Urban alienation & sub-urban lawns

Most of us spend our lives staring through a "glass" whether it’s a Iphone screen or your suburban house window—acting exactly like the moth in Virginia Woolf’s essay, just banging our heads against a barrier we didn’t even realize was there. Like the moth, we’ve become un-conscientiously fluttering against these invisible boundaries, desperately trying to reconnect with a nature that we’ve accidentally engineered ourselves away from.

    Most urban — and especially sub-urban — cities and townships such as our own are incredibly deprived of nature, creating a massive wall between us and the actual world. We have traded real ecosystems for manicured lawns and strip malls. we have taken environments where viberant nature used to exist and terraformed it into our own “backdrops”. The grass on our lawns is may look lush, but it is lifeless ecosystem with no biodiversity and completely separated from reality that Woolf’s moth sought to reach. We no longer walk through forests, instead, we motor through a maze of concrete tunnels, caught in an endless cycle where everything that remains ‘wild’ or natural is the weeded out of our self manicured environment to make room for our own lifestyle.

    Specifically, let’s go back to what I was talking about On the average sub-urban American lawn, we aren't looking at nature, we’re looking at a monoculture (the cultivation of a single crop in a given area.). Research shows that lawns now cover over 40 million acres of the United States, which makes "turf grass" the single largest irrigated crop in the country, even beating out corn, which was a really surprising for me to learn as a person who used to live in iowa. We spend billions of dollars and use nearly 9 billion gallons of water per day just to keep this "backdrop" looking green, yet these spaces offer almost zero support for local wildlife or pollinators. By stripping away 90% of native plant species in favor of a uniform carpet of grass, we’ve created a sensory vacuum. We’ve effectively engineered a world that looks pleasant from a distance but is biologically silent. 

    In the end, we don't have to be like Woolf’s moth, knocking ourselves out against a barrier that we built. Even if our neighborhoods feel like so nature deprived, unlike the moth, we actually have the power to change our environment instead of just struggling against it. Maybe the solution is as simple as ditching the "perfect" lawn for some native plants or just putting the phone down to actually go on a walk.