Elizabeth Kolbert has a great piece entitled Turf War in the New Yorker that sums up the history and hazards of the American Lawn. She mentions an astonishing figure that:

Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted.

Read the full story.