Introduction
We must end the taste for lawns and cause them to revert to meadow. Lawns, as expanses of biological uniformity, are a means for prosperous humans to express and promote the values by which they reserve disproportionate shares of Earth’s bounty to their control, sow fear of what is different, and attempt to destroy the habitability, for any life they don’t condone, of a planet that was not made for their sole benefit. Life, especially all humans aware of the threat to their species from its prosperous members, must unite to teach the prosperous humans a lesson in aesthetics, justice, and the connection of these to the survival of everyone, including the prosperous humans.
To the pretext that lawns provide protection from life that could pose a threat, I answer that a blind pursuit of safety leads directly to catastrophe. To the incensed cry that people need places to play golf, I reply that people are clever enough to teach themselves better games. To the idea that lawns embody order and symmetry, I respond by pointing out that Nature’s, or God’s, order is preferable to man’s and that the highest symmetry is, indeed, nothingness, which lawns approach as near as possible biologically.
In this pamphlet, I present a letter I sent to His Excellency, Edward B. Scharfenberger, Roman Catholic Bishop of Albany, New York, in which I extol the principle of leaving biological matters in God’s hands to a far greater degree than is often done; an essay that explores the irony in how we treat less powerful life, given how we, ourselves, would want to be treated by more powerful beings; and a letter I sent to Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, President of the State University of New York at Albany, in which I point out that the university’s mission to incubate diverse thought in a pluralistic community is grossly misrepresented by its groundskeeping choices. [On March 23, 2024, I added a second letter to President Rodríguez, responding to an essay he had published.]
Thank you for taking the time to read these words in the shadow of the global polycrisis. I think that humanity can promote its survival prospects to a significant degree by unlearning the prejudice some of its most powerful members hold in favor of casting out that which differs. I hope that this pamphlet furthers that goal and that if it does not do so in your own heart, you will see the cause of the failure to be my own defects in communicating an idea of surpassing value.
James Lyons Walsh
Momshair.org
Albany, New York, USA
Mother’s Day, May 14, 2023
Letter to His Excellency, Edward B. Scharfenberger, Roman Catholic Bishop of Albany, New York
December 14, 2022
Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
As the second week dawns of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I have good news. You can improve the situation for God’s creation in a meaningful way unilaterally, by changing how the grounds of the diocese’s many properties are maintained.
Monoculture farming entails creating deserts for most life forms. It is the variety of plants in a meadow that supports a similar diversity in the insect life of the area. A system with diverse elements is more robust than a homogeneous one. As conditions change, the system can respond by growing in some of its elements and shrinking in others. Even in farming, the fact that we grow few varieties of crops, choosing the ones that produce the greatest amount of the qualities we value most, leaves us excessively vulnerable to blights. This is not a subject I’ve looked into deeply, but here’s an article I’ve started to read on an example of which I was aware, the banana.
Our largest crop in this country is lawns. Not only do we cut the range of insects unsuited to life in lawns by growing them in the first place, but also, to get results we value when cultivating grass, we poison what insect life can subsist in the monoculture. While I invite you to consult experts, there is a simple solution: Prescribe less what grows. Rather, leave it in God’s hands.
Redefine what is a weed, limiting application of the word to growth that is agreed by society to be dangerous. When such plants appear, pluck them out promptly. Do not send them to therapy or call them servants of the Paraclete. Pluck them out.
Opinions will vary on the danger posed by many plants previously classed as weeds. Let there be discussion about their merits and dangers. Participate in this discussion. However, cultivate your respect for the wisdom of God made manifest in the appearance of the plant in what had been lawn, and moderate the respect you have for your ability to condemn plants as weeds.
There is an obvious analogy to matters of sexuality and reproduction. Each of us has opinions on what is proper. It might help for me to share that I strongly disapprove of some activities that are legal. Advocates of sexual freedom in general discourage legal behavior that is physically dangerous. I revile sexuality between people holding wildly dissimilar amounts of power, a situation I consider inherently coercive, though even I recognize the issues involved of degrees and nature of power. It is not only Pope Francis who expresses disapproval of my thoughtful, morally motivated choice not to have children. The opinion pages of The New York Times regularly slap me for leaving more resources for the offspring of others and for nonhuman life, without which none of us survives, by sacrificing the advantages of reproducing.
The correct path is to proclaim that more is to be left in God’s hands, meaning the individual judgments of people, similar as they are to processes we cannot fathom that cause one plant rather than another to grow in a particular spot. God’s way of messy chaos, of fearless acceptance punctuated by swift remediation in cases of danger, promotes robustness and resilience of the system, not to go all Jerzy Kosinski on you.
Speaking of the need to avoid sexuality in the presence of extreme power differentials and leaving things in God’s hands, how did Jesus achieve orgasm? I’m reminded of a bit from The Simpsons, in which Homer is offered the opportunity to vent radioactive gas as part of his duties as a safety officer at a nuclear power plant. When, of course, he refuses, he is informed that venting radioactive gas prevents explosion. He reconsiders and vents the gas. In fairness, this is a fart joke, but I contend that it is a profound and edifying fart joke.
We arrive at the question of whether anything we read among the sayings of Jesus is a joke. Father James Martin has spoken of the humor in the preaching of Jesus. As an expert in rhetoric, you must be aware of the importance of dynamic affective range in your presentations. Humor helps to provide this. Picture Jesus preaching: Earnest, serious, earnest, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out.” Not only is that a great laugh line, but also it sets up a call-back at the end of the sermon, a technique that lends resonance to speeches, as you know.
