No Lawn Chair Needed
Saying goodbye to the Queen and the lawn altogether.
Welcome back to The Link, a bi-weekly newsletter making the connection between “regenerative farming,” and you—city slickers, country mice, and everyone living in the in between—every other Sunday.
Oh hi! Do you remember me? Did you forget that you subscribed to this thing? If this is your first time here, welcome to a newsletter dedicated to making the connection between you and regenerative farming. You can get a quick download on how topics I like to cover here, like how this practice connects to your vitality or get a quick primer on terms I often use, like circularity.
I took some rest at the end of summer and literally went fishing, but now I’m back, just in time to be the anaphylactic shut in since pumpkin spice season is here. No seriously, I’m very allergic to the entire squash family. Anyway, I hope you had some time to log off and go look at the stars or get lost in nature somewhere.
So much has happened since we last checked in on each other. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, took civilization one step closer into the circular economy by giving up all of his ownership of his company, and all future profits will be donated to help the fight in climate change. Imagine what shift could happen towards a climate positive future if Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Bernard Arnault, and the newly appointed King Charles III joined in. Speaking of which, as the world experienced the departure of the longest reigning queen in modern history, Queen Elizabeth II, her death has ushered in conversations around decolonization on a global scale. Canada is asking King Charles to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery, which justified the stealing of land from the Indigenous people. What if he took another page beyond wealth itself from Yvon Chouinard and renounced the monarchy altogether?
As I sat there watching the royal family send off their beloved matriarch earlier this week, I couldn’t help but stare out the window at my lawn. Grass. Turf. More specifically, bermuda grass. It’s the thing that’s constantly one step ahead of me. It’s the gaslighter in my life: either dying, overgrown, or somewhere in the middle at all times. I feel judged by it and the neighbors who keep theirs high and tight trimmed every time I walk outside. It requires gallons and gallons of water to keep it happy. It takes a decent amount of money out of my bank account every year—between its maintenance and my water bill—that I should be investing elsewhere, but I don’t really have a choice. It’s part of the upkeep terms I agreed to as a renter with my landlord. And if I don’t? I get fined by the city (and potentially warned, or evicted by said landlord).
Shortly after I listened to an anchorman explain the eccentric royal tradition of lining royalty's coffins with lead (to slow their decomposition) during the queens funeral procession, it made me think of other European traditions like lawns and landlords, which are European inventions rooted in power structures.
Yea, I get it. You’re wondering if I’ve lost my edge since I moved out of New York City because I’m sitting here writing about the kind of grass you can’t (or shouldn’t) smoke. But I know I’m not alone. The New York Times agrees with me, and recently published an in-depth video about the unsexy side of keeping up with the Kardashians.
Grass is the largest crop in America, even more so than corn. According to the New York Times, it requires so much water, it could fill up 5 million Olympic swimming pools. I don’t need to go too in depth for you to already know how far deep in the hole we are on water issues and drought across the country.
The best part of yards (grass or no grass at all) isn’t just the occasional elder who likes to quietly gossip and speculate about you from afar, or the gathering of community over grilling or an all out rager that hides the vomit. It’s an interconnected ecosystem that we’re all a part of, and if we step back for a minute, our siblings in nature get to peacock, when given the chance. Just ask the lightning bugs, although if you want to bring more of them in, stop cutting your grass as often and bring in native plants. Fireflies have been struggling a lot lately, due to a combo of light pollution, habitat loss and chemicals thanks to us humans. But with some stewardship on our end, I’d like to think that more lightning bugs, the visual representation of magic, might reappear in droves. Did you know that they’re actually a kind of beetle?
Even the scarabs from ancient Egypt, now commonly referred to as “dung beetles,” have a natural intuition. Scientists recently discovered that the Milky Way helps to orient the tiny creatures as they roll their literal shitballs to their final destination. Like the scarabs, lightning bugs have their own dynamic design, giving off light to attract and communicate with others in one big block party.
Giving your lawn person a break might tune you back in. But what could happen if we really let go of our grip on controlling nature as a collective and instead invest it into the rhythms and cycles that it’s been doing for thousands of years?
This newsletter started with a discussion focused around bermuda/turf grass, a species that traveled across the world (from places like Africa and parts of India) with the colonizers that brought it here to North America. Today, the forest service, garden clubs across the country, and conservation organizations are finally starting to focus on restoring the land by way of its grasses. But it is the indigenous North American tribal communities who are leading the way in wildlife and habitat restoration. Young members of the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes are saving local grasses in Montana. The Blackfeet Nation and the Sicangu Lakota Oyate are some of the tribes involved in restoring the grasslands on the Northern Great Plains by way of bison restoration towards a food sovereign future.
For the pioneers from Europe who first appeared on these lands, the site of the prairie would eventually evolve through their cultural traditions by way of the tractor. Its microbiome richness—some of the greatest soil out there—attracted them to farm it. But a prairie is not a lawn or a farm—it is a vital ecosystem that native species of insects, mammals, birds and reptiles require for survival.
If you’ve gone to seed (sorry) and gotten distracted, let me bring you back to your own backyard. Maybe you don’t even have one, but you’re reading this from a lawn chair at your neighbors or a park bench in a city park. What happens when we do our part and stop giving in to the unspoken mediocrity of societal expectation on grass and plant native species instead? Could you invest in your soil and your health by planting fruits and vegetables instead? What if you borrowed a farmer/neighbor’s goat (with caution), sheep, or cattle to graze instead of a gas mower?
And if you’re convinced I’ve lost it altogether and written this whole thing while smoking grass, well, sadly I have not, but I probably should. It might improve my writing skills.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The queen is dead, and from the Earth she came, she returns back into it. Now leave the lawn and go plant some native seeds for new life to bloom.
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