Boycott Lawns

yeah, mellow, you want to know the latest travesty?

this county's written in an ordinance against 'cob, straw bale or other improvised or untested construction method' and against 'a-frame, log cabin, geodeisic dome or other unusual designs'

(mutters) kinda...disgusting, to tell the truth. I'm waiting for them to pass an ordinance against backyard veggie gardens. I've already known people who've gotten stuck in housing developments, and gotten fined because the neighbors could see the garden and complained to the homeowners association in the subdivision. (and at least one of the people cited lived 1/8 a mile AWAY from the subdivision, but someone with a 'house on a hill' looked down in the backyard, said it 'distressed them' and had the people fined.) fucking ridiculous.

paying our dues and doing our time, mellow? When were we born into a prison from which we have to earn the right to exit?

 

wow, didn't mean to kill the convo, man...and that wasn't a directed shot at you, just questioning 'the system' in general.

 

No worries, I'm with you, I just got back from a week vacation up North in Maine, inland near Canada, nothing like setting your tent up at a primitive camp site next to a river to put things in perspective.

Don't get me started on the building codes, they wouldn't let me build a timber frame design for my kitchen, though I could if it were a barn.

I will never live in a housing development, talk about a prison, like the corporate world invading your home life. I drive past those places, thinking about the waste that goes into those lawns, all for the sake of appearances and avoiding the dreaded fine, it's ridiculous.

Nope, all I wanna do is fix up my place to where we can get our kids through school comfortably, build a cabin off the grid up in Maine or down in Appalachia somewhere, and start living the real life.

 

A++ I hate those fucking perfect lawns that people fawn over. I grew up in said suburban hell and I was forced by a reluctant father to mow those abominations despite my allergies to them. Its weird, I wasnt normally allergic to wildland when I was out in the middle of a wheat, soy, or wild weed field but when I started mowing my face became a continual sieve and my eyes itched like hell. Zero-scaping is the way to go if you must.

The massive Ogallala aquifer is being depleted at a record pace and after observing the amount of watering then transpiration that occurs in all of the urban/suburban wasteland its easy to see that this is one major cause aside from intensive farming and industrial water usage.

 

I can't wait til it all crashes. The ones like us'll come out of it and be the ones to rebuild the species.

Maybe we can keep enough information to make sure we don't make the same mistakes twice.

I think part of the problem is, is that too many have no 'technological morality'.

according to most people, it seems, 'any technology is 'good' technology', despite the use of it.

 

Agreed, but I think it also comes down to how you define "technology", I mean if you compare a scythe to a weed whacker the scythe is far more intelligent in that a skilled hand can selectively chop off weeds among flowers, while a weed whacker is not only loud and obnoxious, it's a dumb machine that chops off anything in its path, while leaving hunks of those nasty plastic strings behind.

In the bigger scheme of things you're right, we all need to be more vigilant when it comes to technology, by favoring quality electronics that last and use environmentally sound methods of manufacture and disposal, with less complexity, while doing away with it altogether when we can find good hand tools that serve the same purpose.

 

maybe we should just fill our lawns with some grass, and flowers and dandelions.

they'd be much prettier and you just let nature rain on them
and you can always eat the dandelions