A suburban couple was passionate about pollinators, native plants, and living in harmony with nature. Their neighbors were not impressed. This “battle of the backyard” turned out to have national implications.
EPISODE 4 TRANSCRIPT
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.