We cleaned out the yard last weekend. And built an enclosure for the compost pile.
My partner and I rent a house with a front yard, so during the height of quarantine, we built a garden bed and started planting. For a while it was glorious! It was all tomatoes and cucumbers and onions and peppers all the time!
Then, after a year and a half or so, I let the garden die. I lost the motivation to turn the bed and keep replanting. Some interior personal issues were rising to the surface that needed my attention. I went into a long winter.
Around that same time, Kurt, whose responsibility between us was to water and mow the lawn, decided that he was done. We have a manual lawn mower, which makes it a pain, and also California is in a severe drought, so why are we watering a lawn? He just stopped, and the grass turned from green to yellow.
So it became a dry chaparral wasteland out there.
We didn’t do anything about it for a very long time.
I think we had to experience what it was like to let the plant life die. We got to watch the lush grass die and be replaced by whatever resilient desert species cropped up in their place.
And finally, last weekend we weeded the whole thing out.
(It wasn’t even that much work. It was enjoyable. I love getting my hands in the dirt. I need to unplug from the Internet and from my overactive mind sometimes, and getting physical with Mother Earth usually does the trick.)
As we were weeding, I was identifying the wild plants that had started growing. There were tall bristly stalks, short little white flowers, dandelions, a striking orange Treasure Flower, tropical milkweed, some amaranth, and a handful of native plants. We took out all the exotic or invasive species and kept the natives.
Here are the native plants we found growing in our front yard! (I used the app Picture This for identification.)
Hairy fleabane
Spiny amaranth
Tall flatsedge
Creeping woodsorrel
Here are the invasive species we found:
Tropical milkweed
Bristly oxtongue
Unfortunately, after all that naturalist activity, our landlord came by a few days later, possibly inspired by our efforts, and pulled out the rest of the natives as he was trimming up what we started. The good news is he fixed the low front fence that had been missing spikes since we moved in three years ago. The bad news is he killed all the plants we were saving!.
I wonder if that scenario is the Broken Window Theory in action. The theory states that if there is one dysfunctional piece in a system, like a broken window in a neighborhood that no one fixes, it encourages more derelict behavior, and eventually the neighborhood breaks down. Was it because our landlord never fixed the fence that we let our yard meet that level of decay? Was it because we cleaned it up that he also did?
I think that’s part of it. Another part is that with the state of drought in California, it doesn’t quite make sense to keep watering a lawn in a desert. We want desert landscaping with native plants. We want to live in harmony with the natural environment around us, rather than waste precious fresh water that is needed elsewhere, like on the farms.
We don’t need a lawn. We can go to a park for fresh grass.
So we planted a couple of succulents and I’m planning on planting a new vegetable garden soon. (If we’re going to use water in the yard, it’s better to grow food.)
So, the yard doesn’t look great now, but it’s better than it was before.
Sometimes, transitions can be ugly.
I keep this in mind when I think about the transition the world is making from dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy. So much needs to shift in the next ten years, and much more quickly than it has been, to avoid the worst of climate change. Some of it might be ugly. Some of it already has been.
Climate change enters every aspect of our lives. We are citizens living and using resources in the country responsible for nearly a quarter of the entire world’s emissions.
I get to enjoy the benefits of living in a wealthy, modernized, democratic Western country. And I also know that that wealth has been built on the backs of the global South over the past 500 years of colonialism, where the toll of a changing global ecosystem will be greatest.
So weeding the yard is like clearing out the old systems to make room for the new.
Even though it’s easier to put it off, eventually, the weeding needs to happen.
And the best I can do is work on changing myself, embracing the uncertainty of the rapidly shifting future.
It’s time to make lots of changes.
There’s a lot of us out there transitioning to a greener world. We need to. It’s mandatory. It’s crucial that we transition to a sustainable way of life. No more plastic one-time use cutlery.
No more environmental destruction.
No more watering lawns when we need water to irrigate crops.
So our once-green lawn has reverted back to its natural form in the landscape: chaparral. Maybe, just maybe, we can restore a little bit of the native land here and do our part to live our values and be part of the solution. There are too many problems in the world not to try and make things better in whatever way we can. Even if that means letting our lawn die and bearing with the ugliness until we reach the other side.