What you're looking at right here is essentially  what we call our war room.

400 acres, several thousand sprinkler heads on two golf courses.

Wow.

So it's pretty massive.

How do you decide what gets watered when?

So up here, 358,000 gallons  of water ran last night.

Where is all this water coming from?

Because  we're basically in the middle of a desert.

The grass may always be greener  on the other side…but that grass ain’t staying green on its own.

Humans will move heaven and earth to create an artificial oasis, even  in places you’d never expect.

How - and why - does grass thrive almost  everywhere we live?

And in a world facing more record-setting droughts than  ever, is there a better way?

I’m Shane Campbell-Staton, and  this is Human Footprint.

Here in Palm Springs, to walk the  walk, you’ve gotta dress the part.

Lined up there… Perfect, looks good.

Yeah.

Bam!

Yeah.

You got it!

I did not.

Alright.

Nope, it's still there.

Okay, let's see what we can do.

Boom.

I was feeling real good about  myself until just now.

Turf grass… It covers more of the  U.S. than almost any other plant.

And there's nowhere grass is more  pampered than the golf courses of Palm Springs, California.

Good golf requires good grass, in your opinion.

I would think so, yes.

Okay, and good grass requires you.

Well, I like to think so.

Jonas takes care of some of the world's  most prestigious golf courses.

And it's not just a profession, it's a love affair.

I look at parks, football stadiums, soccer fields, and golf courses.

I love it all.

You’ve literally created an oasis, there's not a whole lot of people that can say that.

Yeah Turns out, grass isn't just grass.

You got  your Bermudas, your fescues, your rye... And each species plays a different role.

A good Bermuda grass is going to be your base for probably most of the golf courses  here in the valley, just because the temperatures in the summer get so warm.

And that's the only grass that really will be able to thrive and survive through that.

Not only can Bermuda grass resist extreme heat, it also doesn't require a ton of water and it tolerates a wide range of pH levels.

That’s why we grow it in places like Palm Springs.

But there’s a darker side…Bermuda Grass is also considered an invasive weed: it can outcompete  native species, and controlling it requires powerful herbicides.

Okay.

Alright, let’s see it.

Just  take it back, and go.

Oh, that was heartbreaking.

Oh, a little piece of my soul died just now.

Humans go to ridiculous  lengths to make turf happy.

We have a set of mowers that will mow  down to 8 hundredths of an inch.

We have large mowers.

We have a greens roller  to firm up the surface and make it faster.

The lower the height of the cut,  the different trickier things that you can do to the greens.

We're fortunate we have some pretty balanced and good soils here.

We try to maintain everything at a certain percentage of moisture.

I think ours is in the 20 to 25% range.

Little bit, little more.

Not that much.

Right there.

Back and straight through.

Bingo.

Yeah!

Hello, you’re going pro!

I mean if you're just measuring success and impact, if grass was playing  golf, it definitely got the hole in one.

Underneath this thin veneer of  green lies a massive engineered life-support system.

And without it, this  desert oasis would turn to dust.

So this is putting out a lot of… like, 300,000  some odd gallons of water, every single day.

Yep, on this course.

Then you have this golf  course which would be very similar to it.

Here on this property, we're fortunate  to be a part of the Mid Valley pipeline, which is where they connect water to the Colorado River, so it comes from a long way away.

To keep these courses green, millions of gallons of water travel hundreds of miles to be sprayed out of thousands of sprinklers.

If  that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.

But golf courses are just the beginning.

There are more than 40 million acres of turf  in the US.

Each year they consume 80 million pounds of fertilizer and trillions of gallons of water.

While legions of people and machines keep them manicured and green.

It’s the most resource-intensive  plant in the country.

Yet the vast majority of it grows, not on a farm, but in neat squares around our homes… little patches of paradise, perfect for a drink with a friend.

This is Marc Norman.

He’s an urban planner.

For Marc, building a great city or neighborhood  is kind of like making a great cocktail.

You need to know all the ingredients and predict  how they’ll interact once mixed together.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Oh, that is a tasty beverage.

As a biologist, it's kind of weird to me.

It's like  wherever you go in whatever environment, humans settle down and then there's grass.

Yeah, every place that we inhabit is artificial in some way.

Although this is a pretty nice situation.

It is.

I'm not going to lie.

This is some good living.

I'm going to blame the Brits because...

Okay, I'm okay with that.

Yeah.

This notion of the sort  of manor, of the estate.

You mix that with the kind of individualism of the U.S. and you have now people with quarter acre lots.

That's their castle surrounded by this space.

So it's status, is what you're saying.

It signals that I own this territory, and also that I maintain it.

I think baked into the way we expanded as a country, where we had too much land.

People needed to populate that.

Like manifest destiny.

Manifest destiny, exactly.

If you farmed it, or ranched it, or timbered it, for  five years, then that land was yours.

I mean, if you were white and male.

Yeah of course.

But that sets a precedent.

Right, that you  can’t just sit on land.

You have to prove that you’re cultivating it.

But grass isn't just baked into American psychology, it forms the economic  foundation of American home ownership.

Let’s say you’re driving around a neighborhood in  suburban Boston or Tulsa or Northern California.

They look relatively similar and that’s because  these standards had to be met in order for those homebuyers to get a 30 year mortgage.

They  had covenants saying you had to have grass, and you had to cut it once a week.

Wow, okay.

That is very specific.

Right, and we have homeowner’s  associations that enforce that.

Like legally enforce that?

Legally enforce that.

Okay.

Are the same rules applied to the back, like  you have to mow your backyard the same way?

The regulations might not go  to the back of the house.

This is like the suburban mullet.

It's like business in the front, and party in the back kind of thing going on.

Exactly.

Okay.

Here in California, our days of keeping up  with the Joneses – at least where grass is concerned – may not last much longer.

In just the past four decades, California’s annual precipitation has dropped  to half its historical average.

Today's California is no country for green lawns.

Luckily, there’s a way to ditch the old-school lawn and do it sustainably.

Many conservationists  believe the answer lies in native plants.

Because native plants have already adapted  to the environments you’re planting them in, they require less upkeep and also support  local wildlife, such as birds and insects.

They can help bring back the biodiversity  that existed here in the first place.

So, maybe we can redefine that image that pops into into our heads when we think of “patches of paradise."

Because there’s a simple alternative that spruces up our green spaces while making wildlife happy, too.

Driving around Palm Springs, you can see just how deeply grass is  rooted in the American psyche.

In a country where we talk about  productivity, it's so unproductive, is I think the irony of it all.

Grass is a signal.

Just having it tells the world, and ourselves, that  we’re part of the community.

People think this is freedom of choice, but  if they ever wanted to make different choices, they're forbidden to.

It takes a  whole slew of federal state regulatory frameworks to make this happen.

No matter what was there before… We dig it up, chop it down, irrigate, fertilize, and  replace it with - you guessed it - grass.

Honestly, I can't even tell if  that’s real grass or not.

I think it's real grass.

That’s incredibly uniform.

But what's interesting is that – So many damn cul de sacs!

Literally everything is a cul de sac.

Everything is a cul de sac.

Everywhere we go, humans reshape the landscape  not just to suit our needs, but to match our ideas of what we want it to be.

The good news is, we also have the power to decide what we want our little  patches of paradise to look like.

Thanks for watching!

If you want more Human  Footprint, you can tune in to the full length series on the PBS App or on your local PBS station.