Hello, I'm "Penguin" Pete, the guy with the
indignant rant about palm trees you all seem to love. I'm back today to talk about an even worse environmental blight, and even more pervasive intrusion on our living space: GRASS!
You don't notice grass. Those of you who live in cities are barely even accustomed to seeing plants anymore, so you never stop to think that our obsession to coat the Earth in a fuzzy layer of green micro-plants is anything abnormal. But we have all grown up used to suburban tracts of endless lawns around houses, married to the vision of the American dream of a white-picket-fence neighborhood, all made of ticky-tacky.
Here's a
few reasons why your vision of suburbia is far creepier than you think:
- Lawns aren't just an option. They are ENFORCED. You can go to jail for not having a perfectly manicured lawn.
- Lawns affect neighborhood real estate values, which is why they are enforced.
- The pathological degree of conformity in suburbia isn't just for an aesthetic. Its purpose is to expunge all diversity.
- Lawn enforcement prevents people from celebrating their ethnic or cultural heritage via growing other plants. Especially people who moved here from somewhere else.
- Grass, like palm trees, is so bad for the ecology that you are doing the world a favor if you literally replace it with bare dirt.
- The lawn aesthetic is based on an imperialist Victorian nostalgia for "gentlemen" sports like golf, bowling, polo, and croquet. It is a class privilege signal.
- Not a single blade of grass growing in any lawn in the United States is native to North America.
But
here's the worst problem with grass lawns:
Grass Lawns Are An Ecological Holocaust
It's been said before, only as "an ecological catastrophe."
The Earth's environment, as we have slowly come to realize in the 21st century, depends on the concept of bio-diversity. Ignoring the need for preserving a diverse habitat has painted us into an ecological corner, one so dire that experts predict we
might just starve ourselves right off the planet if we keep this up.
The
chief wildlife victim of our lawn obsession is bees.
It turns out that we need bees to pollinate the crops we depend upon,
and keeping bees around isn't just a matter of nailing some wooden
boards together for a beehive. Bees need to eat, and their food
source is all the native plants around - which we kill off to plant
lawns in their stead. Beyond merely removing their blossoming food
sources, we also kill off bee populations with pesticides,
herbicides, and all the weapons-grade chemicals we deploy to create
this artificial lawn aesthetic.
That addresses the bees, but they are far from the only ecological concern. Bird
populations are dying off en mass, which is
once again triggered by our scorching and bleaching of the Earth's
surface so that nothing is left but plain, dead grass. Once again,
birds have to eat something, and when we kill all the plant life and
exterminate every insect that could possibly spoil our grass lawns,
that kills off birds. If you thought bees were an important part of
the ecosystem, wait until you see the barren hell that results when
you kill off the birds.
Aside
from killing off biodiversity, pesticides and other lawn chemicals
harm birds directly; 7,000,000 birds die each year because of
lawn-care pesticides.
That's it for the bees and the birds; what else is there? Everything!
Since the flat putting green of an American suburban lawn is found
nowhere in nature, it's basically a lifeless desert as far as the
Earth's ecosystem is concerned.
When
we tend our lawn, it isn't enough to insist on having grass. We also
have to fight what we call "weeds." That word "weed"
is actually an environmental slur; what we call "weeds" are
what the rest of nature calls "dinner, a home, and a source of
essential nesting material."
A
Personal Anecdote:
Here
in Iowa, I once had a lesson in what happens when you just let ONE
"weed" grow.
This is the Eastern American Goldfinch,
Iowa's official state bird. Note the thistle-d purple-blossom bush
he's sitting in.
In my home state of Iowa, back at my former residence before we downsized after graduating to empty-nesters ourselves, we had a place right on the Des Moines river plus acres of open woods. Being situated on the side of a hill made mowing the back part impossible without also mowing the house, so I let some weeds grow in the back where neighbors couldn't see.
What
should grow there one spring but this exact bush with the purple
blossoms? To my surprise, it was suddenly flocked with Goldfinches by
the half-dozen, who pulled the fluffy purple down out and flew off
somewhere over and over again, likely building a nest in our eaves.
This was right outside my Work-From-Home freelancer's office window.
The Goldfinches carried this on all spring. It was magical. I have
never before nor since seen so many goldfinches. My state bird.
But
by law, I'm not allowed to have even that. I could get away with it
because this was a tucked-in corner out of sight of the street. I
felt like Winston Smith hiding his double-think from Big Brother.
Since
then, we have moved to ticky-tacky white middle-class suburbia, and
now have no square of turf outside the judging gaze of our white
middle-class neighbors. Which means that we're not allowed one single
flowering bush. The birds, as my current neighborhood dictates, can
piss off.
Grass Lawns Are Enforced! You Have No Choice!
Some
of you have been reading along, perhaps wondering what the big deal
is. "You don't like your lawn, boo-hoo, plant a garden instead?"
