Archive for July, 2008
Obligatory Fritz Haeg Post
Who’s Fritz Haeg? If you missed all of the great press he’s gotten for his Edible Estates project lately, he’s a California based architect and teacher that replaces front lawns with productive edible landscapes.
His first edible antilawn was planted in the middle of American suburbia, Salina, Kansas, in 2005, and he has since planted five [...]
Mowing Sucks
A 56-year-old man from Wisconsin has been arrested after shooting his lawn mower because it wouldn’t start. Why do we add unnecessary stress to an already stressful world by covering our personal open space with needy lawns? If only he had stopped to consider why he even had a lawn, he might have diverted that [...]
Michael Pollan, Why Mow?
Michael Pollan’s book, Second Nature, includes a great piece entitled “Why Mow?”, where he explores the American lawn as “a metaphor for our skewed relationship with the land” and places it into historical and psychological context.
Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
The whole book (buy it) is [...]
New Yorker: Turf War
Elizabeth Kolbert has a great piece entitled Turf War in the New Yorker that sums up the history and hazards of the American Lawn. She mentions an astonishing figure that:
Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly [...]
Eat City Hall
An amazing statement for a more sustainable food system was just planted at San Francisco city hall. It’s entire front lawn was removed and replaced with a Victory Garden, filled with a variety of edibles, to coincide with the Slow Food Nation conference that is taking place there at the end of August.
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