Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart – According to NYT if you maintain a nice garden lawn and mow it regularly you are upholding a symbol of racism and demonstrating your disregard for your personal carbon footprint.
The Great American Lawn: How the Dream Was Manufactured
America’s manicured front lawns represent the pride of homeownership, and the cultivation of community. But the ways we maintain them risk hurting the environment and contributing to climate change. So why do we even have lawns in the first place? We traced their history, starting with early European colonists.
Below, you’ll find some of the sources that helped us the most and other tidbits we weren’t able to fit into the video.
Aug. 9, 2019
America’s manicured front lawns represent the pride of homeownership, and the cultivation of community. But the ways we maintain them risk hurting the environment and contributing to climate change. So why do we even have lawns in the first place? We traced their history, starting with early European colonists.
Below, you’ll find some of the sources that helped us the most and other tidbits we weren’t able to fit into the video.
…
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/video/lawn-grass-environment-history.html
The video starts by blaming colonists for importing foreign seed to feed their cattle, quickly moves to dissing George Washington for popularising manicured European style lawns maintained by slaves, then blames mechanised lawnmowers and advances in the printing press like colored advertising prints for contributing to climate change.
Low cost home loans for WW2 veterans are also attacked because they encouraged the veterans to embrace the climate destroying American dream.
They even attack Roosevelt for for mowing his lawn, when reporters wanted to ask him questions.
What can I say? Dissing the dreams of the deplorables seems to be a liberal pastime these days, especially when liberals manage to work in a few environmental and climate themes. Accusing people who want a nice house and a nice lawn of indirectly supporting the memory of slavery is just an added bonus.
Liberals won’t be happy until we’re all living in caves – except the climate elite like themselves of course, who will still enjoy the full benefits of industrial civilisation because they believe their special mission entitles them to a few perks.
Update (EW): Updated the image to a picture of George Washington, who is attacked in the video for popularising the idea of manicured lawns maintained by slaves.
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Lawns are actually good for the environment…
They promote soil hydration through the retention of water by protecting against over evaporation.
They sink CO2 from the atmosphere and replace it with controlled O2 and H2O release through photosynthesis.
Mowing them and subsequently composting their trimmings further sinks the carbon by transforming it into soil.
What’s not to like
Also in many regions creates a defensible perimeter against wildfire.
-Lawns dampen road noises.
-Lawns trap dust throw up by vehicles traveling along an adjacent road, before it can blow into the house.
-Lawns, through transpiration, cool the air surrounding a dwelling , reducing the need for carbon-hungry air-conditioners (in Washington’s day, lawns, open-windows, shade-trees, high celings, and, for the ladies, a fliratiously fluttered hand-fan, were, collectively, the “air-conditioning” of the day).
-And for early-birds, a lawn provides a bracing daught of oxygen, in the morning, as the dawn’s early light gets the grass to makin’ breakfast. One of life’s enduring pleasures.
P. S. Any doubt about the cooling effect of grass–try stepping, barefoot, from a lawn to a sidewalk, on a hot summer day.
That is why they can into existence, the are also keep short to keep vermin away from the house. The collective stupidity we see today is allowing destructive wild fires destroy homes and disease infected pest to become problem. Add in the leftist enclaves on our west coast are now looking like third world cities, with modern shanty town. Shanty towns without basic hygiene facilities.
Oh, by the way I now live in Arizona, I do not have grass, I do have a large number of plants that are of the low or no water type. I believe far better to have the Arizona sun at work growing something, then just heating rocks.
Name the wildlife that live in lawns. Name the flowers the bees kind of appreciate. If they were chemical free, at least that wouldn’t happen. They are artificial. Might as well be growing palm trees.
Wildlife that livers in lawns…
Moles, Gophers, Field Mice, my cat, fleas, Ants, ground dwelling Wasps, Chinch bugs, Crickets, Sod Webworms, Beetles, Grasshoppers, aphids, Ladybird Beetles…
Numerous creatures inhabit lawns and if you leave milkweed in your garden you’re sure to see Monarch butterflies as they live on it.
Plus, as was pointed out, a well kept and manicured lawn surrounding your home makes an excellent fire break
All these things thrive in a monoculture. Okay.
