"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
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