Djelloul Marbrook

I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture. At this point it would be expensive to correct it, but the predicament heightens my awareness that a great many aspects of our culture are missing from the discourse we are reluctantly beginning about energy.

For example, we have been fiendishly building lawns where they don’t belong, because of some misplaced nostalgia for an English countryside which the Industrial Revolution ravaged. Developers habitually cut down trees, grind or burn out stumps, haul in landfill and topsoil and plant costly and inappropriate flora.

They ignore the topography, because they know they can bring in fill. They strip the surface because that makes it easier for their machinery. All this is unwarrantedly expensive and wasteful.

I live in the mid-Hudson Valley. You could argue that lawns are appropriate to the east side of the river, which is fairly flat between the river and the Taconic and Berkshire Mountains. But on the west side of the Hudson River there is little excuse to install pricey lawns, because the terrain is remarkably rocky, dotted with outcroppings and characterized by a famously complex hydrology.

But the cost of creating these anomalous lawns is only the beginning of the story. To maintain them we operate costly and polluting machinery, we pour tons of chemicals into the soil, some of them harmful to the ecology, in spite of assurances to the contrary from their manufacturers.  We fanatically poison the edible dandelion and crabgrass.

We should be landscaping consonantly with the topography, respectfully. Instead we seem to despise the topography, insisting that our properties should look like somewhere else. To this end, we exhaust endless gallons of water and gasoline, while polluting the environment.

This is not thoughtful stewardship. It’s destructive and wasteful. We can use pebbles, moss and rock gardens, among other concepts, instead of look-alike lawns. For the most part, our homes don’t look like English country mansions, in spite of the silly McMansions we have built in the last decade, and there is no point surrounding them by these expensive, hard-to-maintain lawns. We should, instead, study the terrain and adapt landscaping to it.

Developers who mindlessly kill trees and level land to build depressingly similar homes can’t honestly argue that they’re looking for economies of scale because their concept itself drives up costs and guarantees a future of prohibitive and environmentally contrary maintenance. Communities who encourage this kind of construction are poor stewards of the land. They are guilty of exacerbating the fuel and global warming crises.—DM