forest for the trees

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.

*40% of US adults and almost 19% of children are obese.

*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. By contrast, a thriving forest is a mutualistic ecosystem; interrelationships facilitate the health of everything within.

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.

taming a continent

PART 3

Since North America is made up of 15 ecological regions, further disaggregated into 182 more nuanced areas, landscaped lawns across the country make zero sense. 

Meaning, specific flora and fauna naturally thrive in certain areas based on unique geographical features. What flourishes in Alabama is different than in Arizona than in Albany than in…you get the picture.

Yet from coast to coast, every patch of green space we see looks the same: parks, schools, public buildings, restaurants, god-awful strip malls, place of worships, homes.

Why?

Remember, lawns originated in Europe as a sign of wealth and brought to America. Early settlers then asserted their agenda on the thriving ecosystems and cultures here. 

You know, to tame the continent.

As an immigrant this is baffling. It would never have occurred to my family, or any immigrants I know, to impose our customs, holidays or food on a prevailing culture. We expended time, energy and resources, assimilating to the cultural affectations of the dominant culture.

Instead, European immigrants concocted the notion of Manifest Destiny to justify their eradication of native cultures and take land. Knowing America’s growth is based on aggression and dominance helps us understand how landscaped lawns are historically seeded in the pursuit of a monoculture:

“Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won.”

The first two posts in this series touch on the psychological and environmental costs of lawns. But what are the sociological implications of bending nature to one aesthetic purpose? 

in the weeds

PART 1

Oh Spring: the time of year when weeds are under siege because of our unquestioned pursuit of turf. You know lawns are problematic, right? They require tremendous amounts of time, energy and resources, poison water, air and soil but provide zero benefit to any living creature.

What does it mean we’re willing to destroy the worthwhile, like dandelions, and assert the useless even dangerous instead? Why replace plants that provide multiple benefits with the illusion of a ‘healthy’ green lawn?

Why risk so much for illusion?

Maybe perfectly manicured lawns manifest the illusions we wish for ourselves: my life is problem free and under my control. Illusions though require constant maintenance. Our resources depleted by what we’ve been conditioned to want, rather than directed toward seeking what we need.

I need broadleaf plantain because it soothes insect bites. The omega-3 fatty acids in purslane lower my cholesterol. Yarrow is my go-to antiseptic. Not only do weeds provide myriad benefits for humans, they are food for insects and essential for soil health.

In the same way these common lawn ‘eyesores’ provide physical nourishment, difficult experiences nourish my humanity. 

Out with friends recently, an oversight caused me to shut down. My reaction, disproportionate to the incident, caused awkwardness. I felt embarrassed because I had been a pouty bitch. Like chickweed, it would be easier to remove the ugly event from my mental and emotional landscape. 

Instead I am sitting with it.

Despite how mortifying my behavior was, I am curious. What does this incident have to tell me? Why did it spark such an intense reaction? What can I learn from it? Flaws, failures and the fearsome are as useful as the weeds in my yard. 

I’m not saying this is easy. Lawns and their sidekick, landscaping, give us the illusion of control: I determine what grows where for my sanctioned aesthetic purpose. And it’s easier to reach for the human varieties of permethrin: busyness, addiction, approval, shopping or work (to name a few) to distract from what we deem ugly and bad. Besides, most of us know how to utilize distressing experiences about as well as we know how to make a salve out of weeds.

What if instead we approach the troubling things that pop up in our lives with curiosity rather WMDs? What if we expend time, energy and resources benefiting from rather than denying them? 

They speak a deep medicine we need.