The other morning, I was enjoying a leisurely stroll to the gym. I was doing something dumb on my phone when suddenly, I was struck by a splash of cold water. I looked up, expecting an errant water balloon or an ephemeral summer shower. I was instead greeted by a cold, unfeeling black cylinder emerging mysteriously from the ground. I had once again become the victim of the panopticon of automated sprinklers, whose watering paths frequently fly carelessly in the face of major pedestrian thruways. This 10 a.m. shower is emblematic of something larger on our campus: a strange grass fetish.
This obsession is all around us. The Dartmouth grounds crew has a special “turf manager” who is in charge of maintaining athletic fields and the campus landscape. The topic of grass maintenance had a moment of stardom when the College’s Instagram posted a reel in late March 2024 announcing commencement speaker Roger Federer. In it, College President Sian Leah Beilock has a staged, stressed out conversation with one of the groundskeepers, asking him if he was sure that the grass on the green will be lush for commencement in June. It seems possible to me that grass health even affects our campus politics. Why else would administrators be so intent on preventing students from creating encampments?
Walking around campus, evidence of this obsession manifests everywhere. Groundskeepers put temporary fences up in order to prevent students from walking on the grass. They reseed areas that have turned into patches of dirt because of winter frost or excessive foot traffic. There are also the notorious aforementioned sprinklers. This obsession is not only ridiculous, but is an immense waste of resources.
This is not a Dartmouth-specific problem. The American lawn has existed as a symbol of independence and the suburban dream for a very long time. In reality, lawns are a dangerous monocrop that frequently crowd out local plant species, causing harm in local ecosystems. They don’t allow for local fauna, the basis of any functional ecosystem, to develop as robustly as they otherwise would. It is also clear that lawns are incredibly resource intensive – they require regular cutting, reseeding and blowing to maintain the idealized and clean aesthetic that so many people aim for. This is especially true in New Hampshire, where cold winters mean that reseeding is frequently necessary, according to landscaping experts.
There are many alternatives to the standard grass lawns we have at Dartmouth. One of the easiest ones is white clover – it’s low maintenance, rugged, grows vigorously without fertilizer, is drought resistant and looks remarkably similar to grass. Clover requires less water than traditional lawns and clover flowers help to support biodiversity, according to a study published in the Journal of Insect Conservation. Slower growth rates means that clover lawns need to be mowed less, which can help reduce emissions and maintenance costs. Transitioning to a clover lawn is also very simple. The process simply entails seeding clover over the already existing lawn.
Beyond clover, there are other, more ambitious alternatives. The cultivation of pollinator gardens could provide even more dramatic benefits for local biodiversity, including attracting awesome friends like hummingbirds and butterflies. Replacing parts of lawns that are less trafficked with pollinator gardens may be a great way to replace grass that requires unnecessarily high maintenance.
I understand that spaces like the Green are incredibly important and symbolic for the College – transitioning away from grass doesn’t mean that we have to change all spaces. Even moderate changes to some parts of the Dartmouth campus could yield massive benefits for the environment, with minimal changes to functionality. There are many lawns that are less trafficked, and I bet you could change them for the environment’s benefit without many noticing.
I’m not sure what it is that keeps our campus covered in grass. Maybe it’s inertia. Maybe it’s a strange obsession with optics that I have written about before. Maybe it’s a strange pressure to conform to the traditional image of an elite western university. If it’s any of these things, that’s pretty dumb. Dartmouth is fundamentally a weird place full of people that love to play dress up and dance to welcome our new students. We shouldn’t be afraid to look a little bit different in the lawn department. And who knows, if we plant some clovers, it might just bring us some luck.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