A couple thousand square feet constitutes “mono-culture”?
Really?
I have a flower pot, in that flower pot is a single petunia. Is that also a mono-culture?
Rabbits at my place, plus Ravens and Grackles and other birds.
I will add in worms, and night crawler. The live below the yard, any good yard has trees place to shade the house and walkways in the summer. Trees are the home to birds. The flower beds are for flowers the flowers are for bees, all can be raised minimal amount of water, fertilizer or insecticides. My mother and her mother did the same. I learned to do the same. Not only when i was young did we had a lawn half the yard was a garden were most of the vegetables we ate came from. The garden was not watered as a rule. The only watering was the strawberries, my mother not water is rather amazing since at the time water in my home town was not metered. Oh by the way the garden was at least 60 by a 100 and most of my youth it was hand tilled by yours truly and my brothers.
Various species of bugs and worms, dandelions that I cannot seem immune to all my attempts at replacing them.
I have pictures of Deer in my backyard eating said lawn.
Try clover. Dandelions bloom early. Giving bees something to eat before the other stuff blooms.
I don’t like carefully manufactured and maintained lawns either, but we had White Ibis walking down the streets in small flocks, then foraging (poking their bills into the sand) through certain lawns. Would like to know what they find, as in the book they are listed with the waterbirds. They did to seem more common when it was wetter.
Rabbits love lawns, they eat the grass down to the roots.
My lawn is not a monoculture. It has every type of plant in the neighborhood that thrives when it is trimmed to <75mm high. Something like 70 different species, plus a like number of bugs and small animals.
The park behind the house features maybe 30 acres of flood plain. It has hundreds of tall trees of various ages, half a dozen species that flourish in shade, and quite of number of widely dispersed small plants that grow well in shade. Hardly a tropical jungle of species, which is a bit of a myth.
Tropical rain forests are largely soil deserts. They exist by recycling the soil over very short time spans to keep the forest growing and reproducing. The soils are generally good for only one or two crops before they are depleted and abandoned.
I have a lot of clover in my lawn. The bees and deer love it.
Sowing a breed of flora that ruminants will like, and keeping those to mow it down, and subsequently eating them, well there must be something wrong with that…somehow.
Let’s see, the sun shines on the plant, the plant grows, removes CO2 from the atmosphere in the process, the critters eat the plants, you eat the critters. Trying to find the problem.
Marinated lamb is delicious.
Precisely what I do. I have plants, bushes and trees too! Imagine that! I am certainly a co2 negative, but I am trying to go positive dammit!
“What’s not to like” … trying to mow a lawn with a handmower after a weeks rain.
Handmower. That’s your problem right there.
This here is a lawn mower!
I will add in worms, and night crawler. The live below the yard, any good yard has trees place to shade the house and walkways in the summer. Trees are the home to birds. The flower beds are for flowers the flowers are for bees, all can be raised minimal amount of water, fertilizer or insecticides. My mother and her mother did the same. I learned to do the same. Not only when i was young did we had a lawn half the yard was a garden were most of the vegetables we ate came from. The garden was not watered as a rule. The only watering was the strawberries, my mother not water is rather amazing since at the time water in my home town was not metered. Oh by the way the garden was at least 60 by a 100 and most of my youth it was hand tilled by yours truly and my brothers.
When you say hand mower. Are you referring to the now powered? If you are you do have my greatest respect. If it with a hand pushed non self propelled power momower well when I was a teen and preteen that what I used to put clothes on my back growing up poor I clothes myself since I was thirteen with the addition of hand made down of course. The primary method was lawn care, basicly mowing about a dozen lawns a week at a buck and a half each time, raking and snow shoveling were the fall winter and spring money earning methods post paper boy.
Do they even make push mowers anymore? Push mowers (I’m assuming that is what you are talking about) are for small lawns, mowed at least once a week if not more often.
Wow! Now I am a racist for owning my home and having a lawn (it is green!)
Funny, this arrives just before I am about to go out and mow my lawn. Nice to know that in addition to destroying the environment I’ll be exercising my racism as well.
Ditto Toasters.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/10/eu-to-launch-kettle-and-toaster-crackdown-after-brexit-vote2/
Orwell had it right.
