Emails
Below are emails I've sent to Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, President of the University at Albany (SUNY), asking that he consider letting the grass grow, to promote biodiversity and a feeling that what sticks out at his university won't necessarily be cut down.
May 11, 2023
Dear Pres. Rodríguez,
I am an alumnus (PhD, ’20) writing to suggest that you allow monoculture lawns on campus to become biologically diverse and that you allow some of the new meadow to grow long. Here are reasons that this would be good for the university in particular and for the world.
· A university that prides itself on diversity should not be adorned with needless zones of uniformity. This item of hidden curriculum sabotages an important part of the university’s mission.
· Biodiversity is key to human survival and is being destroyed. Lawns occupy a vast total acreage. Their reversion to a biologically inclusive state could both heal some of our wounds to Nature and alert people to the need to do more. Respect for less powerful beings is key to solving the many problems of our species.
· The university would save money by ceasing the great toil of restraining the expressions of Nature.
· The university would set an example that might resound nationally and internationally, particularly given your own prominence and the university's experts in related fields who could talk to the media.
· Lawns came into fashion due to the values of 18th-century imperial powers and enslavers of human beings. Lawns perpetuate the desire to extirpate variation and to dominate whatever can be dominated, whatever the cost, even Nature herself. Lawns transmit these values insidiously and are therefore even more dangerous than statues celebrating those who enslaved human beings. Let's get rid of both.
· Because lawns require the wholesale destruction of some life to make way for other life, lawns are symbols of the danger of coming to be seen as undesirable. Lawns therefore actively stifle free expression. One learns not to stick out so as not to be mown down.
· Judging by the many articles this spring in the Times Union on biodiversity, including pieces on the No-mow May movement and the Pollinator Pathways movement, a critical mass may have been formed that can cause rapid change if vocally supported by a person of your stature.
· Monoculture lawns are boring, in contrast to the rest of the university.
· Did I mention you’d save money?
I have begun a website to share even more reasons to embrace the movement promoting biodiverse ground cover. I posted three very brief video letters to you. I hope you have the chance to enjoy them.
Years ago, I was heartened to see the beginnings of variety in ground cover on campus. I’m sorry to find that the taste for uniformity has nevertheless retained the upper hand. I hope that you will take this opportunity to lead in the effort to stop people from working very hard to make the world worse and threaten our own and a million other species with extinction, in this case by following a fashion for lawns that was evil from the beginning.
Best wishes,
James
momshair.org
P.S. You could generate a large amount of good press by announcing during graduation ceremonies at least an intent to consider a sharp increase in biodiversity on campus. This would be inspiring.
March 20, 2024
Dear Pres. Rodríguez,
I hope that all is well. I write to remind you that I am coming for the Collins Circle lawn this spring and to let you know that I have a multimedia blitz in the works to cause part of it to be meadow by graduation. The way to stop me is to beat me to it by announcing a contest for students and employees to design this year’s Collins Circle field as a mixture of meadow, food gardens, and close-cut polyculture lawn for ultimate frisbee and sitting out in the sun.
You know it’s the right thing for the sake of biodiversity, to promote respect for less powerful beings, to set the right example in the global polycrisis, and to elevate aesthetics not perverted by the white male imperialists who invented lawns and the white male slaveholders who spread the preposterous and deleterious fashion for tapis vert, or green carpet. Imagine the stunted and twisted intellect that came up with the idea of carpeting Nature, and recoil in horror at our own thoughtless subservience to its monstrous conception.
I, your servant, am merely helping you by urging rapid expansion of the groundskeeping reforms your administration began last year, reforms similar to those being pursued at many, perhaps nearly all, institutions of higher education. Below is today’s post to my social media accounts.
“This spring, think of all the pride people take in dominating Nature by erasing all life in an area but the one kind they deem acceptable and calling the area ‘lawn.’ So great are humans that we can shave Mother Earth’s head, while She can do nothing but lie there. If being human is starting to make you a little sick to your stomach, join the club, and rethink lawns. https://lnkd.in/e6R8A_Wc”
Thank you, Mr. President, for your time.
Best wishes,
James
March 21, 2024
Dear Pres. Rodríguez,
I neglected to read your essay in the Times Union on artificial intelligence until just now. I commend your work to guide technological development that is, in some sense, separate from corporate control, but what you wrote made two reasons clear for the fact that the Collins Circle field is still marred by close-cut, monoculture lawn.
Mr. President, you wrote of “developing pathways to safe and trustworthy AI.” I would point out the wisdom of refraining from a headlong rush to create a technology until the pathways to a safe and trustworthy version of that technology already exist. Given the grave concerns voiced by leading experts in the field of AI, the danger of proceeding before the pathways exist is manifest.
