Living lawns, dying waters the suburban boom, nitrogenous fertilizers, and the nonpoint source pollution dilemma

Technology and Culture

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 652-674

  Whitney, Kristoffer ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FERTILIZER; NITROGEN;

AGRICULTURE; ARTICLE; CHEMISTRY; ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING; ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION; HEALTH; HISTORY; POACEAE; POPULATION; TREE; UNITED STATES; WATER POLLUTION; WATER SUPPLY;

AGRICULTURE; CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES; ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING; FERTILIZERS; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; NITROGEN; POACEAE; SUBURBAN HEALTH; SUBURBAN POPULATION; TREES; UNITED STATES; WATER POLLUTION, CHEMICAL; WATER SUPPLY;

EID: 77958040264     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2010.0033     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. "How to Grow a Better Lawn," Consumer Bulletin, March 1963, 43.
2. Historians have recently done much to elucidate this phenomenon of the twentieth-century landscape. See especially Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn: A History of an 1. American Obsession (Washington, D.C., 1994)
3. Ted Steinberg, American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (New York, 2006);
4. and Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (Philadelphia, 2007). To these stories, I am adding an explicit focus on nitrogenous fertilizers, nutrient pollution, and the gulf between the sociotechnical system of the lawn and the system of water-pollution controls in the United States.
5. For work specific to the origin of American suburbs, see Kenneth Jackson, Crab-grass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), and John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven, Conn., 1988); for flight to the suburbs as part of American "popular pastoralism," see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964); on infrastructure, see Paul Edwards, "Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems," in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 200. Edwards defines infrastructure as separate from, though related to, a Hughesian "large technical system" by virtue of being a sociotechnical institution, which is not necessarily technology-centered. While I believe that lawns fit rather well into his categorization of infrastructure, my primary reason for adopting the term is to highlight the relative "invisibility" of lawns and their consequences. On the invisibility of functioning infrastructure, see also Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 2-16. On the environmental effects of the suburbs more generally, see Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York, 2001); to Rome's excellent account, I am adding a focus on lawns as an integral part of suburban growth and its consequences.
6. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers nonpoint source pollution to be a diffuse type of pollution not emanating from a discrete point, such as a sewer or industrial outfall, but rather as being incorporated into the runoff of precipitation over and through the land. See the EPA "Polluted Runoff" website for the current construction of this category of pollutant (http://www.epa.gov/OWOW/NPS/, accessed 17 April 2009). The agency now considers nonpoint urban runoff, which includes runoff from suburban lawns, "one of the leading sources of water quality impairment in surface waters." See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Management Measures to 3. Control Nonpoint Source Pollution from Urban Areas, U.S. EPA Office of Water, EPA-841-B-05-004 (Washington, D.C., November 2005), 0-1. The concern with nutrient-rich runoff is entwined with the problem of eutrophication namely, that an increase in nutrients can cause explosive growth in aquatic plants and algae, eventually leading to hypoxic or anoxic conditions in a water body unconducive to other forms of aquatic life.
7. On large technological systems and momentum, see Thomas P. Hughes, "The Evolution of Large Technological Systems," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 51-82;
8. on the counter-momentum of the environmental movement, see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York, 1989), 463;
9. for succinct histories of political environmental movements in postwar America, see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 (New York, 1993)
10. and Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh, 2000).
11. Jenkins, 115.
12. See, for example, Christopher Brown, "You Know These Lawn Rules But Do You Practice Them?" House Beautiful, June 1946,175
13. and Frank James, as told to Rafe Gibbs, "Have a Lawn to Brag About," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1947, 190.
14. O.M. Scott & Sons Co. advertisement, BetterHomes and Gardens, March 1947,191. 6.
15. Fred V. Grau, "Lawn Secrets That Cost $1,000,000," Better Homes and Gardens, October 1947, 42.
16. Ibid.; Joseph E. Howland, "How to Pep Up a Tired Lawn," Better Homes and Gardens, September 1948, 44.
17. Victor H. Ries, "For a Greener, Thicker Lawn Next Summer," Better Homes and Gardens, October 1946, 108.
18. J. I. Rodale, The Organic Front (Emmaus, Penn., 1948), 8-20.
19. Dorothy Ducas, "The Truth in the Controversy about Fertilizers," House Beautiful, April 1948, 126-27ff. 10.
20. "Organic Gardening versus Chemical Fertilizers," Consumer Reports, February 1949,91;
21. Andrew S. Wing, "Soil Pros and Cons," Nature Magazine, March 1949,148; "Organic vs. Inorganic Gardening," Consumer Reports, January 1953, 47.