So it’s ok to have a racist mowed lawn, as long as I have a very small electric mower?
Not sure how EU lawmakers decided that making everything take longer was going to save energy?
Sounds like the same ‘gotta start somewhere’ thinking that called moving the clock hands twice a year ‘Daylight Savings Time’
This article in the NYT is extremely racist. It assumes that ‘People of Colour’ do not want to have or are incapable of making nicely manicured lawns for their houses.
There is a neighborhood about a quarter of a mile from house. It is largely inhabited by PoC and has been so since it was built in the 1940s. The people who live there are middle class. It is a nice neighborhood of single family homes. The lawns are mowed and there are many well tended gardens.
PoC is exactly what?
People of Colour … obviously.
“People of color”, in American English. We are no longer allowed to say “Colored People”, as in the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People”, aka NAACP.
The term was never a very good description for Americans with sufficient African ancestry to be discriminated against on the basis of their pigmentation or other physical traits. But it was preferable to alternatives which are now properly considered vile ethnic epithets.
It is perfectly OK and socially acceptable in the US of A for the “People of color” to refer to themselves as “Colored People”, …… including a few other of their chosen “defining” terms, ……. but all “Non-colored People” absolutely, positively must refer to the “People of color” as being African-American(s).
Yes. The NYtimes is racist. Spread the word.
What Dr. Sowell called the soft racism of low expectations.
This is one I can buy into. I stopped putting in all the effort to keep fescue growing in my area and let the lawn revert to bermuda grass (aka wire grass). Now I can stop mowing and let the lawn revert to central Virginia forest, replete with weeds and poison ivy.
I can signal my non-racist and environmental virtue to all the neighbors. No more chemical warfare and trying to find a kid who will deign to accept the $70/hr rate to cut the lawn when I can’t. What a great idea.
I have an old mattress and broken washing machine that I could drop off in your yard to really stick it to the bourgeois.
However, my Ford F-150 is still running well, so it will still be a few years until I can prop it up in your yard on some cinder blocks.
Until then, I salute your “Greene” yard! /sarc off
Always remember a good Okie uses the junk in his yard.
My grandfather, driving into Barstow Ca.
Depends on whther your municipal bylaws and homeowner association allows non racist unmaintained natural ground cover.
I take great comfort in the knowledge that there is such abundant food crop land in North America that we can afford to grow and enjoy lawns.
If we were to avoid anything that was once connected with slavery, cotton would be problematic as well. The NYT once again gets it totally wrong, because they don’t really get it, at all.
There’s nothing like a beautiful well watered and fertilized, lush, green, and nicely mowed lawn with not a blade of grass out of place. I’ve always looked forward to them every summer after a long dreary and cold winter.
I’ve got lots of leftist marxists up near Macalaster College that have no lawns at all. Just a bunch of wild sh#t. None of them have kids of course. To each his own (oh oh…did I us ‘his?) but unfortunately the nosy know it all leftist marxist nincompoop will foist themselves into your situation as best they can…and if it takes the strong hand of the govt to get their way, so be it!!
Why do they care if people mow grass ? Don’t they smoke it ? 😉
Which releases more CO2 ?
In fact, it was the last administration that exempted grass from oversight and moderation.
Did you ever notice that Leftists’ definition of “liberty” is whatever THEY say it is. Which is the exact opposite of what liberty means. The U.S. was founded on giving citizens the freedom to live life as they desire, and respect that same right for other citizens. The new “socialist” progressive branch of party activism is anti-freedom and anti-liberty.
What gets me about this loonscape vision of the future is just how the hell do they see themselves as ‘liberals’ let alone ‘progressives’? Progressing towards what sort of Green utopia? You mean Soylent Green? Mowing down your neighbours so you can decorate your cave with their bones?
Using water, herbicides, fertilizer. Good idea. A monoculture.
Do you have something against modern science?
You also have a really weird definition of mono-culture. Do you often proclaim the right to define words however you want?
You’re right! Tomorrow, I’m paving my lawn over and painting it green. No more herbicides, fertilizer or water.
