Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US, when you think about it. Noise pollution, excessive water use, more driving (all those barely-used front lawns take up a ton of space, which pushes everything farther apart by a significant distance). Fuel use and air pollution (mowing, trimming, those damn leaf blowers—though at least some of this is going electric).

> Lawns—especially front lawns—are connected to a weirdly-large number of problems in the US

Adding to that list: The poisoning of every downstream waterway for miles. The further south you go, the worse it is.

Oh yeah, good point. And since they're manicured and sprayed with all kinds of pesticides (and lots of fertilizer, which contributes to the downstream poisoning you note) they're not even helpful for any kind of preservation of natural life. They'd like some kind of taxidermied version of a healthy natural environment.

Driveways can, admittedly, be handy but you don't need a whole lawn for that. Just turn the driveway sideways and butt the whole thing up against the road. Boom, just as much parking and space for trailers or cleaning your boat or whatever, and you can cut out a few meters of lot depth with minimal loss of functionality. Of course, building codes mandate lawns, so that can't happen. Meanwhile I dream of a world where everything's ~10% closer just because we don't have suburban front lawns.

I also sometimes wonder how many amazing parks we could have if half the money everyone put into maintaining their front lawns went to that, instead. Put half the money and half the land into that and we could have an awesome park on every other suburban block, and still save money and space.