TOXIC CULTURE – TOXIC LAWNS

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

I spent the day repairing fence along a new cut from over the winter, pulling staples from cedar posts, re-stringing high tensile wire, that sort of thing. I can barely type right now because my fingers are so torn up. As I worked I kicked apart the cow patties from last fall, each one exploding into a shower of fine carbon and desiccated grasses. In the spot where the patties were, worms spun and twisted in the sunlight. Where the limbs and branches had been stacked there were large arcs of silvered wood chips spread out in a fan across the cleared land and everywhere the black loam was peppered with shoots of dark green vetch, clover and sorrel.

Do you know why people have lawns? They say that it is a mimicry of the stately commons from late feudal era, large open grounds where you had a good view of whoever happened to be sieging your castle and a clear line of fire for your archers and catapult operators. Lawns give you a safety zone and a clear demarcation of where people live and tend so no one gets the impression that it’s public land, but rather private. Personally I think it goes further back than that, I think it goes all the way back to when primates first came down out of the trees and ventured out on the savannahs. Having a clear line of sight so you had plenty of time to scurry back to the safety of the branches was probably crucial for an animal that had no natural defenses against fang and claw. I big, wide swath of open grass was the buffer and a clear advantage and so we mimic what made us feel safe so long ago that we’ve forgotten and we try to pretend that we’re just one castle shy of being a lord in our development.

All flesh is grass. The most important thing we raise on our farm is our family. I want them to be healthy, to grow strong, to be fertile and hale, so I feed them the food we produce using the seeds we collect and the animals we raise and all of it comes from the soil where we live. The rich dark earth is filled with countless living organisms. To intentionally poison the very foundation upon which all of our nourishment depends is symbolic, in a way, of our larger culture and it’s worship of all that is shallow, transitory, garish and without meaning- it is part of the worship of a death cult. A perfectly manicured lawn of a single grass type, maintained by the chemical application of toxins is the botanical equivalent of Mr/Ms Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair. It appears to be something that it is not. It mimics what it desires to be but can never be. It is a middle finger held to the face of God, immutable proof of mankind’s inability to accept its place in the natural order and to do whatever horrific and hateful act it can conceive of in order to clamber up the crenelated walls of Babel and proclaim itself Divine. It is, as the old saying goes, lipstick on a pig and it only fools those who wish to be fooled.

People who really love their lawns would be a thousand times happier if returned to the earth and saw to the cultivation of life for the sake of life itself.

Just sayin’.


53
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
EL Coyote
EL Coyote
starfcker
starfcker

No more ragging from me. Point of interest, HSF. in florida, strawberries are an annual crop, planted and disced under every year. Max height, maybe a foot. Quite different from the perennial beds I’ve seen in virginia, about 3 feet tall.

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading