User:KNGeist/Lawns

The origins of the popularity of contemporary lawns comes from 18th century trends replicating the romantic aestheticism of grassy pastoralism from Italian landscape paintings.
==== The reason that lawns are culturally ubiquitous despite the inherent problems they create comes from their adoption into the larger cultural context of urbanization and expansion of the middle class. Lawns then became a means of performing class values for the urban middle class, in which the condition of the lawn becomes representative of moral character and social reliability. ====

How did Pesticide Companies gain the ability to pressure the American middle class into monocultured lawns as a status symbol
Before the first World War, Germany was the world’s leading chemical industry and exported most of the dyes and other chemicals that were used in the United States. War implemented tariffs that stimulated the growth of the chemical industry in the U.S., which made chemistry a prestigious occupation as this industry expanded and became profitable.

Money and ideas flowed back from Europe after the U.S. entered WWI, changing the way Americans interacted with themselves and nature, and the industrialization of war hastened the industrialization of pest control.

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