The Washington Post has this grab-bag of op-eds from a variety of commentators ranging from Elizabeth Warren to Turd Blossom to Ed Begley Jr.. The theme of the collection is “!2 Things The World Should Toss Out”, and several of them are about topics near and dear to my heart such as lawns, Internet memes, and bullshit political journalism.
Tag lawns
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Keep The Grass Off!
Even though winter has been hanging tough this year, spring will inevitably arrive, and, with it, the annual question of what to do about the lawn. I am not a fan of lawns, and not just because I am a lazy bastard, either. The American obsession with lawn care rates very high as a significant source of pollution: all those fucking chemicals people dump on their grass to keep it looking like the 7th Hole at Pebble Beach account for 90% of the chemical runoff that destroys rivers, ponds, and other watersheds, while the exhaust from an hour of using your gas-powered lawn mower is equivalent to driving 650 miles in a 1992-vintage automobile. Weed killer products contribute to undermining biodiversity in local plant life, allowing aggressive invader species like purple loosestrife to flourish and crowd out even more plants. All in all, kiddies, that fine manicured lawn is an environmental disaster, an advertisement for everything that is bad about our insistence on our unsustainable lifestyles.
Via Slashdot, of all places, I ran across this L.A. Times story this morning about a couple in the Southern California city of Orange, who are being sued by the city itself because they converted their lawn into a landscaped yard using bark and drought-tolerant plants. The couple say that their motivation was to use less water (the city has very tough watering restrictions in the first place) and they succeeded in reducing their water consumption by 75%, but the city also has an ordinance requiring homes to have at least 40% of their yard covered by living plants (e.g. grass). Even adding more plants did not assuage the officials. One would think that in Southern California, of all places, anything that contributed to lowering municipal water usage would be seen as beneficial, but once again the overarching short-sightedness of the value of grass overtakes common sense.
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Gas, Grass Or Ass — No One Rides For Free
This is a photo I just took of our front lawn (larger version here). As you can see, I have made good on the threat I made last year not to mow at all this year. We even went so far as to buy a bag of wildflower seeds to scatter around, since it has been my thought to try to upgrade the weeds with a random sampling of flowers, but we didn’t go quite that far. (Full disclosure: Bridget *did* mow the lawn once this year, just before her parents came to visit for Charlotte’s dance recital, but over my objections.)
I have to be honest with you and say that the first and foremost reason that I decided I wasn’t going to mow the lawn anymore is because I am a lazy bastard, but my secondary reason (and my primary rationalization) is that lawns and lawn care are fundamentally unfriendly to the environment.
I am not alone in this thinking. This New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert looks briefly at the history of the lawn in American culture, from Frederick Law Olmsted (who really deserves the credit for turning America into a big, grassy carpet) to author Michael Pollan (who advocates turning lawns into vegetable gardens), and manages to squeeze in some of the many unpleasant realities about the damage we do to our world with lawn fertilizers, pollution from gas-powered mowers, insecticides, and the like.
This recent Time Magazine article also looks at the evolving relationship between Americans and their front yards. The piece focuses on one of those people who has indeed turned their front yard into a source of food in contrast to the 1980s and 1990s when the perfectly-mowed “Martha Stewart” lawn was king..er, queen.
I’m sure my neighbors all cluck about the deplorable state of our front yard (and you should SEE the back!), but I have the blazing righteousness of self-rationalization and moral superiority on my side. A wild blackberry briar has been growing along side of the front steps, and for the last several weeks I have been enjoying picking tiny but perfectly ripe berries to nibble every time I arrive at home (thanks to Harry, who has killed or chased off all the rodents and other berry-thieves who would have otherwise beaten me to them). The cats simply adore prowling in the high grass and weeds, looking for unsuspecting mice, moles and chipmunks. Not all the weeds are terribly pretty — I do actually wish we’d gone to the bother of spreading the wildflower seeds because by now there would be hundreds of blooms — but it has a somewhat pleasing consistency about it.
Lawns are doomed, my friends. If we are lucky, we wont NEED to turn our yards into subsistence gardens to counteract the coming loss of our vast array of imported fruits and vegetables. I’m not a gardener and don’t relish the idea of having to tend a vegetable garden any more than I ever relished the idea of mowing grass, so I will not be rushing right out to plant zucchinis and tomatoes, but I certainly appreciate the people who might want to do so. Should it ever come to it, though, I’d do it. Meanwhile, you won’t find me frittering away my Saturdays pushing a mower, or even using one of these contraptions:
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Hey You Kids, Get Offa My Prairie!
So this was the year that I gave up mowing my lawn. I think I mowed once in May and then basically decided to say “fuck it” for the rest of the year. Bridget nagged me about it a few times, but eventually she, too, let it go. It rained just enough over the course of the summer that our front lawn didn’t pull its usual trick of turning brown and dying halfway through, and eventually the grass got long enough that it didn’t stand up straight, so it didn’t even look like it needed to be mowed except around the edges. The edge along the rock wall of our driveway filled up with Black-Eyed Susans that naturally seeded from the one we had deliberately planted a couple of years ago, and looked kinda pretty while the flowers were in bloom. There were also some pretty amazing weeds that showed up, but we left them alone, too.
After a fashion, I came to the rationalization that not mowing was a more conscious decision and a statement, rather than just a complete lack of giving a damn. I decided that come next spring, I’d be willing to clean up the edges a bit and put in some effort to address some of the rough spots, but beyond that all I’m going to do is buy one of those cans of wildflower seeds and spread them around to see what other flowers we can get to make an appearance. I think it’s quite possible and somewhat desirable to have a yard that is mostly wild but not a disaster.
This morning, I read John Tolva’s blog post about how his parents, who live in Northwest Illinois, have let their land revert to natural prairie. He goes on to offer up a veritable plethora of factoids about the environmental damage we’ve created by insisting on lush green lawns in front of every house in suburbia — over 700 BILLION gallons of water annually to irrigate 400 million acres of turfgrass, 70 million pounds of fertilizer and other chemicals, 800 million gallons of gasoline to run the lawnmowers, and so on. And, as John points out, that’s all merely for the sake of the aesthetic value of a lawn — lawns are completely unnecessary and have minimal functionality for daily life.
Whether people realize it or not, we are about to come up against the very hard wall of consequence for our environmental follies, and in a world where it’s going to become increasingly difficult to provide a functional and sustainable environment for humans, there’s going to be no room for riding mowers and bags of Scott’s Lawn Builder. So, while I might be a lazy bastard now, in a couple of years my neighbors are going to be looking at me like a visionary.
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