Designing an end to a toxic American obsession: The Lawn

This. This, this, this.

Folks are completely asleep to the suffering their "aesthetic" yards (read: biodiversity wastelands) are causing to other organisms, and worse, don't really give much of a damn. Consider state DOT highway regulations to install (aka, "plant") wildflowers where pollinators get smashed by 80 mph commuters on their way to work, and how mindlessly everyone in the USA seems to carry on with an "isn't that pretty" mindset, and it becomes clear that absent some change in consciousness among ordinary folks, the United States is a nation doomed to widespread and horrific ecological collapse, especially considering the sixth mass extinctions is literally already in full-swing.

It's really like this covid thing: So, you need some bumpaper because everyone is a maniac and is hoarding it. Well simple, just order it on Amazon. Oh, "shit," all gone because they're not cutting down trees quickly enough and the folks at the Amazon warehouse are getting sick. And they just spread it to their delivery drivers who are striking because it turns out the mortality rate is higher than anyone thought and why should they deliver all the ventilators to millionaires when they're dropping like it's hot and can't afford health insurance.

See, species are like businesses, or maybe even professions. They all have their role and everything keeps chugging along until, aww snap! That species of bat (whichwas the only one pollinating that extremely rare succulent)... is going extinct because an authoritarian regime in the orient is aggressively promoting industrialization in rural areas where citizens who have never even been on the internet let alone know any better than eating rare or threatened species. So whoops. The succulent goes extinct too. Who cares? Well maybe the succulent was like Radio Shack, and nobody will really miss it. But then twenty years down the road, Big Brother is all up in your bio-integrated wearable tech and you can't stop the adds for "Urgent! You're too fat and have high blood pressure! Blink once to accept the user terms and subscribe to our integrated nanobot treatment! Only 2.99BTC" from popping up in your AR retinal implants (which by continuously updating your expected death date to your 44th, nope now your 41st birthday, is itself drastically raising your blood pressure) and the only thing on god's decreasingly green earth that can disable the ads without causing you to go permanently blind is some archaic little bluetooth scrambler sold way back in in the twenty-oughts, from Radio Shack. Oops, that species is out of business. Maybe that species wasn't Radio Shack. Maybe it was the flipping bumpaper industry, and now everyone has to wipe with their hands. (Like, maybe that succulent actually had critically important genes that could have allowed advances to help rice survive the extreme droughts of the hell-earth we're creating where major staple crops can't grow, and wars are routine because everyone is starving). See, every single species on earth has it's roles, and if it's called upon and that species is too busy being extinct, like permanently - for ever; for literally every member of the human species for all of the rest of eternity, your kids, and theirs, and theirs, until we go extinct too and why the hell are you working so hard if this is where were headed - that species' absense, those roles not being filled hurts someone, somewhere, at some point, and it cascades this way until there's an alternate stable state. Like coral reefs dying and becoming algae forests.

Most people mowing their lawns have a level of knowledge of biology that can be summed up by "If it's not grass, it's a weed." And most have zero, I mean not the slightest, remotest clue why they do it. "Because it would get messy, and we'd get critters." (God forbid, you mean your land has more life on it than your neighbor's!). Anyway, if that is why you think you are mowing your lawn, you are WRONG. It's because your ancestors at some point were indoctrinated by a very productive and efficient agricultural society, which values and celebrates linearity, harvest rituals, scheduled/seasonal tasks, predictable yields, and weed suppression, weed suppression, weed suppression! There are hundreds of terrestrial plant families, ffs give something other than the damn grass family a fighting chance. And ffs NO IT ISN'T JUST YOUR YARD AND NO YOU CAN'T PLANT WHATEVER YOU WANT because, honestly you have no clue what you are doing or how many invasive species that produce how many thousands of seeds you just put there because Wally World sells it and gee isn't it f*cking pretty, nevermind that you caused a species or two to go extinct because those seeds found a river and grow like gangbusters along the banks where some critically endangered orchids grow, and because you're not going to let those damn liberals tell you what to do and this is a free country.

TLDR: fuck lawns and fuck stupid people killing the planet.

/r/Futurology Thread Link - cnn.com