Grass in most of North America can be grown without any of them. A properly maintain yard is self weeding and need little if any additional water. You have to willing to allow it to go dormant(brown) in August if you live in the north. In my 66 years of life I basicly never watered an extablished lawn. I also used very little fertilizer and chemicals to maintane my grass. A well maintane yard is a vital part of human health. Cut grass does not support fire and most flea carring vermin.
You know, I get the feeling someone at the New York Times is tired of maintaining their lawn…
More likely they live in an urban canyon along with the other “termite people”. No smear intended, its just different lifestyle where population density has crowded out green things so they have no concept other than in a zoo or park surrounded by even more termite mounds.
The NYT has been outed as telling their reporters to drop the Russian collusion storie and focus on Trump and his supporters are racist stories. This is one of many to come.
As someone subjected to nosy and intrusive neighbours who judge my lawn full of native wildflowers in a way designed to increase my stress and threaten me to comply with their perception of my need to mow my lawn, I find, for once, I am in complete agreement with the climate change alarmists. I intend to print this letter and send it to my local town authority next time they send me one of their “mow you lawn or we’ll do it and bill you” letters.
Good comment. Stepford wives lawns. I added some clover to mine recently. I have wildflowers on a hill on my yard, which I no longer have to mow.
Ragnaar reminds me of those urban environmentalists. The closest he’s come to actual nature was the dog poo he stepped in this morning.
I have regularly tried to explain to my wife that long grass with tops are also flowers … she doesn’t seem to agree.
Can someone check on the mansions of Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc, etc and see if they are surrounded by lush, green swards of grass or xeriscapes? I’m betting on the former.
I guess parks and recreation areas have to go to. Just weeds and dirt from here on out.
Instead of the privately owned “lush green lawns”, the New York Times should have started their “badmouthing” of Central Park, ……. which is the fifth largest park in New York City, covering 843 acres (341 ha).
New York City has 28,000 acres (113 km²) of “green grass growing” municipal parkland.
To wit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_parks
Lawns are not diverse. They are overwhelmingly green.
Lawns are good for local thermodynamic moderation, and are a negative feedback for the global [average] warming statistic.
Perhaps the problem stems from relative humidity. Lawns have been categorized as a probable anthropogenic global warmer and unfairly libeled/labeled as diversitist (i.e. color judgment).
That said, go green… plant.
It seems like my liberal friends are always on Prozac and depressed and unhappy, maybe because the US is not a socialist utopia.
I love to laugh at liberals, and BTW here is a funny one from Paul Joseph Watson, making fun of Soycialists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1AXReZgFxw
It wasn’t too long ago that all these “comrades” got put into a nice, soft and white padded room…Oh for the good old days……
Anyone listen to NPR in the US? I do for the laughs I get from it. They are obsessed with of course climate change but they also constantly bang the drum of how Negros are and were oppressed, on PBS too, entire shows about slavery and oppression back in the Jim Crow days, they go on and on about it, they can not take their minds off of it, what is with them?
One thing that Liberals fail to understand is that all their fantasies are supported by a strong economy. Take away that support and the whole scheme falls to nothing. You cannot subsidize anything if you have no tax basis for generating the needed subsidies. So how do you expect to continue with wind and solar without government subsidies when the economy collapses due to your misguided GND? A solid explanation of how you support all the perks the Left wants when businesses are destroyed would be really helpful.
Sorry Bob, the left can’t think beyond the next 18 months…..
A well-maintained lawn works to keep down all kinds of pests. From chiggers and ticks to Norway mice and field mice and even rats. The presence of mice and vermin then attract predators such as snakes, feral cats, and even coyotes.
Leave it to an urban elite to campaign for for a lifestyle similar to the homeless in NYC and San Francisco or like the rundown sections of Baltimore!
I wonder what it is going to take to get thru to this libtårds…
• I keep a lawn because I like it. Period.
• I keep the flowers weeded because they grow prettier that way. Period.
• I keep the hedges trimmed because they don’t snag our clothes. Period.
• I keep my car washed, because I like it. Period.
• I keep our house painted, to protect against dry rot, bugs, damage. Period.
• I keep our yard clean, because I prefer it to clutter. Period.
• I use a clothesline, because free-hot-dry air is great. Period.
