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

全球城市化的一些最重要的问题是现代城市居民在日常生活过程中造成的环境外部性。这些问题以极其复杂而著称，它们被聚集成更大的规模，但却是由个人的分类选择形成的。此外，这些日常决策的平凡使得它们很容易被忽视，因此城市生态问题仍然没有得到充分的分析。这种问题的一个典型例子，也是水污染本身的一个极其严重的非点源，是美国家庭在管理他们的财产时存放的除草、杀虫和营养化学品。在美国，这些化学品在草坪上的施用量与现代农业的每公顷相当，而且往往超过现代农业。尽管有环保意识和教育，但这种沉积仍在继续增加。这项研究使用密集和广泛的方法论成分来研究化学应用和管理的问题。这项研究将首先进行一项全国性的电话调查，使用在早些时候的全州调查中预先测试的工具，对解释化学品使用变化的经济和人口因素进行定量评估。这将伴随着一项基于密集访谈的市政调查，评估房主行为与环境美学、意识、观点和感受的关系。该研究还将重点分析草坪化学工业的营销实践，并对全国范围内的草坪覆盖率进行评估。通过创建广泛而深入的研究方案来分析这一城市环境问题，该研究形成了城市生态学研究计划的基础。它不仅寻求对草坪化学实践的解释，而且更广泛地解释为什么个人参与具有深远(如果看不见)环境影响的活动。它质疑他们逻辑背后的社会和经济驱动力是什么，并试图将他们的行为与环境变化的更大模式联系起来。因此，这项工作将有助于制定一个统一的人类/环境研究计划，将城市居民的行动与全球变化的更广泛模式联系起来。

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.