Part 5
For about the last twenty years,
I’ve watched my across-the-street neighbor plant grass each spring and fall. She
seeds then waters hours day and
night. Then, for a short spell she’ll have luminescent lime tendrils and she
will stand in the street, hands on hips surveying the tenuous fruit of her labor
with satisfaction.
She performs this biannual ritual
because there is a redbud in her yard and the neighbors on both sides have oaks
leafing shade on her property. Her front yard clearly isn’t meant to grow grass
and it keeps trying to tell her that. Nevertheless she’s internalized the edict
that if you have a yard there’s supposed to be grass in it.
Distilled from the notion of
manifest destiny, this prime directive somehow transcends physical evidence
to the contrary, transcends the arithmetic of climate change, global water
shortage, mass extinction, dead zones downstream; transcends even refrigerator
magnet wisdom: if you do what you’ve always done…
Cut to my daughters’ school. The
district’s grounds crew is at work: there’s a man on riding mower jockeying a
slope. There’s another on a standing mower traversing a field.
On the steps kids are hanging out,
a couple of them are eating hot chips. Hot chips—out of a bag. This bag may get
tossed on the lawn to be shredded by mowers, creating plastic confetti, which
is hardly celebratory to any being downstream.
Cut to what’s in the news, fall
2018:
*Among other shit storms, hurricane
Florence is triggering flooding of CAFOs and coal ash pits
in southeastern states.
*4 in 10 Americans live with unhealthy air.
*Over 500,000 people are
employed in hazardous factory farms.
*Over three million migrant and
seasonal workers labor
in hazardous American fields.
*The number of uninsured Americans
is on the rise yet over half of
Americans are on a prescription medication.
*Trump’s dismantles the EPA
while strengthening the fossil fuel industry.
How are these things connected to
lawns?
A problem of pursuing a monoculture
is our sight gets channeled through the crosshairs of the here and now in the
rifle of what’s expected. We miss the forest with our my-tree-only perspective.
But we live, move and have our being in a global forest, if you will. Unwittingly
though, through lawns and landscaping, we’re complicit in a globally,
economically, environmentally destructive forest.
After Hurricane Katrina, people
realized that cypress trees were
and are the best defense against hurricanes, better even than levees. While
that’s great for our species, cypress trees also provide wildlife habitat and
restrain invasive plants. Tragically, much
of the old growth cypress forest has been turned into mulch for landscaping. My
need for a landscaped lawn contributed to the destruction suffered by
Louisianans, many of who are still suffering.
How then do we
change the prevailing aim of pursuing what-serves-my-tree-only to pursuing
what’s-good-for-the-forest?
The words of Mary Parker Follet come to
mind: Unity, not uniformity,
must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be
integrated, not annihilated, not absorbed.
