We won't protect nature if we don't see ourselves in it
So-Slow Book Club: Spring, Week 5
This post is part of a year-long “slow book club” series exploring Margaret Renkl’s “The Comfort of Crows.” Jump in anytime!
“Suburbia isn’t paying attention,” Margaret Renkl writes in this week’s entry, decrying the wasted water and toxic brew of chemicals that are required to maintain the status-symbol green-grass carpets she sees all around her and the havoc all that modern intervention wreaks on our ecosystems, wildlife, air, water.
While I agree with most of Renkl’s sentiments, I struggled with that sentence.
Yes, our modern idea of “lawn” is harmful, frivolous, and wore out its welcome long ago. But I also hesitate to place the blame solely on “suburbia”, as though it’s a monolithic group of people who value tidy green grass above all, at the expense of birds and butterflies, bees and mice, wildflowers and native plants, clean air and water.
There are other forces at play here: municipal ordinances, HOA regulations, social pressure, marketing and consumerism. Call me a Pollyanna, but I prefer to believe most people aren’t uncaring: rather, uneducated, or unwilling to thwart authority (either actual authority, or the “authority” of social expectation.)
I’ve spent most of my life living on busy streets. Even when I’ve lived in small towns, I’ve more often than not been on a main drag of some sort. The kind of place where you can’t easily escape the notice of your neighbors or the city workers driving around looking to ticket and fine anyone with grass over a certain height, or who allows weeds like goldenrod, burdock or thistles to grow on their lawn because - in the words of my previous city’s municipal code - they are “noxious weeds” and “dangerous, unhealthy, tending to cause and promote disease, and a nuisance.”
I never used chemicals on my lawn (I was gratified to learn that my natural laziness was the ecologically friendly choice) but you bet I made sure that grass was mowed. And while I secretly coveted the tangled, wild-looking cottage gardens I’d see in a handful of neighbors’ front yards, I was never brave enough to attempt it myself.
I now live in a house overlooking 19 acres on a dead-end street. With nobody paying close attention to what we do here, Eric and I can make different choices about our garden and yard than I believed I could in my previous homes—but I find myself a bit paralyzed, both by the freedom and all the shades of possibility in between.
If we interfere too much we’ll lose what makes our yard a peaceful habitat that attracts deer, turkey, songbirds, predators and pollinators. If we don’t interfere at all we’ll have a jungle on our hands, with grasses so thick and tall we won’t be able to access the patch of woods at the back. Yes, we’d still be able to look down on a tangled, thick wilderness from our house on the hill, but there’s something deeply unsatisfying to me about the idea of trees I can’t approach.
So we mow a few times a year, and are looking at alternatives to grass, like clover. Eric brush-chops trails through the woods, and plans to put in another pond. I am planning a pollinator garden in the front. We make choices that feel reasonable and respectful to the land and its inhabitants, but still have our own enjoyment in mind. And some gasoline is burned in the process.
You could argue that my gaining satisfaction from the natural world doesn’t matter — only its health. But if we humans don’t see ourselves as part of nature, dependent on it for both survival and pleasure, might we not forget to protect, tend, and steward it?
The optimist in me likes to believe that we could relearn that interdependence enough to change the municipal laws and HOA rules and neighborly expectations that sustain the current mess we’re in. The pragmatist in me thinks the change will come only when it’s forced upon us, one way or another.
In the meantime, I like to walk the woods behind my new home, listening to the spring peepers and red-winged blackbirds, learning the names of the medicinal plants we call “weeds” and their uses, and considering what my relationship to my yard might look like in an era - not too long in the past, and likely to come again in the future - when her health was necessary to my own.
But really, that era is now—yes? Nature’s health and mine have always been interconnected, because I am part of nature. We aren’t as separable as our chemical-laden, manicured, mechanically-landscaped lawns would lead us to believe.
It’s too bad our modern world has made that fact so easy to forget.
What would it look like if we all remembered?