22. "There's Too Much Bunk about Lawns," House Beautiful, September 1950, 130.
23. "New Way Discovered to Make Shabby Lawns Lush and Green," Better Homes and Gardens, May 1954, 8;
24. T. H. Everett, "Better Lawn Now!" Flower Grower, August 1954, 39.
25. This assertion is based on a survey of over seventy lawn-care and fertilizer-related articles from 1945 to1965 in the following publications: House Beautiful, Better Homes and Gardens, Consumer Reports, New York Times, Flower Grower, American Home, and Horticulture. These particular periodicals were chosen as representative of advice given to homeowners based on extensive readership (e.g., Better Homes and Gardens) and/or special interest (e.g., Horticulture).
26. There's Too Much Bunk about Lawns, 130. "Confused about Chemical Fertilizers?" House Beautiful, April 1954,268; R. Milton Carleton,"Q andAon Fertilizers," Flower Grower, April 1958,47; "Here's What the Lawn Experts Say," Flower Grower, April 1962, 49. 10
27. On "placelessness" as a paradigmatic feature of modern science, technology, and infrastructure, see Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago, 2002), 7-9, and Edwards (n. 3 above), 189.
28. "Four Steps to a Good Lawn," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1955, 252; on this theme, see also "You Can Have a Beautiful Lawn This Summer," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1952, 66, and R. M. Carleton, "A Better Lawn: How to Build One This Year," Better Homes and Gardens, April 1957, 324.
29. "News Liquid Lawn-Feeding Service," House Beautiful, June 1955, 125.
30. Dale Somers, "How to Have a Better Lawn," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1953,64; "A Greener, Thicker, Tougher Lawn," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1958,164.
31. T H. Everett, "So You Own a Lawn?" Flower Grower, April 1957, 36; "Lawns-How to Build Them," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1956, 258.
32. More generally, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star argue that systems of standardization and classification are part of the creation of any infrastructure; see Bowker and Star (n. 3 above), 16, and Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 110. 10.
33. Jenkins (n. 2 above), 139.
34. Robert W. Schery, The Lawn Book (New York, 1961), 1-5;
35. Schery, "Make a Beautiful Lawn," Flower Grower, May 1958,53;
36. Schery, "Facts on Lawn Feeding," Better Homes and Gardens, April 1959, 201;
37. Schery, "Lawns Need Food Too!" Horticulture, January 1961, 49;
38. Schery, "Theories about Lawn Care," Horticulture, April 1961, 202.
39. Ralph E. Engel, "What It Takes to Have a Fabulous Lawn," House Beautiful, May 1962, 188. Dr. Engel was professor of turfgrass science at Rutgers University, and he authored a number of New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station circulars and Rutgers University College of Agriculture Extension Service bulletins from the 1940s through at least the 1960s.
40. See, for example, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular nos. 501-83 (1947-57); "New Jersey Fertilizer and Lime Recommendations, " in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular nos. 584-610 (1959-74); "New Jersey Fertilizer and Lime Recommendations," in Rutgers University College of Agriculture Extension Service Bulletin nos. 336-85A (1960-65); and "Fertilizers and Limes," in New Jersey Agricultural ExperimentStation Inspection Series nos. 81-103 (1960-66). All circulars and service bulletins cited here and below were published in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
41. "New Jersey Fertilizer and Lime Recommendations," in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular no. 539 (November 1950). The example of New Jersey is not 28. arbitrary: the Garden State had one of the earliest agricultural research stations in the United States, a longstanding and relatively extensive turf program, and Rutgers turf experts were frequently high-ranking members of turfgrass associations and contributors to high-profile lawn-advice articles in such national publications as the New York Times.
42. "New Jersey Fertilizer and Lime Recommendations," in New Jersey Agricultural ExperimentStation Circular no. 589 (March 1960).
