5 ms·
It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further dest
by fredrikholm 4y ago
It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction.
The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like:
* Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned
* Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood
* Burning or spraying down all weeds
* Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks
* Aggressively cutting down bushes
Every year the soil gets drier, compacts and washes away when rainfall comes in the spring and turns our parks into giant mudslides.
Next year they spend hundreds of thousands trying to replant and reseed, only to lose it again in the words of 'maintenance'.
Meanwhile, our smaller community decided to do the complete opposite:
* Faux-compost everything (grass cuttings, leaves, twigs, weeds) by literally just throwing it into a pile and forgetting about it
* Mulch everything with said compost
* Let (non-invasive) weeds take over areas that were previously barren
* Not trim down bushes before winter
In nearly two seasons now, we've gone from watching a slow depressing death of what used to be a wonderful garden before the droughts started in ~2018, to a garden that is even more impressive and seems to grow stronger every year. We now have more birds than ever, as insects have started to bounce back.
We're doing 1/10th of the work as our neighboring communities, and we're getting as good if not better results.
I wish more people approached gardening/landscaping with this water-harvesting, nature mimicking way. It's cheap, takes extremely little resources and demonstrates how incredibly strong an ecosystem can be if you just work with it rather than against it, even on a small scale.
- bombcar 4y agoThe absolute amount of effort we spend fighting nature instead of just guiding and living with it is frightening.
- hinkley 4y agoIllusion of Control. We need group therapy and nobody who has successfully accomplished that at such scales has any formal training in the subject.
- mc32 4y agoIf you don't manage it (fight it) you get the buried and re-discovered pyramids of southern Mexico (and Cambodia). Yes, there is a balance, however, the other extreme is also not viable for habitation.
- ericmay 4y agoYea but we're so far on the extreme of slash and burn and pouring chemicals on lawns that it's not even worth considering at this point concerns of habitation. It's just not even on the radar in terms of things that we need to bother caring about for the foreseeable future (100+ years minimum).
- mc32 4y agoI agree that we can find better solutions than what lawns provide, however, weeds, nature and plants will take over an unmanaged property pretty quickly... maybe 20 years. In 100 places are near unrecognizable. The abandoned areas of Detroit did not take 100 years to become overtaken by nature. And that's a continental climate. In Tropical climates the rate will be quicker.
- ericmay 4y agoSure, but in the context of this discussion unmanaged property simply isn't an issue, in my view. It's too much management that's causing problems.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoOP is thinking of protecting property value
- nightski 4y agoPouring chemicals? Maybe a few do but I only apply one application of pre-emergent a year and then one application of fertilizer in the fall. That's not really pouring chemicals. In fact nature seems to thrive in our lawn.
- hcrisp 4y agoI spent some time as a volunteer sandbagging one of the levees in Missouri as high water neared flood stage. While there, I heard a quote attributed to an old-time farmer who was also the president of the Upper Mississippi Valley Drainage Association who also appeared before Congress on damages caused by varying the water level. The quote was along the lines of: "We think we can drain water from certain areas and farm the land next to the river, but that land belongs to the Mississippi. It can take it back any time it wants to."
- bombcar 4y agoThe eventual disaster at the old river control will show us that someday. Hopefully not soon.
- rayiner 4y agoYou should go live in a third world village for a few years and then come back here and say that. Life in “nature” sucks. The kids in my dad’s village don’t have to take a boat to school during monsoon season, like he has to do growing up, because they “fought nature” to control flooding.
- TylerE 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 4y agoWhich suburbs also contain. I don't know which is the more sacred cow, the automobile or the lawn. I suspect people with an agenda picked one rather than attacking on all fronts, alienating a larger group of people.
- tomrod 4y agoBased on my experience, lawns are the bigger sacred cow. Cars get vilified in certain places. Lawns? Just me and my friends on /r/nolawns and similar subreddits. My rare mowing brings rabbits, frogs, insects of all kinds. Few mosquitoes, as there are critters that eat them. We keep the front trim (short) without seeding but the back a bit wild. My neighbors? They complain sometimes. They are the ones who voted out the HOA and we are well in city guidelines, so no issues.
- dismalpedigree 4y agoVoted out the HOA? Tell me more.
- tomrod 4y agoAt least in my current state, the HOA has regulations that enable the voting out of the HOA should that be what the association members want. This dissociates the entity, much like a corporation dissolving. I assume this is consistent in many states in the US.
- nightski 4y agoI mow weekly and we have tons of insects, rabbits, and frogs. So many so it's a problem. I don't think they are very correlated.
- primroot 4y agoAll the more desperate considering that 1/10th of the work may be regarded by many as "not good for the economy".
- fredrikholm 4y agoWe should take those people and make them dig holes in the ground, and then fill them up again. Plenty of work, great for the economy.
- sacrosancty 4y agoDid you just invent an imaginary group of baddies, assign them an imaginary belief, and then feel concerned because they "exist"?
- hef19898 4y agoNot that we, or rather I, mowed our lawn often, at most ince every 3-4 weeks or so. This year, we decided to leave part of it to grow. The amount of insects in there was astounishing, so the patch stayed uncut between June and two weeks ago. The rain transfromed it ibto something less than pretty. Turned out the grass underneath is prettier than before. Next we gonna repeat the same thing with a different patch.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoDid this for No-Mow-May. Left some patches unmowed for that month (we got a lot of rain in May this year). Lots of diversity in those patches. It was kind of hard to mow them in June - had to use the weed-eater first. Left a couple of the patches longer into July. Neighbor across the street almost came unhinged. Tried to explain that it was helping polinators... but it was a waste of breath.
- hef19898 4y agoLucky us we don't have of those neighbors, and basically cannot get them. No HOAs or similar shenenigans were we live, even the city leaves large patches in parks unmowed until automn in some places.
- hinkley 4y agoHere's a fun bit of chemistry I learned some time ago: the breakdown of cellulose and lignin produces water as one of the byproducts. Which stands to reason since photosynthesis consumes a good deal of water in the first place. Those saprophytic fungi, which enjoy a nice wet environment to work in, are producing some of the water they need to work. When you burn this material instead, you send all of that humidity up the chimney with the rest of the gasses (and a little extra from the surroundings due to evaporation from the heat).
- WalterBright 4y agoBecause I'm extremely lazy, that's what I do with my yard. I let the native plants do what they want, just cutting down the invasive ones. It's been (slowly) turning into a lovely yard, lots of wildflowers, bees, and critters. No need to ever water it, either.
- renewiltord 4y agoA book that talks about this at a different level is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka that follows the idea of Do Nothing Farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_farming
- drewm1980 4y agoWe need a state of climate emergency to just ban some needlessly destructive practices, ideally globally. Mowing lawns is something we can just decide not to do. Meat and dairy we can just decide not to do.