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26. Indianapolis
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Anthropocene Reviewed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humanity and the Environment
Health, Disease, and Society
Community and Equality
Technology and the Internet
Summary
Analysis
Green believes that if aliens came to visit Earth, they might think that human’s worship Poa pratensis, Kentucky bluegrass, like a god, since so many people keep it as their lawn. More land is dedicated to lawn grass in the United States than any other plant, and it also requires about one-third of all residential water use. This is in addition to the fertilizers and pesticides needed to help it grow. While Green admits that grass lawns can be useful for sports, he believes that for homes there are other, equally beautiful alternatives for grass. And yet in spite of this, Green himself still has a lawn. He likes how grass brings him closer to nature, but he wishes caring for it was more personal and closer to proper gardening than just using a lawn mower. He gives Kentucky bluegrass 2 stars.
Lawns are a common element of 21st-century life, but Green tries to get people to reconsider them by considering how, to an alien, it might look like humans worship grass as a god. He exaggerates slightly for comic effect, but he supplements his humor with statistics that support his point that humans spend an enormous and illogical amounts of resources on maintaining lawns. While Green disapproves of these wasted resources, due to their contributions to pollution and climate change, he nevertheless keeps a lawn himself, showing how it can be difficult to go against the crowd.
Active
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