Americans have an extreme fetish about lawns (it's a matter of social status), and in temperate climates, they want lawns to stay green throughout the winter, s

Americans have an extreme fetish about lawns (it's a matter of social status), and in temperate climates, they want lawns to stay green throughout the winter, so instead of "leaving the leaves", they often rake or use leafblowers (or for the case of 40% of homeowners, hire somebody). In the case of hired labor, homeowners are usually commuting from suburbs and their kids are at school so they don't have to deal with the noise themselves. Lawn grass is the number 1 crop in the United States, and it exists only to absorb excess wealth and make work for others in games of social status in a culture that originally sought to emulate the symbols of wealth of English landowners, as a neatly cut lawn was an indication of wool production, originally the primary English export during the time of the enclosure movement. But with post-WWII suburban housing subsidies, each house began to have a lawn and most people don't want sheep, so the use of lawnmowers and fertilizer to began to supplant the job of sheep. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-american-obsession-with-lawns/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practic... https://dcist.com/story/20/03/06/the-white-house-lawn-was-once-covered-with-grazing-sheep/ https://dcist.com/story/20/03/06/the-white-house-lawn-was-on...