Golf courses are ridiculous, but suburban lawns are just as ridiculous! Millions of acres of wasted land, these could be thriving with little critters.
Golf courses and lawns are leftovers from the aristocracy and are ridiculously wasteful, the water cost alone… RoundUp and insecticides… fuel for lawn equipment, and on and on, all a massive waste that makes life just a little more shitty
My neighbour brags every year about spending $400 a month watering his St Augustine, then asks me what my secret is since I never water my full sun lawn and it’s lush all summer.
The answer he never believes is that the secret is controlled neglect. Anything that survived the summer and winter gets a month to grow in the spring to put down roots, then it gets mowed every other week at the second to highest deck level.
That means that my lawn is almost completely comprised of local species.
A rabbit loves behind our house and he thanks us for the habitat by eating our asters before they can flower!
I’m kidding. We’ve got two bird nests on our property, a hive(?) of burrowing sweat bees, rabbits, many robins, and lately a raccoon.
I find it fun to watch the activity out there. It’s nice seeing things grow in our garden, fauna and flora alike.
ETA: we used to have foxes but they literally paved over where their den was for a parking lot. Now I haven’t seen any foxes. They were fun to watch.
Love this. My yard is a menagerie of critters and i wouldnt trade the 20+ species of birds, raccons, possums, bunnies, and other lil ones, for anything ever. Too precious >
Suburban lawns are not only bad for the environment due to the wasted lawns and a lack of nature but they also inherently require extremely poor urban planning. When you spread people out into suburbs you force people to take cars which is horrible for peoples mental health and the environment. Furthermore houses are significantly less energy efficient than apartment buildings.
What we need instead is dense cities, with good public transportation, plenty of public spaces, so that we can shrink the amount of land we live on and allow nature to return.
This might surprise you but loads of people would find a dense city bad for their mental health.
Lawns aren’t just wasted space. At this very moment my son is riding his bike around our back yard, my daughter is out there too, probably “cooking” with pots and pans full of sand.
I have a camper trailer parked on some lawn. I have a shed full of bikes for myself and my kids.
Theres also some steel stacked up where im building a patio.
We make use of the area around us. “Lawn” is the best of a range of options to keep the area manageable and usable. An alternative would be gravel, or paving, or concrete. None of which are very appealing to me.
You are very fortunate to have all of that and also a lawn to place it.
Not really. Id say the majority of people in my area are similar.
My point is, lawns aren’t ornamental. People use the area for all kinds of things.
People if your area are also quite lucky to have both he privilege and the use for the lawns.
Thankfully, golf courses are very easy to sabotage.
Often protected by minimal if any fencing, and there are a thousand different ways to make little environmentally-friendly changes to the greens that will irritate the fuck out of golfers.
You could publish a zine with different suggestions
I was visiting a friend, and their whole neighborhood was immigrants. One thing that was clearly different was their lawn barely had grass, at most a patch of 6x6, and everything else was vegetable garden and most trees were fruit trees. 6-7 different types of fruits in the front lawn instead of ornamental plans and seasonal vegetables on backyard.
I really don’t understand the obsession with wasting good land to put useless things. And put so much resources in maintaining it
I don’t do anything with my lawn except trim it every few weeks. The amount of stuff that is just growing wild is awesome.
A food forest would be cool too.
It’s a fucken travesty that Georges Hill where the Diggers first rebelled against the landlords is now a gated golf club.
Food forest sounds dope. Lets do it!
I think of things like these literally every day.
Sadly, I’m actually disabled, and recently stopped being in denial of what that means.
So can’t make anything like this happen.
I’ve mentioned to friends a few times, I think golf courses are an extravagant waste of space, and shouldn’t exist within city limits
I want to raise this that country clubs shouldn’t exist in the suburbs either or rural areas. Maybe the sea or deserts
We have a course that has gone back to nature. It’s kinda wonderful with a little wandering path.
It was a public course meant for African Americans, which makes it a little less cool.
However, these do make for wonderful little parks.
Good heavens, why does everyone hate golf ? I agree many golf courses are in climates they simply do not belong, sure.
But otherwise, golf is a walk with a game on top ! What’s not to like ? There is absolutely a way to have golf that is responsibly and collectively organised…
- Water usage.
- Removing natural flora to replace it with an invasive grass species.
- Energy consumption in maintaining the lawn besides water.
- Poor use of land resource.
- The fuckwit tech bros, oligarchs, nepo babies and other absolute cunts who play this game and have built the culture of exclusion that echoes the discriminatory and elitist origins of this game.
Okay. Maybe we could use some native grass that would therefore need less water, and “mow” the lawn using sheep / goats ?
For land resource, I think it would be good to keep the golf courses as vegetation areas. There are enough useless parking lot acres anyway to repurpose !
And of course this would make it cheaper. I think the exclusivity also depends a lot on the course already, I used to go to public primary school here in France and we had golf one trimester every year, financed entirely by the (free) public school’s budget.
Add exclusivity (cost, keeping “undesirables” out), pesticide use, and fertilizer runoff to that list.
The space it takes up.
I haven’t. I’m struggling to pay my bills. I might consider taking a job running deadbeats off of the country club grounds though.
I have now.
Nice! I didn’t know George Carlin’s twitter account was @BobbBil
Stop reading my dream journal.
Nah, golf’s great. Hands off.
