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TODAY Monday 2 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Monday 2 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: My Front Yard
High on the list of my personal perversions is the lawn. The lawn is a half-acre in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I maintain a weekend house for the "care" of my 16-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. I exercise my duties as joint custodial parent by letting her sleep until noon, cooking spaghetti, and compelling her to watch videos of my choosing. In the hours between my waking and hers I putter around our leaky, ramshackle worker's cottage (as its called in the town records) and then go play in the garden. Each spring, on the first weeding of the year, I mistakenly uproot a significant fraction of the perennial plants I purchased the previous summer, which compels me to return to Andrews' Greenhouse and plant a new batch, thus completing one of the great cycles of nature.
I do not, however, intervene in the care of the lawn itself. Every ten days a teenager from Curb to Curb Lawn Care straps earphones to his head and rides a large mower over the territory. He gives the equivalent of a buzz cut to the grass. I asked Curb to Curb for a two-inch cut every two weeks, but they ignore me and I acquiesce.
The grass that the teenager mows is green and lush, thanks to applications of lime, fertilizer, and "weed suppression" substances from Shumway and Sons in nearby Belchertown. I have elected the Organic Option offered by Shumway, in which the fertilizing agent somehow comes from seaweed, but twice a year I pull in the driveway to be greeted by a little yellow sign that warns me to keep Annie and Sparky off the lawn for a day or two. In this too do I acquiesce.
I know that my regime is ecologically undesirable. The energy required to manufacture, transport and use the mower; the emissions from its nasty little motor; the percolation of my twice-a-year toxic herbicide and its implication in hormone disorders; the substitution of a monoculture of alien grass for the rich diversity of the native woodlands; the sheer stupid wastefulness of it all -- these things I know, and then suppress.
There are two reasons for my perversity. The first is that I want to sell the house when the sixteen-year-old becomes an eighteen-year-old and goes off to college in 1999. Six years ago I put the house on the market (looking to trade up, as they say) the summer after I had decided to forego the Curb to Curb / Shumway strategies and instead rely on a little tenth of an acre lawn, mowed by hand, bordered by a much larger "meadow." I eavesdropped relentlessly on the conversations between the realtor and the house-seekers, and many of them had rude things to say about my natural landscaping. The lack of closet space was the main objection, actually, but certainly no one said "I really like the way this guy has crafted a low-maintenance, species-diverse micro-environment."
Reason Number Two is that the neighbors really hated it. There are no fences in our vicinity; grassy lawns blend into grassy lawns, and the whole landscape becomes a middle-class variation of some manorial expanse. Just one lawn going to seed on our strip of Route 116 makes the place resemble a gap-toothed seven-year-old. Most of the neighbors just glared at me and the former lawn; a couple were brave enough to tell me that they disliked it. This is in a town with lots of public lands, trails galore, and the United Nations flag flying over the Common.
The twin forces of market demand and peer pressure were irresistible, and I knuckled under, never to relent. I'm a loyal consumer now, and the once-hostile neighbors wave cheerily. "Stay home and be decent," Wendell Berry once advised us, and I do think he's right. I do believe that our -- my -- rootlessness is at the heart of the problem. I am looking beyond the horizon at the next chance, the next move, and I want to maximize all my options, financial and otherwise. And I dare not try to persuade the neighbors to go with ecological landscapes, not when I come equipped with a part-time commitment and a nomadic heart.
TODAY ON THE SITE
There's a new Capitol Hill Spy on the site this morning, well worth a look. Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle describe a much-overlooked element of environmental health: the testing standards, protocols and procedures of the Environmental Protection Agency.
5/30: Funders
5/29: Quantification
5/28: Over the Top
5/27: Solar Hippies
5/23: Spiffy Cars, Clunker Bikes
5/22: Petroleum Heresy
5/21: We Irish
5/20: Shallow Backpackers
5/19: Songbirds
5/16: Fat, Fat, Fat
5/15: Our Forthright Administration
5/14: Coral Reefs of the Sahara
5/13: (Life Before) Death and Taxes
5/12: Kids
5/09: Free Trade and Hormones
5/08: Sherry Boehlert, Republican
5/07: Fort Davis, West Texas
5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway