We need a culture shift, something which starts just by seeing
yards like Jeff and Janet’s.
Nancy: You
know, there’s been research showing that once you get three people on a street
doing it, then that is sort of like the critical mass that’s needed for more
people to consider it.
Eve: I found
a bunch of surveys showing more and more people are definitely considering and
purchasing native plants. On top of that, communities around the country are
requiring native plants in public landscaping, as well as encouraging,
sometimes even subsidizing homeowners planting natives. This trend is
significant because private land is where so much change should happen.
Mary Catherine Cochran,
the legislative director, understands that. Standing on her back deck in
Maryland, she quotes this statistic.
Mary Catherine: You
know, something like 86 percent of the land east of the Mississippi is in
private hands. And so if we as private citizens don’t start doing a little bit,
or what we can, you know …
Eve: Cochran
trails off, but her point is clear. If we’re going to protect habitats for
pollinators and all the other creatures in our ecosystem, we are going to need
private citizens, like the Crouches, to be good stewards of their land and to
fight for that right. So when Cochran got that email from the Crouches back in
2019, she went to her boss, Terri Hill.
I sat down with Delegate
Hill in a park near her house.
Terri Hill: She
brought the letter to my attention and said, I think there may be something you
can do to fix this. And so I said, well, let’s, let’s have at it then.
Eve: Cochran
and staff started researching, looking for laws they could use as a model. They
found laws protecting the rights of homeowners and HOAs to install solar
panels, and other laws, in hot, dry places, granting homeowners the right to
plant cactuses or have rock gardens, rather than grass lawns, which require a
lot of water.
As far as pollinator
health, there are a bunch of laws restricting things, like using harmful
chemicals. They couldn’t find a law specifically allowing homeowners to plant
pollinator gardens, or native plant gardens. But they’d found enough to build
on. An important part of the process was just defining what they were talking
about.
Here’s Delegate
Hill.
Terri:
Low-impact landscaping. It means landscaping techniques that conserve water,
lower maintenance costs, provide pollution prevention, and create habitat for
wildlife.
Eve: Low-impact
landscaping. The bill moved through committee.
Mary Catherine: And we
really were pretty certain that the HOAs were not going to let this go through
the lobby. We thought that we’d get a pretty big battle from them, but we
didn’t. They put in a little softer language that left them with a little bit
of control. And even sort of the, the curmudgeonly, uh, Republican old guard,
you know, that can be just to get bad against anything, sometimes we’re like,
Oh yeah, who wouldn’t want to save the bees, you know? So I was like, okay. So
it, it, it went through surprisingly easy.
Eve: Janet
Crouch and her sister Nancy went to the capital, Annapolis, to give testimony.
One of Hill’s Republican colleagues suggested an amendment requiring
maintenance. Basically, you can’t just let your garden run wild. Hill added it.
Terri: You
know, you can’t just have a random wild garden that’s going to have vermin and
cause the rats to come into the community. But I think it’s pretty clear that
what it says is this is a good thing, and you need to figure out a way to allow
homeowners to do sustainable gardening. So what we’re really saying, it can’t
be about your aesthetics.
Right? You can’t just say
it, it doesn’t look good. I mean, what are aesthetics? It’s subjective.
Eve: Mary
Catherine Cochran.
Mary Catherine: And our
practices of how we landscape, you know, comes from the old white guys from
Europe, right? Who wanted to bring Europe here and have these manicured lawns
and these specimen trees. And it’s not the way this area of the world should
be. And we can’t maintain it that way if we want to survive.
Eve: Which
might sound dramatic, but Cochran pays attention to what’s happening with our [climate
and our ecosystem.
Famed ecologist E.O.
Wilson called insects the little things that run the world. And these animals
are not doing well, because humans are poisoning them and destroying their
habitat. To Cochran, this legislation was a step, a small step, but a step
toward righting our ecological ship. In 2021, the bill passed. Almost no one in
either chamber voted against it. Just like that, Maryland established the first
state law enshrining a resident’s right to landscape their yards for
biodiversity. And it all started because one couple refused to cave.
And then, it spread.
Mattie Daughtry: The
bill idea actually came based off of, uh, my father was following a couple in
Maryland who had tried to do the same thing and were blocked by their
homeowners association.
Eve: This is
Mattie Daughtry, a state senator from Maine. Her dad is a soil scientist, and
he sent her a New York Times article about the Crouches and the new Maryland
law. Daughtry got excited. And then she got to work, writing her own bill, and
adapting it to where she lives. On the coast of Maine.
Mattie: And one
of the things we talked about actually to sort of root it back to the district
that I represent, which is my hometown of Brunswick, we have one of the most
important habitats for clams.
And last year we had a
huge clam die-off in the clam flats. And one of the things that they were
actually able to track it to was runoff from lawn fertilizers and pesticides.
