Hello UAlbany Community,
I hope you are well. Though I graduated (PhD, physics) from UAlbany in 2020, I’m more of an otter or a draft horse than a Great Dane, depending on the needs of the day. Nevertheless, I have something gripped tightly in my jaws that I’d like to wave at you for your inspection: current university groundskeeping and its connection to slavery, McCarthyism, health threats, the climate and biodiversity catastrophes, and simple bad taste.
I’m sure that members of several departments on campus, including Africana Studies and History, are aware that the fashion for lawns, which arose among wealthy imperialists in 18th-century Britain and France, was brought to the United States and popularized here by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to demonstrate that they were so rich they could set aside fertile land for unproductive use and for maintenance in an unnatural state via the intense labor of enslaved people. Washington and Jefferson dominated people and Nature in their little corners of our planet, as I point out in today’s Times Union, seeking tinhorn apotheosis in the process. Do we want to perpetuate their twisted, infernal aesthetic?
In the 1950s, an era of extreme conformity, close-cut, monoculture lawns proliferated in suburbs that, it seems not coincidentally, often excluded all but one kind of human, characterized by whiteness and Silent-generation eagerness not to stick out lest they be cut down. Do very many members of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies think that the aesthetic of Senator Joe McCarthy’s supporters, who created the homophobic Lavender Scare, was ever suited to universities? How about the symbolic act of giving Mother Nature a buzz cut with lawn mowers just because we like her to look a certain way?
No doubt the Chemistry Department and the School of Public Health are full of people who know the damage to the environment and our bodies done by the materials we use to destroy the life that would naturally grow where we, thoughtlessly following 18th-century fashion, decree there be monoculture lawn.
Members of the Departments of Physics and of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences could not possibly have overlooked greenhouse-gas emissions from lawn mowers and from lawn-related economic activity or the greatly impaired capacity of the land to sequester carbon dioxide when maintained as close-cut, monoculture lawn.
Members of the Department of Biological Sciences could not have been distracted by the labor of writing their lengthy, though no doubt entirely justified, version of “Biology Department” to the extent that they would overlook the gratuitous destruction of all other life on vast acreage of their campus to leave only the solitary condoned species.
Members of the Department of Art and Art History are the most important of all in this matter. Teach us the connection of aesthetics to values and vice versa in the feedback loop that determines our way of life by shaping our minds and hearts. Tell us how society reverses its ways suddenly by changing the songs it sings and the art it makes and the literature it writes and the decoration it creates, including in its public spaces, and how to damp the pendulum motion thereafter to keep us in a state that promotes the survival prospects of our civilization. Explain to us what chopping down dandelions and other wildflowers, each a cherry tree to a butterfly or bee, means to the development or stifling of our hearts and hence to our behavior and hence to the toll we take on the ecology on which we depend. What does imposition all around us of biological monoculture on land that wants to be so much more portend for human cultures of which you would be a part and a creator?
Last spring, I started writing to Pres. Rodríguez about the infelicity of monoculture lawn for ornamental purposes at a university that prides itself on its diversity. In the summer, I found out that a couple of no-mow zones had recently been established, where the grass was permitted to grow out into beautiful meadow. I recorded a brief video to express thanks and encourage expansion of the pilot program at a time when many schools are doing the same.
This spring, don’t accept tiny increments in groundskeeping reform on the campuses of your school. Time is running very short to save the habitability of Earth for two million species currently at risk of extinction, including our own. Insist that most of the colossal Collins Circle lawn be in the process of growing out into meadow by graduation, with some lawn retained for games and sitting out in the sun.
Eliminate ornamental lawn, retaining only functional lawn. Mow only where you go, letting the rest grow. The alternative is to continue to be laughed at by the shades of Joseph McCarthy, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.
Best wishes,
James
James Lyons Walsh, PhD
For information on the Collins Circle Meadow Project, please visit https://www.momshair.org/collins. Please share this email and my other work freely.
Pronouns: he, him, his
My initiative to address the global polycrisis is at
My professional history is at
https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56/
Times Union commentary on lawns