“Green is the New Green”
I apparently am still unable to remove ads from individual posts for whatever goofy reason. Honestly, with the amount of time I’ve spent trying to figure out the best way to configure this site and use ad inserters and the like, I might be better off just learning HTML and coding the site myself. How different from Python can it be?
Spoiler: very different.
Anyway, none of that matters because I’m not talking about computers today. I’m talking about plants! It’s been a while since I wrote about those. I think my last environmental science post was when I was late to the Earth Week party. Then again, there wasn’t much of a party for anybody because of, well, the pandemic that the world is still in the middle of. And since then, I’ve been writing about other things, little things like Sirenhead or personal things like my mom and dad or very big things like the fact that the American justice system is regularly complicit in humans rights abuses. That’s not something that’s going to go away any time soon, and I’m not going to stop mentioning it. But I’ve done what small part I can on this blog for now, as the protests slowly wrap up and even more real change starts to take place. I’m privileged enough that I can move on to write about other things in addition to race, as I’ve said about everything I can say on that topic. Listen to the people who know a lot more about that than I do. And especially for white people, don’t think it’s over because the protests have stopped. Stay involved. I’m trying my best to do exactly that. But I can do better.
Anyway, at a certain point I worry that if I talk too much about this, I end up just trying to bolster myself and make excuses for my own privilege. So before I get into that territory, and sorry if I already have, here’s something completely different: I hate lawns. Sorry, mom.
I think that wide, grassy, private lawns are one of the worst developments of modern American society, with an emphasis on the private part. I think that wide, grassy public lawns, like for soccer fields or baseball games, are great and should accessible to everyone for recreation. It’s those yards that I really hate, monocultures of a single species of grass that get sprayed with pesticides and too much water and do nothing but take up space. Like golf courses. Though maybe even golf courses have some redeeming qualities. I more have an antipathy towards the typical suburban lawn, where the only living thing around is the nonnative Kentucky bluegrass. The kind of lawn from things like Stepford Wives and Over the Hedge.
Hear me out; the typical suburban lawn is ugly. It’s flat, uninspired, it has one shade of green. There’s no texture or variety to it. It looks exactly the same as every other lawn in every other part of suburbia. It’s an unnatural, man-made space that offers about as much nature as the bottom of your shoe. There is, in an ideal suburban yard, one species and one species only. It’s kept at a uniform height, uniform density, and uniform shape. At that point, you might as well just have carpeted your outside space for all it does. These lawns offer zero substance whatsoever. They don’t support native pollinators, they don’t look pretty, they just barely protect the top soil, they have zero biodiversity, they don’t clean carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and maybe most importantly, they don’t grow food.
Now, most important is a bit of a loaded statement; most important to whom? If you’re talking nature, then the most important resource that all that empty space, filled in only by some dumb grass, could provide is habitat for wildlife and a strong ecosystem. But for people, I think that the most important resource that large expanses of healthy dirt, i.e. the stuff that’s taken up by urban sprawl, is food. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but whenever I see a golf course or a big lawn, I look at it and I think, “hey, how many different species of vegetable do you think I could grow on all that land?” And the answer, even if it’s just one, is better than zero.
The world is currently is a sort of food desert crisis. For some countries, that means regions where there is never enough food for everyone, despite the fact that we, as a planet, have the capacity to feed ten billion people. For others, that means regions where nutritious food is scarce or too expensive; i.e. impoverished neighborhoods where a box of apples costs four dollars but a meal from McDonald’s costs two. These food deserts are usually, but not always, inner city neighborhoods, and usually, but not always, made up of minority groups and oppressed peoples. Unequal access to healthy food is a pretty common trait of cities around the world, and trying to fix that is a problem that urban planners and sociologists have been tackling for decades. What’s the best fix if there isn’t enough food, though? Grow more of it.
