A Toxic Playground

"The average American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world". Read that again. The American lawn, that's the patch of grass at the front of the house where nobody plays, is being referred to here as an agricultural industry. That's the single-most unused and unproductive piece of ground in all America.

Now don't blame the Americans for that. They just happen to be doing this on a grander scale than anyone else. Given half the chance most of the rest of the world would be doing the same, in fact plenty of countries are. Now before we let the Yanks off the hook entirely, let's just take a look at some statistics. The American lawn "uses more phosphates than India, and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture. It could feed continents if people had more social responsibility. If we put the same amount of manpower, fuel and energy into reforestation we could reforest the entire continent." Consider that the cost of
professionally felling an average-sized tree in South Africa these days is between one and two-and-a-half thousand rands and the cost of planting a sapling* can cost anything up to a thousand rands or more. Put that into dollar terms and multiply by about five hundred million trees and we're beginning to get the picture.

It continues, and this is the part I like the most; "A house with two cars, a dog, and a lawn uses more resources than a village of 2000 Africans". Now, I know it's difficult to quantify something like that, a number of factors have to be taken into account when talking loosely of an African village, but I think the point is a simple one. Somebody somewhere is doing something wrong and the planet is suffering as a result. That may sound like a sweeping statement, but when you start to think about earth as a series of interlinked ecosystems making up a planetary organism, it starts to make more sense.

So, what do we have so far? Vast amounts of money being spent on something that is, to all intents and purposes, completely unproductive. Not only that, we have staggering amounts of artificial fertilizers altering the soil ecology and penetrating the groundwater. The effects of this will only begin to be felt sometime in the future, and I for one, am not willing to leave that kind of mess behind me when I die.

How did this situation arise? Why the obsession with neatly manicured lawns in middle-class suburbs the world over? In pre-Industrial Britain and Europe, for example, front lawns in towns and cities where non-existent. Food was always produced within the towns. Chickens roamed the streets, providing meat and eggs. Every town had cows, pigs and even sheep freely grazing in front and behind. Fruit trees grew along the roadsides and in public spaces. Firewood came from trees in and around the villages as they were pruned and shaped into strongly natural forms. Just outside the towns were communal woodlots where timber was cared for and responsibly harvested for every thing from roof timbers to cartwheels right down to wooden spoons and root balls used for pipes. Nothing was wasted and even the bark of the trees was used for tanning leather and what remained went for compost.

Why is it now frowned upon to have anything useful growing in the front of your house where people can see it? It seems that these days it's a sign of poverty to have chickens in your yard. Well Bill Mollison in his "Introduction to Permaculture" suggests a very interesting origin. "The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. The tradition has moved right into the cities, and ... it has become a cultural status symbol to
present a non-productive facade. The lawn and landscape is a forcing of nature into a salute to wealth and power, and has no other purpose or function."

Strong words. He goes on. "The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled, menial and meaningless toil." I might add to that that most of what Western culture has to offer is similarly meaningless and merely serves to blind us to the fact that we have become slaves to Consumerism.

Hollywood and popular culture has done its fair share in leading us down the golden path of unthinking consumerism by demonising our relationship with nature and teaching us to be afraid of everything from fungi to spiders. Why? So that we will be willing slaves busying ourselves with "work" and accumulating "wealth" that global markets, at the touch of a button can wipe away with as much cleansing force as a hurricane.

The question is this; do people out there want to fix this, or are we just happy to carry on living our lives the way we are - seeking ever more wealth and greater levels of comfort? Safe in the knowledge that not all people can share in the wealth and that some just have to suffer, because "that's the Law of the Jungle, and there's nothing I or anyone else can do about it". Or is it just that most people are ignorant of the facts and unaware of the solutions, and if they were they'd be out there in the streets trying to fix things? Because, trust me, solutions are out there in the buckets full. You've just got to want to find them...

Some people say that things have got way out of hand and there's no way we are ever going to be capable of fixing it. Well I say "rubbish" to that. It just raises the bar and makes things more challenging, that's all.

