Delawning discourse is important. It is not an “extra” thing that we can focus on later.
It’s an urgent right now thing that needs to be addressed.
Lawns are one of the most obvious – but least talked about – examples of capitalist, consumerist, supremacist culture.
Everyone knows they’re harmful. The sprays and the gas equipment and the wasted water. But not very many people compelled to do much about it. Climate action is someone else’s job.
Folks will do **more work** to maintain **sameness** over literally thinking to themselves…. “Hey maybe I could mow dead grass less often.” Or “How does my lawn support isolationist and ecocidal norms?”
As our weather warms our area mows more than ever. It’s constant. It stinks. It’s loud.
And no policy is coming. It’s just not. The only people we can rely on to change this is us.
Everyone knows American culture is a culture of wasted time, energy and resources but we as suburbanites still exist out here absolving ourselves of complicity in our daily efforts to uphold norms that we’ve never reflected on why they exist.
Mow less. Go electric. Add native plants. Grow some herbs or veggies.
Do SOMETHING loudly and proudly. It isn’t enough to acknowledge privilege, we have to shop and vote and speak and take radical action to bring change into being as well.
Normalize this conversation. Normalize acknowledging that change starts in our daily habits not the Oval Office. Normalize a radical defiance of harmful norms in the name of comfort or non confrontation.
Delawning is not extra. It’s a desperately necessary starting point to change the nightmarish history of suburban USA.