Suburban Lawn Rebellion

At home sick today. Sinus cold. My head is throbbing to the rhythm of my pulse, which would be kinda cool if it didn't hurt so much. I don't do well at being sick. I usually spend my time thinking about all of the things which I could be doing if I were not sick. In my case today, the list of interesting things I could be doing is pretty large, but they all seem to involve a clear head.

Instead, I have chosen to lay on the couch with a gigantic cup of tea and a good book: No Impact Man, by Colin Beaven. Cindy and I had recently seen the movie by the same title, and I wanted to learn a bit more. The book (and the movie) is an autobiographical account of the author's attempts to live with no net environmental impact. The author, along with his some reluctant wife and charming baby daughter, goes all out, to the point of turning off his electricity and running on a small solar panel. In the middle of New York City. I'm sure I have more to say about that in a bit; but first, the story of today's posting...

The book's choppy, blog-like style has inspired me to write a bit. In the spirit of the blog-style, I feel compelled to tell you the story of my neighbor and his lawn. He's out there, right now, for something like the third day in a row, laboriously raking out winter's dead grass. I'm sure there's some type of gardening word for this behavior, but I don't remember what it is. Mulching? My wife Cindy took one look across the street at this production and said, "If I'm going to be putting that much work into my front lawn, it had better produce food for me."

We're planning on erasing at least half of our front lawn this year and putting in garden beds. Our garden last year was a real treat, but was probably only capable of sustaining our whole family for all of a week. We're looking to triple that number this year. We have just picked up a five-foot hanging porch swing for the front, from a wonderful place called Marc's Outdoor Lawn Furniture, which afforded me the opportunity to support local small-scale manufacturing and drive my beat-up F-150 at the same time. I'm looking forward to evenings spent swinging and watching the garden grow.

As I'm typing this, the aforementioned neighbor is putting the dead grass clippings into bright orange plastic bags beside his house. I suspect he has nefarious industrialized methane-producing plans for them. Now he's fired up his gas-powered lawn mower to give his lawn another go-over, for reasons which only God Himself could comprehend. Well, maybe there's a book entitled, "Meticulous Lawns of Suburbia" which offers a few hints, but that's not on my bookshelf. Another neighbor, a retired man with a penchant for classic cars, is up to his daily routine: running the engines of his cars in neutral for a good 10 minutes. This, I'm sure, has something to do with keeping the engine in mint condition. My bondo-and-rust F-150 looks across the street at the classics idling away with what I imagine to be a mixture of disdain and jealousy.

I have informed both Mr. Classic Cars and Mr. Perfect Lawn of our plans for the garden. The car guy spends his vacations fishing, so he understands why someone would spend way more money and time to acquire food than could be spent in a quick trip to the supermarket. But lawn guy is completely baffled. "What the hell are you doing that for?" he sputters. "Strictly to irritate the neighbors," I reply. Car guy chuckles.

Now, I actually quite like our neighbors. Our kids play together, we get along well, and we have even had dinner a few times at lawn guy's house. But I can't help thinking that all three of us have a little identity display going on. We haven't become the most dominate species on the planet by being rational. We've achieved that status by chancing upon a pattern of mutually-reinforcing competition, in which part of our feeling of happiness is dependent on the knowledge that we're kicking someone's ass at something. We've taken "survival of the fittest" in a million new directions, leaving literally all of the other species on this planet in the dust. Me (crazy eco-guy, I'm sure), car guy, and lawn guy are locked in a three-way dance of slightly smug superiority over our displays of suburban identity.

I'm not even going to try to fight it. So, rather than try to rewrite the driving force of human civilization, I think I'll invite my neighbors over for dinner. Once I can cook a meal entirely from our garden, that is.

Inertia Pattern

Well, the 2010 Winter Olympics are over, and what a ride they were! As you may recall, in a previous blog post I told you that my workplace had planned to run itself entirely remotely for the full two weeks of the Olympics. Our heads were filled with visions of traffic jams clogging the city streets, and hour-long waits for the SkyTrain. We had even planned for riots breaking out: meeting rooms in the office were labeled “safe room” if they didn’t have a line-of-sight to the street. None of that happened. If anything, traffic was lighter than normal, and the longest I had to wait for a train was an extra three minutes or so.

Instead, it was as if the entire world showed up for a gigantic two-week long street festival with a side plate of sports thrown in for fun. After a couple of days of this, all of the residents of Vancouver sort of looked at each other and said, “Hey, this isn’t so bad. Let’s join in!” If anything, the only part of the Olympics which felt poorly planned to me was the suburban train line to my house. The line’s capacity was doubled with extra runs, but they could have easily tripled capacity and still filled all the seats. I’m certain that the transit planners had access to the ticket sale numbers broken down by suburb, but they underestimated the number of people who would want to come in, well, just to join the party.

One thing which made it such a great experience was that the city had created a network of pedestrian-only streets in the downtown core, connected together by the subway lines. This meant that families could easily walk between venues with young children, jumping onto the metro system if the distances were too large, or just wandering around the streets, free from traffic worries. During the first week of the Olympics, my family came down on one of the extra afternoon trains, and we stayed until 9:30 PM. We wandered for hours through the venues. On Granville Street, a large exhibit of lantern trees had sprouted up through the pavement, much to the delight of my kids. Dinner even came with a show -- a troupe of fire jugglers set up on the street next to our patio table.

Granville Street Lantern Forest

The whole thing was such a great experience, it made me wonder why urban life couldn’t always be that way. Do people really need cars to get around a modern city? Do they have to spend their evenings in their living rooms watching Survivor reruns on their big screen TVs? Must all food come in boxes and cans found within warehouse-style grocery stores, themselves surrounded by giant parking lots? I think that most people (myself included) are focused on things like getting that assignment completed for work, or taking the kids to the park, or trying to figure out what to cook for dinner. Few of us have either the time or the energy to contemplate a different way of living. The way this all sums up is that society operates on an inertia which keeps everything moving in more or less the same direction it did yesterday. Even if we are presented with a wonderfully different way of living, as occurred during the Olympics, it's simply too easy to lapse back to the old ways.

Many people commented to me how traffic was never lighter than during the Olympics, and how the pedestrian streets were full of life. Within a few days after the closing ceremonies, the barricades came down, the cars returned, and children could no longer to be seen eating warm Nutella crepes in the middle of the street.

Back to the inertia pattern.

Sigh...