From Suburban Monoculture to Diverse Ecosystem
The American wilderness has been under attack since the settler colonials got here hundreds of years ago and immediately began chopping down all the trees. For millennia before that the aboriginals did a pretty good job of managing the land.
Things have gone terribly wrong since the end of World War 2 when an interstate highway system, suburbanization and a whole host of other bad concepts (plastics, pesticides, car culture) kicked into high gear and began destroying wild spaces at an unprecedented rate.
Urbanists will tell you that single family homes are wasteful and selfish and they’re right. Gardeners that tell you that the typical American suburban yard is a monoculture of one species of grass are right, but it’s more complicated than that. For starters, tearing down a perfectly good single family home to build a fourplex or a condo has an enormous carbon footprint. Think of all the construction materials - the plastic, the waste. And doing that is never altruistic - real estate developers have a formula for making as much money as possible - build out as much square footage as possible on any given piece of property. Publicly financed housing is another story, when it exists at all.
Seattle is a city based on single family homes and people in the wealthy neighborhoods do not want development.
This brings me to a story about our neighbor, Sharona. An elderly lady that has lived alone for at least twenty years in a huge four bedroom two bathroom house. It’s selfish for one person to take up so much space while others go hungry on the streets, I guess, but what are you gonna do - ask an old lady to bring in roommates? That’s her business - but her lawn - that’s MY business! Unlike her more eco-conscious neighbors (us) with a yard full of dozens of varieties of trees and plants and free range rabbits, Sharona’s lawn is a monoculture. Just green grass which must be mowed by work guys with gas-powered equipment. And here come the crows! This time of year crows descend on Seattle lawns to feast on larval stage invasive beetles and they tear the lawns up in the process. Last year Sharona had some kind of netting on her lawn that was not effective and this year she gave up.
I mention Sharona’s lawn because in a suburban yard near Albany, New York a lady has set up a thriving ecosystem, with a pond - the complete opposite of Sharona’s lawn. “In a small effort to help reclaim the shrinking woods and meadows in this suburban area, I have opened our family’s quarter-acre lot to wildlife. Bird, bat, deer, rodent, and insect species coexist here” according to Jenna Spevack. Judy’s Way is Jenna’s way of doing her part to fight the misguided concept of what we are trained to think of as a “lawn.”
Plants and animals love the idea.
—Alex