Okay, so the name of the blog is slightly misleading, but it came to me one day while I was out mowing the 'lawn'.
I have no problem with grass as a plant/species/concept. It has huge value as food for animals, as a playing surface, etc. It even helps prevent erosion and mudslides in some parts of the world. And being a good plant, it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.
However, where an awful lot of us find it most frequently is right outside our own front doors. If we don't keep it cut short, we get in trouble with our spouses and our neighbours. Cats leave dead things in it. Small children get lost in it - sometimes only to re-appear years later as feral teenagers.
So we invest our (increasingly hard-earned) cash in a mower, then we spend large chunks of un-retrievable time pushing/driving/maintaining said contrivance, and still more wedge goes into fuel (yes I am including electricity in that definition) and/or oil and spare parts. And for what? So we can have a nice green outdoor carpet for the neighbourhood dogs (owned, usually, by the same people who complain if your grass is too untidy) to crap on? Allowing for the fact that grass clippings can be composted, what other benefit does it bring? Can't eat it, can't sell it, can't smoke it. Okay, if you have kids, they can use it to play on. But after a certain age, most of the time they want to go play on someone else's grass, or hit the streets on their bikes, play video games, or chase girls/boys. Leaving you with the grass to cut, every week (okay, every other week!) of the summer, every year, for THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. A complete waste of time and money. Better BY FAR to use some or all of your outdoor space to grow food or trees to suck up some of the carbon you've been spewing out of the back of your mower - and yes, electro-heads, I'm talking to you, too. Unless you're completely energy self-sufficient, SOME of the power your mower uses probably comes from non-sustainable, polluting sources.
So is this blog going to be all moaning about grass and lawn-mowers? No. That would be stupid. And almost as much of a waste of time as mowing. It's not even going to be all about moaning about anything. But consider your cards marked - there will be regular railing against the status quo. There are few things more irritating to me than stupid situations arising out of inflexibility - someone clever once said that a reed which won't bend in the wind will always break. Unfortunately, those 'reeds' have a tendency to cause damage as they fall - to businesses, organisations, and lives. A lot of the problems facing the world today are due to 'doing things the way we've always done them'. So this blog, and this blogger, aims to champion change, in whatever form it takes. Not change for it's own sake, but if all I do is open a gap in someone's head that allows them to consider a problem from a different angle, I'll call it a success. Thanks for stopping by.
