Assessing and Explaining Consumer Landscape Practices: Towards an Ecology of the City

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Some of the most significant problems of an urbanizing globe are environmental externalities created by modern city dwellers in the course of their daily lives. These problems are notable for extreme complexity, being aggregated into larger scales but formed from the disaggregated choices of individuals. The very ordinariness of these daily decisions, moreover, makes them easy to overlook, so that problems in urban ecology remain under-analyzed. An exemplary case of such a problem, and an extremely serious non-point source of water pollution in its own right, is the deposition by American households of herbicidal, insecticidal, and nutrient chemicals in management of their property. These chemicals are applied to lawns in the United States at a rate per hectare that matches, and often exceeds, that of modern agriculture. Despite environmental awareness and education, such deposition continues to increase. This research examines the problem of chemical application and management using both intensive and extensive methodological components. The research will first conduct a national phone survey, using an instrument pre-tested in an earlier statewide survey, to quantitatively assess economic and demographic factors that explain variations in chemical use. This will be accompanied by an intensive interview-based municipal survey that evaluates the relationship of homeowner behaviors to environmental aesthetics, consciousness, opinions, and feelings. The research will also analyze the lawn chemical industry by focusing on their marketing practices and conduct an assessment of lawn cover nationally.By creating an extensive and intensive research protocol for analysis of this urban environmental problem, the research forms the foundations of a research program in urban ecology. It pursues an explanation not only of lawn chemical practices but more generally of why individuals participate in activities with far-reaching, if invisible, environmental impact. It queries what the driving social and economic forces are behind their logics and seeks to link their behaviors to larger patterns of environmental change. The work will therefore aid in formulation of a unified human/environment research program that connects the actions of city dwellers to broader patterns of global change.