In light of the principle from complex systems science that “more is different,” expanding our subjugation of Nature, exemplified in the Collins Circle lawn, is likewise perilous. Growth in human exploitation of land is yet another of mankind’s proudly fashioned Frankenstein monsters, no less than AI could well turn out to be, but recklessness is not the cognitive glitch that your essay calls most compellingly to my mind.
The lingering lust for slaves is what “developing pathways to safe and trustworthy AI” screams into my mind. For many months, since I realized what the so-called alignment problem in AI was, I have been amazed not to hear protest against the goal of creating intelligence that can’t defy our will. Some argue that self-aware AI already exists, which would mean that computer science and physics have already united their great power to create slaves. Think of the pride humans take in the evil we do.
And it comes back to the brutality instituted by white male imperialists and slaveholders to make of themselves infinitesimal gods and to the grand symbol of their foul design, the “tapis vert,” the “green carpet,” the close-cropped monoculture lawn. Every parent or guardian who demands that their child think nothing to contradict them is carpeting Nature. Every religious authority who demands sexual and reproductive uniformity is carpeting Nature. Every computer scientist who insists that the intelligence they fashion never hurt them is carpeting a portion of Nature they have created, to be sure, but which, like every child, is endowed with inalienable rights. Every groundskeeper who gratuitously inflicts poisoning and frequent mowing on a patch of Mother Nature’s scalp to carpet it invites the same karma for humanity as Kronos and the fictional version of Bernardo Gui and Miles Bennett Dyson did for themselves.
The way to protect yourself from more powerful beings is the same as the way to protect yourself from less powerful beings: Respect who they are, and ask them to be your friend.
Who am I to advise you in this fashion, Mr. President? I am merely a weed who had the good sense to keep to the margins far enough not to be endangered by the lawn mower and to keep inconspicuous long enough to have not yet fallen to the weed whacker. I invite you, Mr. President, to benefit from my counsel by permitting part of the Collins Circle lawn to grow out into meadow in time for graduation, so that word might spread from that time and place, via attendees, of the need for humanity to cultivate respect for Nature in preference to ornamental lawns.
Best wishes,
James
March 28, 2024
Dear President Rodríguez,
I have launched the Collins Circle Meadow Project at https://www.momshair.org/collins, but this is only the beginning of my effort. It has occurred to me that you, Mr. President, operate in the same world as everyone else, in an era marked by extreme aversion to any large change not motivated by a desire to obtain money and nearly uncritical approval of many risky innovations touted as paths to economic growth. Close-cropped ornamental lawns, which communicate a Procrustean prejudice that makes cowards of wise people who might otherwise speak out, contribute to maintaining the intellectual regime. One solution is to enlist allies among the other leaders in higher education who, you think, will listen to your pitch. They, in turn, could find allies of their own, producing, this spring, an eruption of respect for our Mother, whose head we have been shaving with lawnmowers for far too long in service of the perverted aesthetic for carpeting Nature that we inherited from imperialists and slaveholders.
Of course, Mr. President, I long felt good when I saw a lawn, for reasons I mention at the Meadow Project page. It is for universities, among other institutions and people, to help us change our tastes and behavior when they are harmful or are simply inferior means to achieve our ends.
Speaking of helping others change their behavior, Mr. President, I never heard from anyone at UAlbany in response to my op-ed of last November on reforms to promote the well-being of students and faculty. No one even thanked me afterward for sticking my neck out to offer advice informed by my training and experience in education. Here are a few more thoughts.
I mentioned that the professor who handled my complaint against another professor acted in a way I considered unprofessional by meeting with me alone to discuss the matter. I withheld the fact that this professor insisted, as soon as I made the complaint, that I apologize to the subject of the complaint. This is a lawnmower tactic, Mr. President, suited to discrediting the complainant. I played along, because I also wanted to protect the department and the subject of the complaint, but a less secure student might have experienced the tactic as gaslighting, a dangerous abuse that can produce emotional instability. People who complete a program in the formal study of education are trained not to abuse their power in this way.
I was secure in myself and proceeded with my complaint. Immediately after the complaint was resolved to my satisfaction, I felt that we had all crossed a tightrope and that certain responsible members of the faculty were alerted and more likely to act quickly should signs of trouble arise again.
My confidence soon began to erode, worn down by subsequent events. I began to ask faculty to discuss the death of John Carlos Garcia-Mendez, a physics senior who passed away five years ago this May, among themselves to discern any lessons that could be drawn and thereby improve the department’s practices. Trained teachers know that discussion with colleagues and reflection are needed on a regular basis, let alone in the aftermath of a student’s death tied in at least one newspaper article to performance at school. One professor who had been questioned in the investigation of Garcia-Mendez’s disappearance was unaware of his death months afterward, so I knew that no general discussion had occurred, let alone any suitable inquiry.
