Back in July I was astonished by a neighbor’s compliment about my lawn being all green and plush. In the twenty-seven years we’ve lived here we’ve never been complimented on our landscaping, no sense to even thinking about the ‘yard-of-the-month’ award. This is due, no doubt, to a certain laissez faire philosophy the darling and I share regarding the yard: you’re welcome to live here if you can survive here, except for rats and poison ivy, in which case I’ll hunt you down and kill you, St. Francis notwithstanding. As for everything else, beyond the lawn being mown you’re on your own. The attitude fit nicely with my ‘suburban bubba’ landscaping concept requiring three or four unfinished projects stacked around the yard. But a couple of years ago I got interested in growing things like tomatoes and vegetables that never made and flowers in pots that get watered and fed until they die. I cleaned up the project piles and early this year decided to extend my gardening repertoire to include the lawn and so actually fed and initially only occasionally watered it, presuming upon the rain as is the normal case here in waterworld.
In May the drought became sort of obvious, requiring more than just incidental lawn watering, and by June I had a first ever full-fledged watering schedule under way dragging hoses and sprinklers around the yard like some suburban Sisyphus doomed forever to start again what I just finished. The ovens of hell were opened in July with no day below 100. (In one of my dimmer moments, hitting the links one day with Biker Kerry at a 1:00 tee time. We had the normally busy place to ourselves because it was, well, so fucking hot. I was proud to announce my score of 104 equaled the temperature, though upon reflection have considered it a fundamentally stupid thing to do; not even young healthy people were out there.) But it was a dry heat thanks to the drought; so the lawn required increased water and I became a sort of Sisyphus on speed, hauling hoses every day. The lawn was green and plush.
Then I got my water bill. I was a bit appalled–not by the price so much as by the usage: 30,000 gallons. With Houston baking and Texas burning and no end of drought in sight despite Gov Goodhair’s public imprecations to his deity (the pharaoh’s prayers were answered not only by more drought, but by fires descending like some plague of Moses) there seemed to me to be something gluttonous about that green and plush lawn. So the hoses were rolled up and Sisyphus stopped his chase and lassez faire gardening became the operative once again: ‘sure hope you can survive this.’ I spent most of August watching lawn and landscaping die and am reconciled to the cost of resodding and replanting if it ever starts raining again. The same thing’s going on with most of our neighbors–a sign at the entrance to our subdivision announces ‘voluntary water conservation’–whose lawns are also going brown. I’m glad for this little display of community, the weed-strewn dead grasses painting ‘we’re all in this together.’ It’s not like we talk to each other otherwise. The decision to turn the lawn over to the mercy of nature and watch it die then led naturally enough to a question about the utility of the weekly visit from the lawn crew when in fact nothing was growing. But I finally decided that these guys need to live on something and so continue to pay for the kabuki of it all.
I caught an article on the effects the drought is having on the already semi-arid region of west Texas around Abilene where we first started out of seminary. The hamlet of Robert Lee has a lovely reservoir tucked back into the hills that serve the town and surrounding area as both a recreational area (good fishing) and the water supply. It’s down to 1% of its capacity (fishing for, I suppose, mudpuppies); the folks are wondering where they will get water. This is happening to little towns all over the place: they’re running out–or in some cases have already run out–of water.
The problem becomes especially severe with the plague of fires. And that’s additionally compounded by the fact that those little towns are served by volunteer fire departments (as is also true of our little suburbia). Guv Goodhair the Texas miracle and current popup in the whack-a-mole Republican presidential nomination process cut that state budget by 75%. But, hey, no problem, ’cause mr. less guvment got us FEMA funds. My pal Ecclesiastical Dave forwarded a terrific observation: chutzpah — n., when the Governor of Texas cuts funding 75% for volunteer fire departments, then demands federal disaster relief to fight wildfires, while calling for cuts in government spending.
Due, no doubt, to the mustard gas incident in high school chemistry class–a simple lab assignment gone awry and sending old Mrs. Marshall into a panic as if I were the only guy who’d ever done it–and the midterm D earned in Physics that eliminated me from being Head Yell Leader (thus destroying my presidential aspirations forever) I took the minimal number of science classes necessary in college, as I recall, two; one being ‘ecology 101′. This was around 1974, at the dawning of a social awareness of environmental issues, when with the oil embargo came the crisis of the ‘population bomb’. So we began to learn about how all these things–environment and human–interact with each other and I recall from the prof, ‘The environment is a living organism with finite resources. When too much demand is placed on her, Nature will react against it, to put things back in balance. We’re reaching that point. So we have a fundamental choice: we can do nothing and let nature take its course–and you know, nature doesn’t give a shit about human suffering; or we can minimize human suffering by passing environmental protection laws and cleaning our messes up and learning to live more modestly, more respectfully within spaceship earth (as it were, back in ’74).
‘
Forty-seven years later it appears we are encountering the environmental shit hitting the fan only suspected back then: historic droughts, historic fires, historic floods, melting ice caps, sterilized oceans, foul air, and disappearing rain forests. And they’re not historic because they are relatively unique, they’re historic because each one’s more violent than the last (Jake the tv weather guy: ‘Why we haven’t had a storm this severe in, oh, twenty-two months’). Much of the environmental degradation is due to human activity, especially but not only our use of fossil fuels. Scientists have been warning us about this for decades, also noting that without major changes it’s only going to get worse. There is a huge consensus about this among the leading climatologists in the world. But it’s the minority of self-interested deniers who have the money and the power and the airwaves, so little gets done politically. Nature will take her course, and human suffering and misery will get worse.
From childhood years in Pennsylvania I recall walking the forests around Johnstown with parents and siblings and later playing with my pals on the banks of the Stony Creek and skinny-dipping therein. I went to church Camp Sequanota (where I met PA Dave who, bless his heart, continues to help on the periodic maintenance and upkeep of the place) and our church worship calendar included a couple of weeks on the stewardship of creation when we sang ‘This is my Father’s world; and to my listening ears; all nature sings and ’round me rings the music of the spheres!’ And we recited the litany ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein; for he has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers.’
And I took with me the ethic that we are to live respectfully with the earth, using only our necessary share and conserving resources for all, and, as per my days backpacking in the boy scouts, remember the people who come after you and leave the campsite in better condition than you found it. You do this because the place doesn’t belong to us; we are only here for awhile to manage it for the good of everybody. ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.’ That’s what the Good Book says.
Books lie, he said.
God don’t lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are His words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. (Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian”)
And they’re telling us the same thing.
Larry
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