Comment

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on May 14, 2012 at 10:34am

While I do think we need enforcement of certain standards, municipalities are normally pretty inept at learning how to pick their battles. In this case, explaining her intentions should have been sufficient.

 

Dallas, Tx does not do an outstanding job at code enforcement. There's one house down the street that is so juniked out it's terrible. It's right on the corner of a major intersection, highly visibile, and full of all kinds of violations.

 

And thyme yards can be beautiful:

 

Comment by Adriana on May 14, 2012 at 10:13am

She had a great idea. Too bad they made her fight it in court!

Comment by Michel on May 14, 2012 at 10:00am

When I had a house in Longueuil, complete with yard and lawn, a neighbor wanted to have nothing to do with grass and she planted a type of ground covering thyme.

To achieve complete coverage with thyme takes a couple of years and during that time some wandering municipal inspector spotted her front yard and thought it was unsightly. He ordered her to plant grass or be fined. (Some municipal bylaw on neatness...)

I think she had to fight it in court. But after a while her front "lawn" was finally grown and it was very cool. A nice patch of blueish grey in an otherwise uniformly grass-green street.

One less lawnmower buzzing on Sundays.

Comment by doone on May 14, 2012 at 8:45am

RETHINKING LAWNS

by Kevin S. Baldwin

Spring has arrived, Summer is just around the corner and once again I must deal with the enigma that is my yard. As I look around town, there is a wide range of lawns spanning from, what Michael Pollan (2001) would call, Apollonian control to Dionysian abandon. Mine is towards the Dionysian end of the spectrum.

This is by choice. I have never understood lawns. What exactly is the point? A uniform swath of green grass seems so contrived and unnatural. As practiced in much of 21st century North America, that monoculture is a triumph of technology. It takes a lot of inputs to maintain such a beast: Regular mowing, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizer, and in some areas, water. Perhaps that is the point.

I remember growing up in upstate New York, helping to fertilize the yard, mowing its weekly growth, and then putting the clippings in bags to be taken to the dump. It just seemed wasteful at the time (not to mention that as a fifth or sixth grader, it really cut into my playtime). Now I would probably mulch the grass in place and skip the fertilizer. Later, as a teen in southern California, I had to religiously apply water, herbicide and fungicide to maintain our lawn. Again, it seemed colossally wasteful. I tried to convince my parents to switch to more drought friendly vegetation, but they weren't that enthusiastic about it. As it turns out, I now happen to live in one of the few areas in the country where it is possible to grow lawns without irrigation or fertilization. I mow it when it gets shaggy, and  that's about it. I'd rather spend time gardening than trying to achieve a "perfect" lawn.

A few square feet of my lawn resemble the chemlawn ideal (an example of modern Platonic essentialism?), but it is mostly a patchwork of grass, clover, creeping charley, dandelions, and many other species that I have not identified. In the heat of summer, with little rain, the grass will retreat as it is displaced by crabgrass, which is a hot-dry specialist. If the rains return, the grass fights its way back. I enjoy witnessing this tug-of-war. My lawn is diverse and dynamic.

Continue reading "Rethinking Lawns"

Posted by ksbaldwin at 12:30 AM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on May 11, 2012 at 9:14pm

This & That

May. 11, 2012

Comment by Chris on May 9, 2012 at 10:04pm

Check out this article Corporations Win in Battle Against Investment Regulation. Corporations are successfully wining lawsuits where environmental regulations restrict their ability to make a profit.

I wonder how much less money members of Congress will be able to make because of STAMP act restrictions.

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on May 3, 2012 at 1:05am

Comment by Chris on April 30, 2012 at 8:26pm

A while back there was a discussion about fish and overfishing. Here's an article that says:

Sardines are considered a "sustainable" seafood, one of the few fish you can eat guilt-free, right? Well, not exactly. Forage fish like sardines and anchovies are the key players in huge but delicate food webs known as wasp-waist ecosystems. These are so complex and dynamic that it's questionable whether we have the know-how to manage them well yet. And as we've learned the hard way from examples off California, Peru, Japan, and Namibia, wasp-waist ecosystems collapse catastrophically whenever the stresses of climate change intersect with the stresses of overfishing (see Andrew Bakun, et al, below*).

These systems are often driven by multi-year, even multi-decadal, climate patterns like El Niño and La Niña—natural boom-and-bust cycles that remain largely beyond our abilities to scientifically manage. And while some overfished wasp-waist ecosystems have recovered after decades of fishing moratoria (California, Peru), others have not (Japan, Namibia). Some, like Peru, collapse repeatedly.

Global capture of sardines in the Sardinops genus in tons, 1950–2010, as reported by the FAO. Based on data sourced from the relevant FAO Species Fact Sheets: Epipelagic via Wikimedia Commons 

More here

Comment by doone on April 29, 2012 at 3:11pm

Comment by doone on April 26, 2012 at 4:36pm

Tree House, Novosibirsk, Russia  The Rise of Atheist Trees!

Apr. 26, 2012

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