But first of all, you've got to stop what you're doing and take a look around your world and ask yourself if we might not find a better way of going about our lives. Funny things happen when you start letting the grass grow under your feet, too. Flowers start springing up all around you.



*That includes the cost of growing the sapling (for six months at least), as well as the transportation and labour required to dig and prepare the hole (and if you want a healthy tree you're going to need good well-rotted compost as well as a fungal innoculation to give it a head start).

All quotes are taken from the "Introduction to Permaculture", by Bill Mollison.
ISBN 0 7974 1105 4

The Shape of Things to Come

It's amazing how life adapts to change. As we head at a crashing pace towards our inevitable demise, there seems to be a part of the human mind that is desperately trying to find balance in the world.  On an ever growing scale (and I say ever growing because more and more people recognise the pure common sense of it), people are starting to dismantle the Western capitalist model (and all the others that don't work properly), in favour of alternatives.

Simple systems that for too many years have been firmly lodged on the fringes of society are now becoming more and more mainstream.  Things like Permaculture have developed out of the fragmented "Back to Nature" movement of the Sixties and Seventies into fully-fledged, viable alternatives to the "That's Just The Way Things Are" way of thinking that I, for one, grew up with.

Take a website like Freecycle, for example, where people literally give things away to one another.  Not just junk, but everything from books, clothing, kitchenware, computers (good ones), and even cars along with many good and useful things besides!

Talent Exchange is another one.  A place where you can swap your skills for those of another.  Such an ancient idea, and yet so modern.  What's next, bartering chickens for a lift to work? Why not.

Mother Earth News ran a story many years ago now, about a thing called the 'Hour' in Ithaca, New York.  Similar to the Talent Exchange idea, you swapped your abilities for "banknotes".  The thing about the notes was (still is, I believe) they were for time, not money.   So you paid your barber with time, who paid his mechanic with the same time who then went and bought fresh organically grown veg. with the same "hour".  Everybody got something out and no money went through the system.  The taxman was the only one with a blank look on her face!

These are all examples of people's willingness and ability to beat, bend and hammer the system into a more humane and sensible shape.  They are indicative of the groundswell of awareness that the capitalist model, with its unerring ability to favour the few over the many, is not the way Nature intended us to live.

People working within the system are becoming more effective all the time.  I remember way back in the Seventies when I was a kid that there was an often violent differing of opinion between two differing schools of thought amongst the "alternative" communities of the time.  The one crowd thought that the only solution was violent revolution while the other sought to subvert the system from within (basically joining the system in an effort to beat it).  These people were decried as having sold out to the system and were given short shrift by the more angrily vocal crowd.  I was kind of torn between the two, and being young and foolish went with the fast turnover idea that "revolution was the only solution".  Luckily that didn't last long and as I became a slightly more sensible person the idea of change by evolution began to take form.  I was always reminded of the song lyric "...now that you've got your freedom, what are you going to do with it?" and it had a sobering effect on me and many people that I knew as we began to reflect on what actually does happen after the revolution.  Do we keep on making the same old mistakes as those bright minds who went before us?  Considered soberly, the honest answer had to be that no, we didn't actually have a clue as to what to do next.

Then a very weird thing began to occur...  The "corporate subversives" were popping up all over the place in government and civil society and providing solutions to problems that most people hadn't even seen yet.  They were educated and eloquent and passionate and were making a difference from within the system.  Holy shit. they were starting a revolution!  A living, breathing, walking, talking revolution.  A real paradigm-shifting, upside-down turning make-you-sit-up-and-think revolution.  And people really are starting to think.  They're starting to think that maybe we really can "wrest technology's sword from the hands of the warlords".

Check out something like the Reclaim Camissa project (which will soon have its own home here)and you'll see that there is real change happening right in front of us.  There are so many projects like this happening all over all the time that I would dearly love to see splashed on the front pages of every daily newspaper and as headline news on TV.  Well, at least they got it onto 50/50