Oh I feel a ballooning essay coming on. Yes, over a lawn.
I got yelled at by a third person in this neighborhood for letting dogs pee on their lawn. I find this reaction to be pretty hilarious on several dimensions of thought, which is what I'm going to try to demonstrate without becoming unhinged. I'll begin within a limited argument and expand out as I go.
The first time someone yelled at me I threw my head back and laughed in a comical and exaggerated way. I felt a little sorry about this response - though I was talking on my phone so it is hard to tell how the lady interpreted the gesture - so I subsequently tempered my response on later occasions.
This fixation on lawns is understandable: in a world growing increasingly chaotic, and increasingly aesthetically horrifying by a combination of neglect, automobile-based asphalt/concrete ubiquity, and the expediency of mass-produced, monocultural beauty, the average lawn-owner just wants to have a small patch of land that can be controlled and made visually pleasing in a semi-naturalistic way (though most of these efforts collapse into the corporate monoculture category for reasons I'll get to). I do get it. And it is sad to watch the look on these people's faces...that quivering mixture of despair and horror as they fixate their gaze on the offending dogs hovering sordidly over their beautiful grass. It doesn't seem as though they particularly relish snapping at people to get off their lawns, but they are left with no choice given their own inner perturbation.
However this commitment - and the concordant behavior - is ultimately misplaced and futile. First, this is a heavy dog-populated neighborhood. For every dog the owners happen to catch and shoo off their lawn, there are dozens more which escape their gaze and unleash rivers of urine into their lawn. People walk their dogs at all hours of the day. There are tons of them going by all the time. There is no way to reverse this grim tide of dog pee. Besides, though Americans are actually part of one of the most obedient mainstream cultures in the world, they typically refuse to be dominated by their peers - so you could say Americans on average are obedient to authority, a vertical quality, while they are allergic to any hint of obedience to their peers, which is a horizontal quality (this trend is changing though). What this amounts to - and I've seen this in family and several neighbors - is that scorned dog owners go out of their way to get their dogs to pee on the lawns in question out of reaction to being insulted; the preventative act is reversed in its effect and becomes a magnet for undesirable consequences. Besides, it is much easier (and more friendly to the community) to simply shrug and water the lawn, which helps too.
But wait, water the lawn? What of lawns? For now we've been entertaining the key premise that joining the community and having a nice green lawn is desirable. But is it? This makes one stop, pull further out, and consider the greater argument.
The fact of the matter is that the mass adoption and propagation of the manicured lawn is one of the greatest environmental disasters in the history of human civilization...on par with the deforestation of Easter Island. I'm not even kidding! Lawns are fucked.
Now granted, if you recycle your mulch, you can get a nice organic fertilizer and your lawn acts as an effective carbon sink, plus it allows wildlife like bugs and wormies and birds - which eat the wormies - to settle in. But then plenty of other forms of plant life and soil have this effect too.
Lawns need lots of water to survive. Now, meadow grass is at least sustainable wherever it happens to grow in its natural habitat. Wild lawns can survive just fine where there is plenty of rainfall to feed it. But the problem is the lawn as it exists now has become a product of mass-produced monoculture. It is spread and grafted in stylized form to the far reaches of the country: we plant it in deserts, in the mountains, on top of concrete, etc. In these environments, it is almost impossible to grow and maintain lawns without three elements: fertilizers, pesticides, and lots of artificially administered water.
Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are disasters in themselves. Generally they are petroleum based, which on top of contributing to global warming, are seeing global supplies strained as the conventional sources are being sucked dry, with proxy wars taking place over many of the remaining conventional sources and energy companies increasingly pursuing dirty, environmentally destructive, energy intensive, and economically inefficient unconventional methods (fracking, tar sands, deep drilling). Plus, every time it rains, pesticides are deposited to god knows what receptacles everywhere they happen to flow to. These chemicals are incredibly toxic and have many documented negative effects on human beings, wildlife, crops, pest resistance, whole ecologies (they kill bees in mass amounts) and more. While giving temporary boost to agricultural yields, they destroy soil and the life around them in the long run.