43. Gilbert Ahlgren and Ralph Engel, "Spring Care of Established Lawns," in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular no. 524 (March 1949);
44. Ahlgren and Engel, "Summer Care of the Lawn," in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular no. 525 (March 1949);
45. Ralph Engel and Gilbert Ahlgren, "Making a New Lawn," in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular nos. 531,553,556 (October 1949, April 1953, April 1954);
46. Ralph Engel and R. S. Skogley, "Making a New Lawn," in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular no. 586 (March 1959);
47. Henry Indyk and Ralph Engel, "Your Lawn and Its Care," in Rutgers University College of Agriculture Extension Service Bulletin no. 362 (1962).
48. Gilbert H. Ahlgren, "Planting and Caring for the Lawn," in New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station Circular no. 724 (March 1946), 3.
49. Ibid., 4, 14. 30.
50. Robert Dyment, "Aquatic Weed Control Credited with Save of'Major Industry,'" Agricultural Chemicals 16 (1961): 30.
51. "Increasing Utilization of Water Puts Spotlight on Aquatic Weed Control," Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 113.
52. Alban R. Essbach, Donald N. Riemer, and Donald A. Schallock, "Aquatic Vegetation of New Jersey: Part II, Problems and Methods of Control," in Rutgers University College of Agriculture Extension Service Bulletin no. 382 (1965), 98 (emphasis added).
53. Ibid., 99-100.
54. This recalls solutions to the consequences of herbicides employed by midwest-ern farmers, another example of problem-definition within the twentieth-century "chemical paradigm"; see J. L. Anderson, "War on Weeds: Iowa Farmers and Growth-Regulator Herbicides," Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 743. My use of Anderson's "chemical paradigm," as well as the language of "commensurability," has obvious roots in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). 30.
55. Lewis B. Nelson, History of the U.S. Fertilizer Industry (Muscle Shoals, Ala., 1990), 352.
56. Clifton A. Woodrum, "Fertilizer Outlook," Agricultural Chemicals 1 (1946): 41; Federal Trade Commission, Report on the Fertilizer Industry (Washington, D.C., 1950), 1. 41.
57. "Borrowed Fertilizer Not to Be Returned!" Agricultural Chemicals 1 (1946): 31; Federal Trade Commission, 24. 30.
58. Russell Coleman, "Fertilizer an Answer to Our Farm Surplus Problem," Agricultural Chemicals 10 (1955): 45.
59. J. D. Joffe, "Slowly Available Fertilizers," Agricultural Chemicals 10 (1955): 36-37.
60. "DuPont Names Turf Specialist," Agricultural Chemicals 10 (1955): 90.
61. "Uramite Fertilizer Developed by DuPont Combines High Nitrogen, Slow Release Rate," memorandum from DuPont's Public Relations Department; "DuPont Uramite Fertilizer Compound: A Completely New Kind of Nitrogen for Turfgrass and Ornamentals," brochure, accession 1410, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Public Affairs Department, J. K. Hunt Reference Files: "Fertilizers, 1938-55," Hagley Museum and Library (hereafter HML), Wilmington, Delaware.
62. Schery "Lawns Need Food Too!" (n. 26 above) 49. 30.
63. Advertisement, Allied Chemical & Dye Corporation, New York Times, 9 September 1956.
64. Carleton "Q and A on Fertilizers" (n. 18 above), 47
65. Ralph Engel, "For a Better Lawn: Use the Products That Fulfill Their Promise," House Beautiful. May 1959, 224.
66. Carleton "Q and A on Fertilizers," 48. Interestingly, it is precisely these types of slow-release fertilizers and low application rates that are now recommended by agricultural extension services and state environmental agencies to prevent excessive nutrient runoff.
67. William H. Heflin, "What's Ahead for Non-Farm Fertilizers?" Agricultural Chemicals 19 (1964): 34;
68. R. J. Church and J. W. Lewis, "Producing and Selling Lawn and Specialty Fertilizers," Agricultural Chemicals 18 (1963): 19;
69. George Doherty, "Self-Service Sales to the Home Market," Agricultural Chemicals 17 (1962): 51.
70. Walter Scholl, Gordon W. Schmidt, and Helen P. Toland, "Consumption of Fertilizers Continues to Increase in the U.S.," Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 27;
71. "Change and Challenge," Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 23.
72. "Merchandising a TV Campaign," Printers Ink, 15 November 1963, 55; "Garden Supply Sales Sprout as Ads Vitalize Brand Names," Printers Ink, 21 June 1963, 7; "How Can Analysts Keep Pace with Changing Fertilizer Technology?"Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 18. 30.
