Rethinking the College Campus Lawn

The Arts quad at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Here’s a great quote from this article in a San Francisco newspaper: “We had succeeded with the old model of landscaping with beautiful manicured lawns and gardens and trees. However, it’s resource intensive. It takes lots of inputs from the outside and at a macro level, some of our urban biology — like birds and pollinators — has really suffered. The paradigm has changed. We are now redefining urban land stewardship as creating complex landscapes with intricate ecological webs.”

Some folks take the idea of reducing the size of lawns — whether it be college quads, hospital grounds, condo commons, public parks or their back yards — as sacrilege.

It’s nice to see at least some people rethinking this paradigm: http://www.sfsu.edu/~news/2010/fall/27.html