This is where the gardens come in, then. Think of this; instead of big, green, useless lawns, what if every home in America had a garden instead? A place where they could grow green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, melons, corn, peppers, any kind of plant that’ll grow in a given climate type. That’s less food waste, more healthy food available, a more robust agricultural economy, better access to nature because you’ll have to be down in the dirt to get a garden, and, hopefully, fewer food deserts as healthier foods become cheaper and more easily attainable, or just even grown at home. And these spaces don’t have to be someone’s lawn, either; the roofs of buildings, vacant city lots, community gardens next to parks and nature preserves, the opportunities for very literal growth are endless. Why have grass when you can have greens?
In his incredible memoir and one of the greatest pieces of nature writing since Walden, Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac that “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” I don’t know about the heat part, but I think this is especially true today, at least in much of privileged America. Growing plants is hard work! It takes time and knowledge and space and resources, but none of that’s shown by the cucumber you pick up from the supermarket. Besides providing more food, everyone having a huge garden instead of a yard might make people appreciate the food that they do have more. Being a farmer is no easy job, and if you want to make enough money to keep your land to next year, sometimes all you can do is use all those pesticides. I still think pesticides are a huge problem and that organic permaculture is the way of the future, but farmers themselves usually don’t have a choice. Maybe everyone having a garden could help change that.
How does one even go about starting a garden, though? Honestly, in my limited experience with growing food at home and at school, it’s a lot of trial and error. You got to till up the soil, plant the seeds, water the plants, weed out the extra stuff in their, thin out the stalks, clean off any pests, harvest everything, and depending on the strength of your soil, plant cover crops or rotate everything for the next season. It’s a lot of logistics and planning, which is why agricultural science is, you know, a science. I just started by taking a big fork and turning up the ground until I felt like I could plant some seeds in it, and so far, it’s been working. I ate some green beans from my garden the other day, and I have to say, it was pretty dang satisfying to know that I could actually eat the fruits of my labor. Or vegetables of my labor, anyway.
And that kind of goes hand in hand with another thing I wanted to talk about; fruit trees. There are a couple different groups and websites dedicated to finding and documenting fruit trees, bushes, and similar food-producing plants in urban regions, all for the purpose of people going out and picking those fruits so that they don’t go to waste. Did you know that you can eat those little red berries that grow on that tree in your yard? If they’re serviceberries, you can. Don’t go out and pick random fruits, of course, some of them could be poisonous. But if you know what you’re looking for, there’s good food all around, even in the most unexpected places. I plucked a bunch of berries from in front of a parking garage a couple weeks back, and one of my roommates made a pie out of it. It was amazing! And also illegal! But fucking why?
Sure, private property laws and all that, but if the fruit is just sitting there in a public space, looking all pretty and ornamental, why can’t someone pick it? I think that picking fruit from urban areas should be a legitimate activity, not something that the janitor and your neighbor yell at you about for being a weirdo. In a world that already has so much waste, why let some perfectly good berries rot on the vine? I think that everyone should be able to go out and harvest fruit from their neighborhood, wherever they are. Hell, maybe towns should start planting fruit trees for that exact purpose! Would it be so bad if the village hall made a couple of pies every year with the stuff they harvested from next to the parking lot? It’d be just like Animal Crossing!
But this is all just the tip of the iceberg for alternative uses for lawns. Why take up all that space when you build more houses? Or why have just grass when you can have fifteen different species of grass? Why not include some flowering plants, like native wildflowers, which bloom beautifully and also live for basically forever? No more needing to cut the lawn when your lawn is six feet tall and also a wildlife hotspot. Want to save the bees? Plant some flowers. Want some trees? Plant those, too! Just call your local pipe location service first, so you don’t accidentally burst a gas pipe in fifteen years when those tree roots extend thirty feet in every direction.
I’m not entirely sure where else I wanted to go with this, besides giving some sort of explanation for why I hate lawns so much. They’re ugly and useless. I guess those are the main points. But just think about all the great things that they could be used for, and all without giving up your private property! Forget the Home Owner’s Association. That’s a thing of the past. Take control of your lawn and do something useful with it. Make it pretty. Make it unique. Make it productive. But above all, and like all things in life, make it diverse. We aren’t getting anywhere if everything looks exactly the same. Grass is dumb and gardens are cool. Let’s grow those victory gardens and help those bees. We can all do it, one yard at a time.