73. Editorial, Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 17.
74. George Mackintosh, "The Expansion of Oil and Chemical Producers into the Fertilizer Industry," Financial Analysts Journal, May-June 1965, 71.
75. "For a Beautiful, Healthy Lawn ...," New York Times, 21 March 1965.
76. "A New Lawn-Care Combine Takes Automation to the Front Yard," Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 63. 30.
77. For a discussion of these companies, see Jenkins (n. 2 above), 160-62, and Steinberg (n. 2 above), 72-76.
78. See Adam Rome, "Building on the Land: Toward an Environmental History of Residential Development in American Cities and Suburbs, 1870-1990," Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 419-26, and Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside (n. 3 above), 7-13.
79. Peter J. Westwick, for example, goes so far as to refer to this as the "law of unintended consequences"; see Westwick, "Reengineering Engineers: Management Philosophies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1990s," Technology and Culture 48 (2007): 83.
80. "Fertilizer Outlook," Chemical Week, 9 April 1960, 78. 30.
81. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Proceedings: The National Conference on Water Pollution, December 12-14, 1960 (Washington, D.C., 1961).
82. Statement from Louis M. Glymph, assistant director, Watershed Engineering Research, Agricultural Research Service, to the House of Representatives, Water Pollution Control and Abatement (Part 1B): Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, June 6, 10-14, 18, 20, and 25, 1963, 88th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C., 1964), 1697.
83. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, 1962).
84. J. I. Rodale et al., Our Poisoned Earth and Sky (Emmaus, Penn., 1964), 416.
85. Lewis Herber, Our Synthetic Environment (New York, 1962);
86. Lewis Herber, Crisis in Our Cities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 199.
87. Barry Commoner, Science and Survival (New York, 1963), 12. 30. 68.
88. "C-VPFA Widens Scope to Encompass Entire Southeast," Agricultural Chemicals 20 (1965): 29. 69.
89. "Fertilizer Outlook," Chemical Week, 9 April 1960, 78.
90. Untitled, undated draft essay, accession 1410, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Public Affairs Department, Carl Kaufmann Files: "Environment General," HML.
91. See Vladimir Novotny, Water Quality: Diffuse Pollution and Watershed Management, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N.J., 2003), 11-15, for an overview and references to government studies and programs on polluted runoff. Important EPA documents on nonpoint source pollution include U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Managing Nonpoint Source Pollution: Final Report to Congress on Section 319 of the Clean Water Act (1989) (Washington, D.C., 1992), and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Manage- 30. ment Measures to Control Nonpoint Source Pollution from Urban Areas (Washington, D.C., 2005).
92. Christopher C. Obropta, "The Greening of New Jersey Lakes and Ponds," Water Pages: A Quarterly Newsletter Produced by the Rutgers Cooperative Extension Water Resources Program, summer 2004, 2;
93. F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe, Redesigning the American Lawn (New Haven, Conn., 1993).
94. S. R. Weibel, "Urban Drainage as a Factor in Eutrophication," in Eutrophication: Causes, Consequences, Correctives, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC, 1969), 390 (emphasis added), published as proceedings from a symposium, 11-15 June 1967. Weibel was the U.S. Public Health Service's sanitary engineer director, later assigned to the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, Cincinnati Water Research Laboratory, U.S. Department of the Interior. While it is true that the government focused more attention on the problem of polluted runoff after 1970, Weibel's work was part of a small, preexisting literature on urban and suburban watersheds.
95. For two postwar studies that address urban runoff, see S. R. Weibel, R. J. Anderson, and R. L. Woodward, "Urban Land Runoff as a Factor in Stream Pollution," Journal of the Water Pollution Control Federation 36 (1964): 914-24
96. and Weibel et al., "Pesticides and Other Contaminants in Rainfall and Runoff," Journal of the American Water Works Association 58 ( 1966) : 1075-84.
97. A. Myrick Freeman III, "Water Pollution Policy," in Public Policies for Environ- 72. mental Protection, 2nd ed., ed. Paul R. Portney and Robert N. Stavins (Washington, D.C., 2000), 176-79.
98. Congressional Research Service, 1972 Legislative History, 1457, quoted in Robert W. Adler, Jessica C. Landman, and Diane M. Cameron, The Clean Water Act 20 Years Later (Washington, D.C, 1993), 172.
