Personally, I love a fresh-cut yard. There's nothing like the smell of that grass, freshly snipped by the blades of the lawnmower (or if you grew up in the country like I did, giant tractor) and the feel of it underneath your feet, slightly prickling and tickling your toes as you walk atop it.
Yet some people, I imagine, might find this offensive. Why? Maybe because they think things should be left in their natural state. Maybe because they feel that its "harming the environment." To me, (and I hope most would agree) this seems a little extreme. I can appreciate maybe clearing out a forest unnecessarily as "offensive," but cutting your grass? That is expected.
Why do I bring this up? Well, it strikes me as really funny how much more attune I've become to anything pertaining to the environment/nature since taking this class. This evening, my dad and I were stuck in traffic and were talking about transplanting perennials and planting trees in my yard, and somehow got on the subject of grass cutting. He said he is more of a "natural landscaper," (oxymoron?) in the sense that he really could care less about "finely manicuring" everything, i.e., weed-eating, leaf-blowing, hedge-trimming "maintenence" with which many homeowners find their weekends occupied. Now, this in part could be because they live out in the country and so while we do have nice flowerbeds around our home and no shortage of trees and things to keep pruned, I can definitely appreciate his lack of motivation to keep everything so precisely manicured. He prefers to spend three or more hours out under the open sky, on his big Cub tractor (yes, its yellow) just slowly making his rounds around their (mostly open) 3+ acres. He finds it relaxing, refreshing, calming. And, too, there's just nothing like that "fresh cut grass." It looks nice, it smells nice, and he takes pride in keeping it that way and takes personal pleasure in the practice of cutting it.
I'm not quite sure exactly where I'm going with this, other than that while we were having this conversation, it struck me that my mind immediately jumped to our class and to the things we've been learning and to what others' "reactions" might be to something as simple as grass-cutting, insofar as it pertains to our "environment" and to "nature" and to living in the "mesh."
Hi Courtney. Lawn maintenance is a form of agriculture. Lawns came into existence long before the invention of mowers, round about the 17th Century, and were originally maintained by sheep. Sheep are wired to cut grass down to a certain level and no further, unlike other grazers. When the English Commons got "enclosed" (read: privatized) in the 17th for wealthy sheep owners, the sheep in these fenced yards did a very thorough job. It looked nice, so it became a status symbol of the wealthy, and after a while you had to have a lawn even if you didn't have sheep, or you weren't cool.
ReplyDeleteWhen industrialization boomed the middle class, everyone had to have a lawn. Before that, it was gardens: the British still call their yards "gardens". Now, it is the most expensive and pointless form of agriculture there is. Gasoline, herbicides and fertilizers in, grass clippings out, week after week. It's totally dependent on outside sources of fuel and nutrients, and they go to the nurturing of a crop that feeds no one and that you have to throw out with the trash every week. It's a starvation pattern, making every yard a little Third World country: you import all the means and export all the yields, and the only people winning are the petrochemical companies.
My wife and I mulched our lawn three years ago and started eating from where we were by gardening. I hate lawns. Anyone who has to maintain them hates them, at least sometimes, because they're slaves to them. Mostly, no one uses the things; they just look at them. There's no direct involvement.
There is one (and only one) respect in which I agree with the vegetarians: we need lots of FRESH vegetables and fruits in our diet. But I rarely see my vegan friends mulching their yards and planting brassicas and berry bushes (in which kids love to play hide and seek), which is the ONLY way to get fresh fruits and vegetables, because cut and picked produce loses half its nutritional value a few minutes after it's harvested. Generally, by the time you buy it in the store, it's been there for days and you'd be better off putting it in your compost pile. This is why most of us are also slaves to the vitamin supplement industry. Meanwhile, the flavor of store-bought tomatoes is generally pretty insipid, and you have literally never eaten an Asian pear unless you at least know someone with a tree. Lots of Americans don't even know what a fresh fruit is, and I have to chase them off my berry bushes or they'll pick off all the fruit before it ripens.
As an agroecologist (and permaculturist), I would say that generally speaking, what looks neat and orderly to a person in Western Civilization is actually wildly DISorderly to an ecology. Order means that everything in the mesh gets fed and feeds everything else. Functional order never looks neat. Straight rows and neat, even levels are a sign of ecology in crazy distress. Aesthetically, just because we're used to low-quality food and boring landscapes doesn't mean we wouldn't like something else better.
I talk about permaculture in my blog, among other things. Visit pefkfl.blogspot.com.
Check out Michael Pollan's _Second Nature: A Gardener's Education_. I think you and your dad would enjoy it!
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