And it killed over four acres of soft-shell clams. And so when we’re working on
this bill, we saw firsthand how the stuff that was being used to keep our lawns
green was bigger than just the grass. It was literally killing off a very large
industry. And I mean, in Brunswick alone our shellfish industry is worth $13
million. And so even though some people tease me, you know, it’s just a B bill
and it’s just about people’s lawns, it’s a lot bigger than that.
Eve:
Daughtry and her staff modeled their bill after Maryland’s, and then they
presented it to the Maine legislature. Daughtry even used the Crouches’ stories
to help sell her bill.
Mattie: Yep, we
quoted them right off in the beginning of our testimony. Literally, the first
thing we led off with the committee is talking about what the Crouches went
through.
Eve:
Daughtry also passed out that New York Times article about the Crouches, their
court case, and the Maryland law. And her bill passed by a comfortable margin.
It went into effect in July 2023.
Mattie: It is a
mouthful. So, it is “An act to promote water conservation and water quality and
create habitat for wildlife, including pollinator species, by protecting
low-impact landscaping.”
Eve: So,
we’ve gone from one family in Maryland who refused to give in to its HOA, to a
law that covers all of Maryland, and now to a law in Maine. It’s spreading.
Turns out, there’s a name for this.
Joshua Basseches: Policy
diffusion is a concept that political scientists invented.
Eve: Joshua Basseches is an assistant professor of environmental
studies and public policy at Tulane University.
Joshua: You
know, we have 50 states. Louis Brandeis called them the laboratories of
democracy. They’re actually really important, and they pass a ton of policies
that affect our everyday lives. And they sometimes are in silos, but more often
than not, there’s some coordination and communication, which then results in
policy diffusion.
Eve: This
term describes how lots of laws spread, but Basseches
says policy diffusion has been especially important for environmental policy.
Joshua: The
action had been at the state level entirely until President Biden passed the
Inflation Reduction Act. And so for decades, the only climate policies that
were on the books in the United States were at the state level. And in the
environmental area, more and more of the things that are going to need to
happen in order to transition to a cleaner energy economy are going to happen
at the state level, because that’s where they have happened.
Eve: And the
so-called diffusion continues. Also, in July of 2023, Minnesota passed a law
protecting natural landscaping. And there’s another law like this in the works
in New York. And it’s not just politicians spreading these ideas. Mattie
Daughtry, the senator from Maine, says regular folks and social media are part
of the policy diffusion.
Mattie: One of
the things that I’ve actually found really interesting is the bill has been
getting a lot of traction on Instagram through a lot of seed companies. And
more and more gardeners are finding out about it. So, it’s sort of happening on
a grassroots level as more people are learning about it. And it just passed, so
I think we’re just sort of starting to try to get more states to take it on,
too.
Eve: So, is
that something you’re actively doing, is trying to diffuse?
Mattie: A
little bit. I think any lawmaker and policymaker, one of the most satisfying
things is when you see other people work on that same idea. It all comes back
to word of mouth and stories and seeing the impact on a human level, because,
you know, the Crouches’ case showed what it’s like in a homeowners association
and what they are hoping to be able to do as individual citizens. And then for
me, I was able to take that story and think about my own experience planting
like this, but then also seeing the impact of fertilizers and lawns on the
shellfish industry here. And so that was how it became my story.
And I can’t wait to read
about the next state and another legislator having their own personal
experience to bring to it.
Eve: Back in
Maryland, in the Crouches’ neighborhood, where all this diffusion started, the
HOA has a new president, and it seems a culture shift is underway. He has
stopped the HOA’s landscaping company from mowing along the streambeds in order
to create wildlife meadows.
The bigger picture, Janet
says, climate change, species loss, it’s overwhelming. But her and Jeff’s
garden, filled with native plants and pollinators. It’s tangible.
Janet: When
you see what happens in your yard, and you see your yard come to life, you want
to do more. And you learn more. You see more new things that you’ve never seen.
The hummingbird moth, for example. The dogbane beetles. The new discoveries are
exciting.
Eve: This is
where she believes she can make a difference. By focusing on what’s close to
home.
Janet: I think
we all have these opportunities to do things in our lives, to help, to help the
planet, to help your yard. And you feel like maybe you can have some impact
there. Maybe you can make a change there. And so that’s how we focus, even
though the focus is always this much bigger thing.
Teresa Cotsirilos: A quick
update to this episode. This past summer, Illinois passed its own law
preventing homeowners associations from banning native plants. These policies,
inspired by the Crouches’s Lawn War, are still
spreading.
This episode was reported
by Eve Abrams and produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer, Alyssa Jeong Perry.
Additional reporting by me, Teresa Cotsirilos. Special thanks to Cara Buckley
at the New York Times. Buzzkill is a production of the Food & Environment
Reporting Network and is distributed by PRX.
Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy are Buzzkill’s
executive producers. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by
Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sandra Lawson Ndu. Naomi Barr is our fact
checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation.
And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
Thanks for listening.
