Kingberry Court

The people of Kingberry Court are themselves typical examples of upper-middle-class Americans. Six of the eight respondents interviewed hold advanced degrees and all eight households earn more than 100,000 per year. Their... 

Certainly, our conversations underlie the fact that that a direct relationship between socioeconomic status and environmental concern carmot be assumed. Michael and Tom, the least environmentally conscious residents of Kingberry Court, were the most highly educated (Michael) and had the highest income (Tom). 

For these four Kingberry Court residents (Frank, Arthur, Suzanne, and Tom), the professional status of lawn care service companies and chemical manufacturers goes a long way to ensure the safety of lawn chemical treatments. Whereas some scholars emphasize that modem Americans are increasingly skep-... 

This may overstate, however, the degree to which the management of everyday life and its objects, like the lawn, is passive. The level of civic engagement embodied in the maintenance of the lawn in a face-to-face society like Kingberry Court suggests something else. Despite an insistence that the lawn is collectively trivial and tangential, there is a persistent moral responsibility tied to lawn care that no resident can deny. 

Walter, another long-time resident, described himself as a trendsetter on the Court. He used a lawn chemical company when he first moved to Kingberry Court, and he says that all the other residents were soon following suit. When... 

Taken together, the survey results and the stories of the people of Kingberry Court suggest a profile of people who apply chemicals despite anxiety, who are skeptical about chemical producers but have faith in those who produce and apply them, and who downplay the importance of the lawn in community life while setting their environmental schedules by the community lawn clock. Arguably, these urban residents together participate in a lawn community. ... 

Kingberry Court is a pseudonym for a cul de sac in which interviews were conducted between April and October 2003. These were tape-recorded and transcribed, and lasted between one and two hours. When initiating the interview, we asked to speak with the member of the household who did most of the yard work. In all but one case we were directed toward the adult male in the family. In four of the eight interviews, only the adult male was present. In three of the interviews, however, the wife also sat down with us or hovered nearby and often added her own observations, which usually confirmed the husband s opinions. 

APPENDIX TABLE B. 1 Comparison of Kingberry Court to Ceneral Population ... 

Data are from 1987, the year Kingberry Court was built. Source Median and Average Square Feet of Floor Area in New One-Family Houses Completed by Location. 2003. Manufacturing, Mining, and Construction Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau. 

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