After the grossly unfortunate cover on last week’s New Yorker, I swore off the magazine as not only pretentious, irrelevant, and obnoxious, but as a downright biggot-den. To my surprise, Turf Wars popped up on morning blogosphere cruise, in which Elizabeth Kolbert perfectly dissects the history, significance, and senselessness of American lawns. Some highlights:
…[T]o advocate a single replacement for the lawn is to risk reproducing the problem. The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it—all green, all the time, everywhere.
We now have lawns smoother and more velvety than Downing could have imagined. And yet our relationship to the Beautiful remains vexed. As the anti-lawnists correctly observe, the American lawn now represents a serious civic problem. That the space devoted to it continues to grow—and that more and more water and chemicals and fertilizer are devoted to its upkeep—doesn’t prove that we care so much as that we are careless.
I worry that her mention the relevance of lawns to “privilege” (what kind? the white bourgeoisie, i.e. New Yorker readers) fails to dissect the implications of lawns-as-privilege markers. Kolbert traces who owns lawns (the privileged) and what lawns do (produce mangaled grass communities pumped with toxins) but omits any mention of priviledged responsibility for cleaning up the mess they have perpetuated. We often talk about environmental problems as though we share the burden equally and everyone needs to pitch in–no so. Its about time lawn-mowing, SUV-driving surburbanites take some credit for the work they’ve been doing.
The current CRISIS of lawns on this continent stems from a lack of appreciating the ramifcations of process from product. Contemporary lawncare is approached without asking how grasses function ecologically or how the ancient, sacred act of human-working-on-land should be treated culturally. This one, enormous element of contemporary landscape design epitomizes industrial American society as a disrupted ecological fragment bereft of the connections-to-place that made us make sense, once upon a time.
As for me, the space in front of my Berkeley home is covered in sprouting beans, cilantro, tomatoes, zucchini, and more. There’s a lovely bench in which I can sit–just enough away from the road–and look back at my house in its disjointed stature, built over decades. Food Not Lawns!
I’ve just seen WALL-E. Despite my doubts about liking such a mainstream movie, its one of the most beautiful movies to be widely distributed in a while. Most fascinating to me is the theme of environmental degradation leading to the utter collapse of civic life, causing the evacuation of all human life (and the death of everything else). One can’t help but form an emotional attachment to this character that has been left on Earth to clean up humanity’s mess for hundreds of years–alone–while finding an enormous range of curiosity for all the trash left behind (i.e. junk collecting). 
Hayao Miyazaki was even exploring environmental degradation in animation back in the 90’s, epitomized by 
