Lawns by themselves are not nature, they are a controlled, artificial delusion, a superficial

green carpet imposed on the earth with chemicals, machinery and an almost pious obsession

with conformity. The North American lawn - neatly trimmed, aggressively weeded, perfectly

edged - serves as a monument to control, domination, an ingrained fear of the wild and

untamed. A sterile, biologically dead zone, and yet it has become the defining feature of the

suburban dream.

¿How did this come to be, and how did an ecological wasteland become a symbol of

prestige? American lawns can trace their origins back to aristocratic Europe, where only the

wealthiest landowners were able to afford dedicating vast tracts of land to nothing, to grass

for pure appearance, rather than for subsistence reasons. In the 20th century, the postwar

boom and the rise of the suburbs made this aristocratic affectation an expectation for the

middle class. Lawns became the requirement, the unquestioned rule.

And so, entire neighborhoods have been built around an untruth: that a well-kept lawn spells

the mark of a good citizen. A weed is a failure and a dandelion is a menace, but a lawn is not

a sign of life: It's a war zone.

The “perfect lawn” pursuit constitutes an exercise form of environmental degradation since it

is a gradual and relentless slaughter of everything that fails to conform to its narrow and

artificial definition of beauty. Consider the staggering costs: Lawns annually use an estimated

3 trillion gallons of water alone in the United States, and this in a world where entire regions

of Latin America are shrinking, where the rivers of Mexico are dwindling, and where the

glaciers of the Andes are disappearing. In order to keep these artificial green carpets alive,

water that should belong to the forests, to the farms, to the people, is being taken away.

The lawn is a poison-covered killing field. Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides - all deployed in

an everlasting pugnacious contest against nature itself. These chemicals percolate into the

soil, reach the rivers, become widespread in the air. Not only do they stay in North America.

They run off and reach lands that have already suffered enough under the weight of

extractivism and exploitation. Those are the very same companies that sell pesticides for

lawns that poison the Amazon, and those same chemical giants that make billions from

suburban landscapes are the ones profiting from the destruction of indigenous lands.

Venture into the wilds of Latin America - in the depths of the rainforest, high in the

mountains, next to rivers - and you'll perceive the sound of life. The buzzing of insects, the

chirping of birds, the movement of leaves. Feel the circulating water, because in it you will

find the infinite and entwined trace that life exists.

Then step on the lawn once again and you will notice how you find absolutely nothing in it.

The hum of a distant lawnmower, perhaps. But no insects, no wildflowers, no movement. Just

a dead green carpet, chemically disinfected and constantly treated to prevent any weeds from

taking root. The American lawn is a biological desert, a symptom of a culture that only sees

the land as something to be mastered.

The obsession to control not only remains restricted to the gray suburbs of the United States.

It spreads overseas, beyond the borderlands, and engulfs entire continents. The same culture

that fights a war against dandelions declares a warrant against the Amazon. The same system

that clamors for a perfect and uniform grass demands that Latin America remain a supplier of

raw materials, cutting down forests, damming rivers, mining mountains and extracting life to

feed the insatiable hunger of the so-called “first world”.

Just as a lawn obliterates biodiversity in favor of a single controlled crop of lifeless grass,

multinational corporations are eradicating Latin American ecosystems to plant monocultures

of palm oil, soy, sugar cane, and cattle ranches ¿What is a lawn but a smaller version of a

deforested rainforest? North America poisons its own land with its chemicals, and then sends

the companies responsible to Latin America to continue their destruction: mining companies

gutting entire mountains, big oil companies gutting entire mountains, big oil companies

destroying entire forests, and then sending the responsible companies to Latin America to

continue their destruction.

Because it's not enough for them to kill their own land. They have to kill ours as well.

And if you've made it up to this point in your reading, you should also realize one thing.

Talking about a lawn - however realistic it may be - turns out to be a metaphorical figure, for

the lawn is a problem, but this writing is not only about the lawn.

It's a issue about control. About a system that is intolerant towards the natural, scared of

anything it cannot package, standardize and sell for its own economical purposes. The

suburban lawn is nothing but a small-scale reflection of a vastly larger violence, that is, the

same violence that has shaped history, that has dispossessed land, extracted resources, erased

cultures and crushed resistance under the infertile green carpet of colonialism and global

capitalism.

The sod is not merely artificial grass. It's the plantation, the strip mine, the factory farm, the

oil field. It is the reformation of the land to suit an economic machine that demands the

subjugation of ecosystems, of people, of entire nations. The same impulse that demands a

perfect, weed-free lawn is the one that led to the conquest of Latin America, to the parcelling

of land, to the division of rivers, to forced labor, to the extraction of life itself for the benefit

of others.

Colonialism not only took the land, it also modified it to the taste of its colonizers. It

uprooted the native landscapes, burned the forests, paved the once fertile land. ¿And who

profits from it? Not the land. Nor the people who have lived with it for generations. Wealth

flows in one direction: northward. Raw materials are extracted, forests are cut down, rivers

are dammed, and the profits fall into the hands of the same nations that once sent ships to

conquer the land. This is still happening, with different names and tools, but with the same

result.

Over and above the physical destruction, there is another robbery being attempted: the

robbery of culture, knowledge and identity. Those very same agencies that have substituted

sterile monocultures for biodiverse ecosystems are doing the same to human beings. Native

ways of knowing, of caring for the land, of living in balance with nature, have been

expunged, criminalized, repackaged and sold in digestible chunks. The same cultures that

were labeled as “primitive” for planting food, applying medicinal herbs and respecting the

land now see corporations profit from “organic” agriculture, pharmaceuticals patent stolen

plant knowledge and influencers turn ancestral traditions into Instagram aesthetics.

Even rebellion has become a commodified phenomenon. The same wealthy nations that

extract, pollute and exploit currently call themselves “green,” promote sustainable products,

grow PR-friendly forests while continuing to mine lithium, overfish the oceans and dump

toxic waste on the lands of those too powerless to defend themselves and hold their heads up

to them.

They instruct us to recycle while they drown the world in plastic. They tell us to plant trees

while they ravage rainforests. They tell us to buy “green” while they ship us our own

resources wrapped in waste at a higher price. The hypocrisy is relentless. And yet, they

expect silence.

To tear down and murder the lawn is therefore the banishment of delusion. It means rejecting

control, understanding that the struggle for nature is also the struggle against capitalism,

against colonialism, against those who believe that the earth must obey, that people must

serve, that resources exist to be plundered. But as nature fails to obey. Rainforest grows again

and rivers open new paths. Weeds crack the pavement and the earth reclaims what was stolen

from it. And so must we.

The struggle not only consists in reclaiming the land, but in regaining what is left of our own

nature, in recognizing that we are not living outside of it but are part of it, in remembering

that resistance is not only political but also biological, that every tree planted, every

indigenous land defended, every oil pipeline blocked, every stolen tradition vindicated, and

every wildflower that blooms is an act of rebellion against a system that demands that we

submit to it.

Kill the lawn. Let the wild come back. Allow the land to breathe again. And take back

all that was stolen from us.