We also typically prefer to manicure our lawns, with...drumroll...gasoline powered lawnmowers. Few people use hand-pushed mowers. They're hard to use (I've used one) and most suburbanites are overworked and low on energy anyways. Plus, most gardeners stick to gasoline-powered equipment themselves due to the nature of their profession.
Wow! Now the water. Lawns, if they are grown in inhospitable environments, take lots of water to sustain. An insane amount of water in fact. Otherwise they just grow brown and dull, defeating the purpose. Consider the dilemma this furthers. The US (and many other places in the world) is increasingly experiencing water shortages and drought, which is growing worse. We are running out of fresh, potable water due to population strains. Plus, you have pesticides and fertilizers contaminating certain water tables, sewage disposal systems becoming outdated, farmers fighting over water supplies for agriculture, and frackers vying for water supplies to do their fracking (which consequently also contaminates water). Cities are beginning to feel the pressure and even whole institutions are trying to come up with guidelines to start rationing water. But even incremental reductions aren't going to cut it.There is going to come a time when we simply don't have the water to keep lawns green, which basically defeats the purpose. No one wants a brown lawn. And the crop is basically useless in the capacity we use it in. This is insane!
Now, further out. This conventional monoculture phenomena of repetitious mass production is very striking; it seems to emerge out of size and scale. The lawn can be traced to the British upper class. The British upper class supposedly loooved their fresh green manicured lawns. So much that many of them took turf with them to the colonies to transplant it there and make things more like home. This look caught on, eventually becoming integrated into the American Dream mythology, with everyone wanting a nice manicured green lawn as part of the package. As population mushroomed out as a consequence of the second industrial revolution (mass production through assembly lines and industrial agriculture) it was now possible to distribute a growing amount of reproduced manicured lawns based on the mass produced suburban model.
It seems as though a social body that grows large enough to be considered a civilization is centered around a common set of ideas, with resultant patterns being multiplied throughout the population. A monoculture forms, with accompanying pressure to conform, thus the phenomenon of the manicured green lawn multiplied across the landscape, even amidst clearly hostile environments. A monolithic idea is thus spread across a diverse land, resulting in strains to sustain the idea where it is unsuited.
The distinctly American brand of mainstream culture is directly hostile to the surrounding environment, which puts strains on everything from the material circumstances to the social relations that take place within. The lawn people are those unfortunate products of convention, those nodes which strain to maintain a given aesthetic continuity within their culture, however misplaced, and despite greater destruction to the greater surroundings. Their attempts at control are based on a greater model that has to be cast aside by the entire population to avoid disaster. The larger a living system grows that separates itself from the greater living fabric, and the more inputs required to sustain such a living thing, the more is taken from the surrounding environment, the more tension forms between that thing and everything else, as a general principle. To paraphrase the Hopi, the more you take from the earth without giving back, the more forcefully you invite disaster.
This now relates to the religious idea of giving up on a previous conception of order that is based on the ghostly image of an old, dying mythology that is projected universally. There is emergent order even within chaos; it just appears differently from a hierarchically organized, top-down distributed mode of order that materializes as green trimmed lawn. This means giving up on the old, and letting oneself be swept away by the new.
You see some homeowners ripping up their lawns and placing indigenous, low-water plant systems on their land. Or you see permaculture practitioners rejecting industrial agriculture and building whole ecologies while attempting to harmonize with principles of nature. More is needed, but these are good steps.
That is why the spectacle of these angry lawn owners cracks me up. It is as if they stand on a Wyle E Coyote style sliver of cliff hanging out over the abyss, complaining about the spidering cracks forming underneath their feet. I also check myself and try not to laugh too much, as many people simply just don't know and we are facing some very serious problems. Perhaps I'm being a bit dramatic. Or perhaps not.