Well, it is not that easy!
In the first place, much of American real estate is controlled by HOAs (home owners associations) which
mandate a green grass lawn, cut to a specified
height. Not only are you not allowed to rip out the grass and replace
it with native plants or even a gravel patch, but you are further
required to keep it alive and maintained - they will check with a
ruler!
And God help you if you are allergic to grass and try to replant your lawn with alternative plants - a
court in Missouri pursued a case against a widow who did just that (shown above) for just such a reason. The case has dragged on for five years while this innocent woman minding her own business is threatened with thousands of dollars in fines and decades in prison - just for NOT GROWING A LAWN.
Then
there are local, municipal government regulations about this, in
places like, say, my city in Iowa.
Local
lawn-mowing ordinances can fine you up to $10,000 for being caught
with your grass too long. If you don't pay that, in some cases, you
can see jail time and lose your property. Yeah, you heard that right.
A country where half the murder cases go unsolved, but by God, we have
Grass Police.
The Draconian enforcement of this minuscule issue can reach the
realm of bureaucracy run wild. A Florida
resident was fined $500 per day while out of town, racking up a $29K
debt which he has tried to fight in court, and judges have upheld. An
Indiana resident has spent $15K fighting his city's lawn ordinances,
even standing and obstructing a mower sent out by the city like a
Tiananmen Square reenactment. It is like this in state after state.
To
quote one victim of this legal overreach: "We’ll end up with a
planet full of chemicals because everything that is living will
disappear." Buddy, you don't know the half of it!
Lawns Are Also Destroying the Earth
Let's start with Sarah B. Schindler, University of Maine School of Law, who brings us a modest proposal - ban
the lawns.
> "This psychological attachment to lawns, however, resultsin significant environmental harms: conventional turfgrass is a non-nativemonocrop that contributes to a loss of biodiversity and typically requires vastamounts of water, pesticides, and gas-powered mowing."
Let's talk about that water. Turfgrass is the most-irrigated "crop" in the United States, covering 128K square kilometers of the nation. Meanwhile, a single golf course in Tampa, Florida consumes 178,800 gallons of water PER DAY, an amount which could go to the daily household use of 2.2K Americans per day instead. To quote more from that source:
> "Keeping a lawn green takes one to two inches of water per week; for a mere thousand-square-foot lawn, that easily adds up to over ten thousand gallons a summer. Less realized is that, like a fully loaded luxury sedan, lawns are hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels. It takes natural gas to produce lawn fertilizer; petroleum to power the wide-area mower that runs 'like a Deere'; oil to keep the weed whackers, edgers, and blowers all buzzing."
Mere
homeowners, without considering golf courses, sports stadiums, and
other businesses, consume 9 billion gallons of water in the average
day, with most of that just being dumped on the useless grass
outside.
Can We Ever Get Over Lawns?
Some drought-stricken states are finally waking up to this issue, such as California, which has suffered a decades-long drought while blithely gushing gallons of water onto their patches of turf year-in-year-out. Finally, as the reservoirs drain and citizens are starting to get the dust out of their taps, California
is starting to pay urban residents a bonus for tearing up the turf and replacing it with alternatives, such as woodchips or low-moisture succulents.
Naturally,
this kind of environmental wokeness doesn't happen by itself in
government; it takes years of activism. There are sites like lesslawn.com which have been around for years. Quoted there is this excerpt:
> "In her 1992 book Requiem for a Lawnmower, Sally Wasowski wrote: "I belong to the school that believes a natural landscape should be composed of only those plants that would have naturally occurred on that site. That means native plants - combined in the way that Mother Nature arranges them. Today, many native plant lovers and environmentalists are taking this innovative and, to me, quite sensible point of view."
Meanwhile, the
Wild Seed Project offers step-by-step instructions on how to convert your lawn back into a native meadow nurturing to your surrounding area.
Native
plants! Remember what I was saying about "weeds" back there
and how one "weed" ended up being important to our official
state bird? For all we know, nobody has even observed that
goldfinches need purple thistles because I might have been the first
person to allow one to grow.
The
process of letting a lawn become a meadow is quite simple, the simplest
thing to do in fact: nothing! Don't water, don't mow, don't
fertilize, and let nature do its thing. Naturally, you will still
want to cut a path or trim back shrubs so you can walk around and
have a view out the windows. But you just might be rewarded with a
beautiful property blooming with wildflowers and merry with
hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees. Which, you know, can also help
us not starve to death in the long run.
We can do that, or we can pour all this effort - watering, mulching, fertilizing, weeding, mowing, watering again - into a useless plant
that had no business being in the borders of North America in the
first place.
Of
course, people are broken, so we'll likely stick mostly with the
grass. In that case, nature will have to wait until the humans kill
themselves off - and then it will get back its sunny happy meadows
anyway.