99. D. H. Michael Bowen, "Runoff Poses Next Big Control Challenge," Environmental Science & Technology 6 (1972): 771.
100. On pollution control in twentieth-century America as "loops of retrofits and technological fixes," see Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio, 1996), 29;
101. for succinct histories of the Clean Water Act, including the nonpoint source regulatory gap, see Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 1999), chap. 19; Thomas R. Wellock, Preserving the Nation: The Conservation and Environmental Movements, 1870-2000 (Wheeling, Ill., 2007);
102. and Hugh S. Gorman, Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry (Akron, Ohio, 2001), 363.
103. For more extensive discussion of the EPA and environmental policy, see Marc K. Landy, Marc J. Roberts, and Stephen R. Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions (New York, 1990)
104. and Michael E. Kraft, "U.S. Environmental Policy and Politics: From the 1960s to the 1990s," Journal of Policy History 12 (2000): 17-42. 75.
105. Edmund Russell III, "Lost among the Parts Per Billion: Ecological Protection at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1970-1993," Environmental History 2 (1997): 30-31;
106. Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Tarr, 354-84.
107. On the political difficulties of regulating consumers versus producers at the federal and state levels, see David Vogel, "When Consumers Oppose Consumer Protection: The Politics of Regulatory Backlash," Journal of Public Policy 10 (1990): 462-64;
108. for suggestions from the Natural Resources Defense Council on federally mediated runoff prevention, see Adler, Landman, and Cameron, 197; for an example of the conflict between homeowners' associations and "native landscaping," see Heidi Ridgley, "When 'Weed Laws' Make Homeowners Outlaws," National Wildlife, December 2004, 12-14.
109. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 20. 75.
110. Thomas P. Hughes, "Technological Momentum," in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 101.
111. Paul Robbins and Julie T Sharp, "Producing and Consuming Chemicals: The Moral Economy of the American Lawn," Economic Geography 79 (2003): 425-51; Rob-bins (n. 2 above).
112. For examples of local conflicts over lawns and lawn care, see Jenkins (n. 2 above), chap. 2, and Steinberg (n. 2 above), chap. 10.
113. Joseph R. Heckman, Susan E. Lance, and James Murphy, "How to Protect Water Quality and Have a Beautiful Lawn: Ten Steps to Proper Fertilization," Rutgers Cooperative Research and Extension, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, May 1996; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Managing Nutrients in Your Backyard and Your Community," 19 March 2008 webcast, http://www.epa.gov/ owow/watershed/wacademy/webcasts/archives.html#20080319 (accessed 17 April 2009). 75.
114. Robbins, 128-31.
115. In addition to current EPA assessments of nutrient pollution, recent historical monographs on major northeast United States estuaries highlight the role of nutrients and eutrophication in the death of these water bodies, as well as the politically unruly nature of the problem. See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency "Water Quality Criteria for Nitrogen and Phosphorus Pollution," http://www.epa.gov/waterscience/cri-teria/nutrient/policyhtml (accessed 17 April 2009);
116. Howard R. Ernst, Chesapeake Bay Blues: Science, Politics, and the Struggle to Save the Bay (New York 2003), esp. chap. 3
117. and Tom Anderson, This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound (New Haven, Conn. 2002).
118. The classic essay on risk and environment is Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildav-sky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley, Calif, 1982), esp. chap. 1. On the invisibility of environmental risks and their 75. place in "late modernity,"
119. see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1992), 27-28, 44-46.
120. A search for "unintended consequences" in Technology and Culture is instructive. The vast majority of articles using this phrase simply make passing mention of unintended consequences as one of the obvious outcomes of technological change, in some cases even formulating a "law of unintended consequences" (see Westwick [n. 60 above]). A few uses of the term are stories of broader chronological scope that show how unintended consequences were part of the long-term evolution of large-scale landscapes (see Arne Kaijser, "System Building from Below: Institutional Change in Dutch Water Control Systems," Technology and Culture 43 [2002]: 521-48
121. and William H. TeBrake, "Taming the Waterwolf: Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management in the Netherlands during the Middle Ages," Technology and Culture 43 [2002]: 475-99). While the creation of the national lawnscape and ubiquitous nutrient-impaired waterways may fall into the latter category of long-term landscape evolution, my point here is that attention to the specifics of taken-for-granted unintended consequences helps to explain the character of this evolution and the fate of proposed solutions to the deleterious consequences of historical sociotechnical change.