Therefore, I implore you to support Pope Francis’s initiative on biodiversity by adopting the principle of leaving things in God’s hands, whether they be the expressions of Nature to be seen in the plants that grow on the diocese’s properties or the expressions of Nature in the legal sexual and reproductive choices of your parishioners and people more generally. Reap best by cultivating least. Just be sure to pluck your eyes out when you’re done.
Yours in the God Who laughs immoderately from time to time,
James
Capital Hills Golf Course, Artificial Intelligence, Biodiversity, and Human Survival
May 5, 2023
The values behind golf courses could kill you. I’d like to explain how the urgent pleas from the artificial intelligence (AI) community for regulation of their industry relate to biodiversity and the municipal golf course in my hometown of Albany, New York.
A helpful recent newspaper article clued me in to the fact that Albany’s municipal golf course is open for nature walks year-round, as long as one sticks to a certain path. I went there for the first time the other day. It was beautiful and well worth the visit.
Now, the general sense I got was that my denim-clad self was out of place. I found mention of the nature trail on the course website only in the seventh rule for golfing and only in the context of dog-walking, not hiking or strolling. The people I met were nice, but I remained confused about which path to follow. It’s very hard to avail oneself of this resource without detailed guidance from a current user. Furthermore, the course is difficult to reach without a car and is not prominently advertised as being for anything but golf.
Perhaps no one has consciously ordained this state of affairs. Nevertheless, a magnificent place winds up being visited by fewer members of our species than might benefit from it. As a person trained in complex systems science, I would call this an emergent abuse of power, by which I mean behavior that is not intrinsically bad but that winds up harming the vulnerable anyway.
I’m even more concerned about access to this land for other groups than I am for non-golfers and those who reduce gas prices and traffic by rejecting car ownership. What about insects and weeds? Diversity makes systems, in general, more robust and resilient, because as conditions change, some system elements can decline in number and different ones increase until a new equilibrium is reached. Diversity stabilizes systems. Efficiency or suitability for some limited purpose may be increased by reducing diversity, but at the cost of making the system more vulnerable to collapse.
If you don’t believe me about the need for diversity in biological systems, consider that the Abrahamic God ordered Noah to take members of all animal species on the ark, including unclean animals in a fixed ratio to clean animals, signifying that not only must all species be preserved but that the numbers of each must be kept adequate. Wildlife underpins our economy in ways we have been content to ignore. Consider that wild bees, the bees actually at risk of, and succumbing to, extinction, are more effective pollinators of many crops than honeybees.
We need insects. Insects don’t need us, but they do need meadows. I think that in the past, insights like these were communicated by speaking of God’s will. Maybe not everyone wants to think holistically about systems. I’m childfree, so I have the time. I respect others who don’t. I understand the benefits of diversity because I’m privileged to have the opportunity to think holistically about systems.
More people would enjoy the vast, beautiful golf course if we gussied it up by letting it revert to meadow. We’d get more insects, more insect-eating birds, more life. Think of the bird-watching. School groups could visit. Adults could play games that involved pretending to be botanists or hunter-gatherers, instead of whatever it is that golfers are pretending to be.
I respect golfers, though I kid. I simply think that we’ve gone too far in indulging our taste for dominating Nature, as golf courses clearly do.
If the idea of God’s will isn’t your cup of tea, you might consider the Keanu Reeves version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The arrival of a powerful alien who, unlike so many of us, respects less powerful life outside their association group, might be an occasion for us to learn such respect. We all know that one day we may run into a vastly more powerful being who's apt to treat us the way we treated those in our power. We feel this in our bones and in our sense of irony, don’t we?
It turns out that unless we act quickly, there’s a good chance that we, ourselves, will soon create a vastly more powerful being. Artificial intelligence research has been proceeding surprisingly fast. Many of the biggest names in AI, along with Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, have signed a letter asking that certain AI research efforts be paused immediately.
I recommend visiting YouTube to see the DW News interview with MIT professor and key thought leader Max Tegmark, who explains that we may soon create intelligences that are “as far beyond us as we are beyond insects.” Prof. Tegmark is scared and wants to align AI values with human ones. Ironically, AIs following human values, rather than possessed of values aligned with human desires, would enslave humans or destroy us, as we foolishly do less powerful beings.
So many things could destroy our species in the near future, and the risks are turning out to be mutually reinforcing. Let's walk or ride around a golf course and think carefully about what we value and the danger those values cause. As Klaatu says in the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, “The problem is you… You treat the world as you treat each other.” Golf courses let you experience the problem holistically, with your entire being. It’s a good thing we have golf courses to teach us so vividly that we have far too many golf courses and far too little respect for the less powerful beings on whom our lives depend.
We can still change.
Letter to Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, President of the State University of New York at Albany
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.
Letter to Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, President of the State University of New York at Albany
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
Momshair.org was founded on May 7, 2023, a week before Mother's Day in the United States.
Author: James Lyons Walsh received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of Vermont in 1994 and 1996, respectively. In 2008, he received a certificate of advanced study in adolescence education from the College of Saint Rose. In 2013, he completed the Complex Systems Summer School of the Santa Fe Institute. He received his doctorate in physics in 2020 from the State University of New York at Albany. In addition to teaching as a graduate assistant, he has taught physics and mathematics at Schenectady County Community College and Fulton-Montgomery Community College and physics at SUNY Albany. He was listed as a teacher ranked as excellent by his students while studying at the University of Illinois in the late Nineties and received an award for academic excellence at the University of Vermont and awards for high test scores and voluntary service at SUNY Albany. James dropped out of both high school and the top graduate program in condensed matter physics in the United States. Since 2020, he has been writing about the global polycrisis.
An early version of the author is on the left in the photo below.
The author's mother, Mary Lyons Walsh (1940-1979), is on the right.
Ms. Walsh's mother, Mary O'Brien Lyons (1910-2004), is in the center.
