A respected advocate for farming interests in California once explained to me that every acre of lawn requires 5 acre feet of water per year. The unsubtle implication was that the more lawn we kill, the less water we waste. But this is zero sum thinking. How much lawn are we talking about, and how much water?

In August 2023, the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times offered their unequivocal take on lawns with a column titled “Say Goodbye to Grass.” They claimed that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has 218,000 acres of turf in their service area, and 23 percent of that is deemed “nonfunctional.”

Let’s suppose that 50 percent of Met’s sprawling service area is within Los Angeles County. That would mean that 109,000 acres of turf (“functional” and “nonfunctional”) are requiring 545,000 acre feet of water per year to keep green. The horror.

But is any lawn “nonfunctional?” A study conducted at the University of Minnesota found that lawns reduce temperature by between 7-14 degrees and that “lawns and other landscape plants could reduce total U.S. air conditioning energy requirements by 25 percent.”