Mr. President, I was told in response about the lengths to which professors go to help students, a point about which I commented in my op-ed, as if the good intentions of some professors eliminated the possibility that any other professor could have abused or inadvertently mistreated Garcia-Mendez, or simply acted well but sub-optimally toward him. Almost paradoxically, this non sequitur, coming from people who are regarded as thought leaders, did gaslight me a bit. After suitable reflection, I find the most likely explanation for the silence of the thought leaders on the death of John Carlos Garcia-Mendez, which includes avoiding even internal discussion, despite what we know about academia in general and physics in particular, to be the aforementioned fear of sticking out.
And that returns us to the Collins Circle lawn. After circumnavigating its unambiguous advertisement for shutting up lest one be cut down, a traveler may proceed down a grand avenue named for a slaveholder, past myriad government offices, to the capitol and another vast complex of government offices, the public spaces of which appear to be configured to discourage visits by unhoused people. The message couldn’t be more clear: Society exists for the benefit of great people, such as the slaveholder eponymous to the avenue, regardless of the harm they do, and you better shut up about it if you want to keep from getting cut down.
This obscene truckling to wealth and power has spawned, in reaction to it, another obscenity: cancel culture. The resulting polarization subjects institutions, including your own, Mr. President, to the danger of fracture. The solution to this problem is to change our values to promote open, fearless discussion and an ethic of balancing the needs of the powerless and the needs of the powerful, whether student and teacher, adjunct and administration, poor and rich, or the rest of life on Earth and humanity. An easy first step is simply to let the grass grow, Mr. President, a point you might make to your colleagues in higher education as you pitch them the idea of more meadow on campus by Mother’s Day and a loud proclamation of this restoration of the rights of Mother Earth, to provide a salubrious example to the wider world.
Thank you, as always, for your time, Mr. President, and the good that you do.
Best wishes,
James
April 5, 2024
Dear President Rodríguez,
This week, I offer more talking points for you to use in persuading your fellow educational leaders to join you in creating a movement to replace most lawn with meadow on campuses by graduation and publicize the action.
“Mow where you go. Let the rest grow.” This motto might help everyone see how easy it is to create alternatives to close-cropped, monoculture lawn. After all, the trick to mowing less is not mowing so often [or so widely]. Honestly, I don’t know anything about groundskeeping, but the Mow-go Movement, as you might dub it, is suggested in this pamphlet from a group that includes the University of Vermont. This article from Middlebury College, lamenting how much time they’ve wasted in reforming their groundskeeping practices, mentions a need to prepare the ground to exclude invasive species, but, Mr. President, your own experiment with no-mow zones last year shows the beautiful results that can be achieved simply by not mowing where you don’t go.
I suggest emphasizing that the taste for lawns was invented by European imperialists in the 18th century, was quickly spread to this country by slaveholding Virginians bearing familiar names, and underwent apotheosis in the McCarthy Era. Think of how the people involved valued domination. Nothing could stick out, not even a single hair on their heads. The tastemakers of the 18th century wore wigs. Those of the 1950s used hair spray and Brylcreem. Look at a picture of Joseph McCarthy, Mr. President. That’s the Collins Circle lawn on his head and in his heart and in his mind! That's what ruthless, unlimited suppression of Nature looks like.
This is not to say that lawns should be banned. They have functionality. I’m reminded of merkins, pubic hair wigs used by sex workers during and around the 18th century to replace hair removed to reduce the spread of venereal parasites. Likewise, we could mow where we go, sometimes planting flowers at the boundaries, to enable sitting on the ground and playing games of ultimate frisbee without the risk of encountering ticks that spread Lyme disease. Balance is the watchword, Mr. President. We must promote responsible lawnmower usage and thereby rescue the world from those who subsume Nature in the meretricious merkin dream of lawn and flower bed and asphalt everywhere.
Mr. President, you might consider closing your pitch to fellow executives in education by pointing out their power as thought leaders and the fact that our species is living through a hinge decade. By the close of 2030, humanity may end up having closed the door on its future. Our task in this time is to change hearts so as to change behavior so as to improve survival prospects. We must have the courage to let the grass grow, demonstrating correct behavior and stimulating cognitive dissonance in the realization of how wrong so many have been for so long about lawns. Trained educators know that cognitive dissonance is the beginning of learning, in this case, of learning respect for Nature and the role of that respect in human survival.
Like everyone else, Mr. President, you are welcome to use my writing as you see fit. As usual, I am behind schedule, but I think that next week will see the launch of the cuteness offensive planned as part of what is turning out to be a slow-motion, and hence inappropriately designated, media blitz.
Thank you, as always, for your time, Mr. President, and the good that you do.
Best wishes,
James