• I dug a well, and water with it, because it’s cheaper. Period.
• I put up PV solar panels, because of outrageous PG&E bills. Period.
• I drive a 3 ton American truck, because I use it to-purpose. Period.
The bottom line is that I do these things because I want to. Because there’s not one dâhmned thing about any of them which is remotely subservient to notions of colonialism, slavery, micro-climate, personal ecology, jurisprudence, flaunted wealth, flippy fad or other foolishness. Its also why I cannot conceive of living in one of the Orwellian prisons known as knee-to-jowl packed gated homeowner committee governed compounds. Don’t need them, and their foppish rules, infinitessimal regulations, power-grabs, or other galling practices.
Conservatıve-Libertarian, to the core, I am.
Got my guns, hunt with them, and defend my property when needed.
After all, where I live, we have 180 pound mountain lions, 50 pound coyotes, endless hawks, hoot owls, bemasked raccoons, feral dogs, feral cats, and far too many ankle-twisting gophers to count. ‘Cept for the lions, .22 LR subsonic takes care of them all. Gophers get my PCP air rifle. Snakes, a snake-stick and a pair of hand clippers. Snakes don’t do so well without their heads.
NYT can suck my proverbial snake stick.
LOL.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
Goat Guy, You don’t get it: You want all that because you are a racist. In fact wanting all that proves you are a racist and getting it exposes you as a white supremacist. Woke up!
I’ll plant what I want, where I want, when I want. I’ll mow, fertilize, apply weed killer, an kill moles as I see fit.
To the dweebs at the ‘Old Grey Lady’ NYT: Kiss My Grass!
This piece would have been better received if it didn’t intentionally try to make a ludicrous connection between lawns and racism.
With regards to contributing to climate change. Since the last 40 years have featured the best weather/climate for life on this planet since the Medieval Warm Period, 1,000 years ago and the increase in the beneficial gas, CO2 has resulted in a massively positive response in plants/crops that were in CO2 starvation mode a century ago.
Ironically, it’s also causing lawns and landscaping plants to grow MUCH faster and greener…..which is the actual main effect from the increase in CO2………the planet greening up.
Pick your plant(s) at this link with thousands of studies to see how it does better with CO2 enriched air:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject.php
So its not really lawns that are affecting climate change but the benefits of climate change that are affecting lawns.
The relevant point is this. Is the aesthetic appeal of a well groomed lawn worth the work, money and wasted resources(in places that don’t have an over abundance of water, this is a waste of that resource which is better used for crops or more essential needs)?
In areas that have water supplies that will never run low……….it’s justified.
If you live in the Plains and use Ogallala aquifer water to maintain a green/lush lawn, you are wasting a precious resource with a limited supply.
Where I live in central England UK, I have never had to water my lawns.
I have never considered a lawn had any racist dimension to it…. who in their right mind would?
“See you in a while darling, I am going out to mow the racist patch..”
What is happening in the world, when a previously respectable news paper runs clic bait stories rather than stories worthy of the history of the paper?
We live in puzzling times.
I have a rather tiny patch of lawn, which has been invaded by violets. I enjoy the purple florets of the violet in the Spring, and once they’ve reached peak, I mow them down and let the clover start to blossom. Clover being a nitrogen fixing plant means that I get the bennies of that, and i let the leaves fall and mulch them with the mower in the fall, which puts nutrients back into the soil. So no artificial this or that is involved in my tiny patch of lawn, and my geraniums – a weed that’s been domesticated by hoomans – make my front steps look quite cheerful and pretty. I even use an electric mower instead of gas-powered because it’s such a small space.
I’m sure that this will make the Greenbeans and their holier-than-thou followers GREEN WITH ENVY. They’re just a nasty little bunch of jealous brats who don’t like anything that’s real and worth having.
Eric Worrall
“Aug. 9, 2019
America’s manicured front lawns represent the pride of homeownership, and the cultivation of community. But the ways we maintain them risk hurting the environment and contributing to climate change. So why do we even have lawns in the first place? We traced their history, starting with early European colonists.
Below, you’ll find some of the sources that helped us the most and other tidbits we weren’t able to fit into the video.”
Why is this repeated ?