In the 1837 edition of his Guide for Emigrants
to the West, a Baptist missionary called John Mason Peck
described the process he had watched in Indiana, Illinois,
Missouri, and Michigan for nearly 20 years. His account will apply
in broad outline to the great movements that cleared all the
continents of the earth.
"Three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have
rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends
chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation . . . and the
proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude,
chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop
of corn [maize] and a 'truck patch' . . . a rude garden .... The
next class . . . purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out
the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log
houses . . . occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school
houses, court houses, etc., and exhibit the pictures and forms of
plain, frugal, civilized lives. Another wave rolls on. The men of
capital and enterprise come .... The small village rises to a
spacious town or city .... All the refinements, luxuries,
elegancies, and fashions are in vogue . . . ."
Here, in miniature, is the history of
agricultural man.
Cultivated space is also the history of urban
man. In
Schrebergärten in Germany today we see some
evidence community gardens that were first developed as a social
program in nineteenth-century Berlin.
Residents were allotted plots in green belts at the periphery of
the city, giving them the opportunity to seek respite from the
confines of their urban lives by traveling a short distance to work
in a food and flower garden. On each plot they would construct a
small cottage, and many relocated to these tiny shelters after the
city was bombed during World War II. Visiting these gardens, which
can still be found throughout Germany, is like stepping into either
some agrarian past or a utopian future. This observation was made
by Fritz Haeg in his book,
'Go for
an edible estate: the case against
lawns'.
In contrast, the American lawn he said is an
almost entirely symbolic. Aristocratic English
spectacle and drama which has degenerated into a bland garnish for
our endless suburban sprawl and alienation. The monoculture of one
plant species covering our neighborhoods from coast to coast
celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity. An
occasional lawn for recreation can be a delight, but most of them
are occupied only when they are being tended.
Today's lawn has become the default surface for any defensible
private space. If you don't know what to put there, plant grass
seed and keep watering. Driving around most neighborhoods you will
see lush beds of grass being tended on narrow unused strips of
land. In the United States we plant more grass than any other crop:
currently lawns cover more than thirty million acres. Given the way
we lavish precious resources on it and put it everywhere that
humans go, aliens landing in any American city today would assume
that grass must be the most precious earthly substance of
all.
Yet the lawn devours resources while it pollutes.
It is maniacally groomed with mowers and trimmers powered by the
two-stroke motors that are responsible for much of our greenhouse
gas emissions. Hydrocarbons from mowers react with nitrogen oxides
in the presence of sunlight to produce ozone. To eradicate invading
plants the lawn is drugged with pesticides and herbicides, which
are then washed into our water supply with sprinklers and hoses,
dumping our increasingly rare fresh drinking resource down the
gutter.