Grass. I have a real problem with grass. For starters, it’s not much to look at. Sure, it’s green. But it’s a monotonous, uninteresting green. And then we have a few weeks of drought, and it’s not even all that green. And what does it do? It’s not a food source. It doesn’t provide much in the way of food for insects or animals, either, since we don’t let it get tall enough to flower or produce seeds. In fact, you can make a good argument that it’s actually bad for insects and animals, since it supplants natural vegetation that would be more likely to produce something they can use for food or building material. A grassy lawn is a monoculture, a genetically vulnerable and unnatural creation incapable of supporting the kind of complex ecosystems that evolve in the wild. Some scientists have speculated that the rise of monoculture lawns may be one of the stress factors that have decimated honey bee populations.

Grass is a thermodynamic disaster area. To keep it looking decent year after year, we have to apply fertilizer and pesticides. It rewards the effort by growing, transforming the fertility of the soil into tall blades. Then we lop them off and haul them away to a composting center—or worse, a landfill. We deplete the soil to produce a useless crop that we then discard. And as if that weren’t enough, we use gasoline and electricity to do the harvesting, spewing air pollution and noise in all directions, replacing the peaceful sounds of a summer evening with the shrill whine of the weed-eater and the deafening roar of the leaf-blower.

Not all of the fertilizer and pesticide get metabolized by the lawn, of course. Some of them leach out—along with the copious amounts of fresh, clean water from the municipal supply that are required to keep the grass alive in hot weather—into the storm drain systems, adding damaging levels of nitrogen to the ecosystems downstream and moving ever more of our limited supply of usable phosphate down to a lower and less useful position in the planetary ecology.

And what’s it all for? Oh sure, occasionally you see children playing on a lawn. But most lawns seem to be empty of people most of the time. Even if there’s some local and occasional demand for patches of grass for certain activities—croquet, volleyball, playing in the sprinkler—the supply of grass-covered ground seems to vastly exceed the demand. All of our grassy lawn needs could probably be easily met by one or two grassy lawns per block of houses.

So what should we have instead of grass? Considering all the negatives that go along with grass, one could make the argument that we’d be better off with nice, smooth expanses of low-maintenance concrete. But concrete prevents the absorption of rainwater, so it leads to increased flooding. Also, pavement is a sink for solar energy, and our cities are too warm already. So how about some nice gravel or river rocks? That would solve some of the runoff problem, but they’d still soak up too much sunlight and turn it into heat.

Gardens seem like an obvious choice. The average garden might require a little more work than a lawn of the same size, but it can also yield flowers, herbs, vegetables, or fruit. But the right kind of garden can actually be maintained with considerably less work than an equivalent amount of lawn if care is taken to incorporate some low-maintenance, slow-growing elements. Trees, shrubs, ground covers, and vines can provide cooling, shade, soil and water retention, and beauty with nearly no work at all after the initial investment of effort. Nurseries can supply drought-tolerant native plants to facilitate “xeriscaping”—a form of landscape design that requires minimal amounts of supplemental watering.

Or we could let our lawns return to nature. We could let wind-sown and bird-born seeds take root in the soil. We could let native flora make their way back into the city. We could help nature along with diverse plantings to replace our monoculture a little at a time. We could watch for the return of bees, and butterflies, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals. And we could enjoy the peaceful sounds of a summer evening.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

I want to believe I will have the courage walk on my own legs and that they will not have to drag me, as I have seen them drag others. At the edge of the great well, they will say prayers to ask the god to accept us and bring an end to the drought. And then we will jump into the cenote, or we will lose our nerve, and the priests will pick us up and throw us in. If we survive the fall, they will pull us out of the well, and the god will give us the gift of prophecy.

I want to be brave. I want to make this sacrifice for the sake of our people, but especially for my parents and for my little sister. But I am not sure that giving up my life will bring the rain. I am young, but I am not too young to remember last year and the year before that. The priests gave victims to the gods, but the rain still hasn’t come. Why do they think that this year will be different?

Once my father was gone for eight days, scouting with a party of warriors. When he came back, he told me about a man that they met in the jungle to the west. The man was tall, with long limbs, and he told them of a place many days’ march to the north where rain falls nearly every day, and of places far away where the gods make rain flow across the ground in a kind of roadway of water.

I don’t want to die. I want to escape to a place where the gods don’t ask so much of their people.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

“The role of the social architect recognizes that acting on what matters for one person will happen in concert with those around that person. Individual effort will not be enough. If we do not encourage others to find their own meaning, their own voice, we will never be able to sustain our own.”

This piece of art has been a fixture in my life for so long that I don’t remember any details of its creation. I have to imagine my parents, who would have been somewhat younger than the age I am now, hunched over the brown-and-white Formica kitchen table, sorting the tiny tiles and organizing them into rows. I picture Dad arranging the chaotic blocks of solid color that represent the buildings while Mom patiently laid out the orderly pattern of the sky. You can see a little wavering in the neat rows where the two sections of the composition come together. Maybe they miscalculated how many rows it would take to meet in the middle, or maybe one of them was fitting the tiles more closely together than the other. In any case, they found some way to make it work as a single consistent picture.

The City isn’t remarkable as a work of art. I keep it because the colors are pleasing and because my parents made it with their own hands. I also like that it seems outdated, a little retro, and that it gently connects me to every house I ever lived in with my parents. I think there’s something written on the back in pencil in my father’s handwriting, a date perhaps, but the mosaic is heavy and I don’t want to take it off the wall to remind myself what it says. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by that writing again some day—or not—when I have occasion to take it off its hook, maybe to take it to the next place I will live.

I also display it because I like mosaic as an art form, so it’s kind of cool to have not one but TWO pieces in this unusual medium in my room. (I’ll tell you about The Fishies at a later date, perhaps.) My fondness for mosaic might be associated with my Rome fetish. The Romans were masters of the mosaic form at several stages of their history. At the ancient port city of Ostia Antica, a town that was abandoned 18 centuries ago because of the silting-up of the Tiber river, entire mosaic floors were preserved under the mud. They’ve been excavated now, and some of them are still in such good condition that visitors are permitted to walk on them. In the heart of Rome, pieces of intact mosaic floors are visible here and there throughout the Imperial Forum. This stuff could last forever.

A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibit about Pompeii. One of the artifacts on display was a beautiful piece of mosaic floor. A simple design made of tiles somewhat smaller than the ones my parents used surrounded a central mosaic medallion of much tinier tesserae that depicted the Gorgon Medusa. A plaque on the wall explained the technique. The central medallion was designed to be removable so that if the owner moved to a new home, he could take the finer, more expensive part of the artwork with him.

I’m trying to imagine the house I’m sitting in as it might look if it were undisturbed by human activity for 20 or 30 centuries. If some catastrophe or sudden change in economic or demographic factors should drive us away from here, and assuming that climate change doesn’t send Houston once again to the bottom of a giant inland sea, how long would The City survive? Exposed to the elements, the wooden frame and backing would probably disappear in just a few decades. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that the tiles themselves, and with a little luck, the mortar that holds them together, might survive.

What might some future anthropologists think of my parents’ cityscape? What stories might they make up to explain its meaning and its historical significance? What will it tell some future museum-goers about our culture and beliefs? I like to think about leaving The City for them. I’m sure some of them will like it.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick