Crabgrass wars:
French, William C
CRABGRASS WARS MY FATHER'S SURRENDER My father was two years old in 1910 when William James published an essay titled "The Moral Equivalent of War." In it James argues that though war has been...
...Why else the weekly migraines...
...Perhaps he resented their radiation physics lab with its nuclear reactor for test purposes placed where my grandfather's cows once grazed...
...My brothers and I hated those wars...
...Career success made him more relaxed...
...He, in turn, exercised us...
...Shame for what we used to feel was defeat in our crabgrass wars has now turned to pride in our eccentricity...
...Kentucky bluegrass mixed with fescue, and rye with a touch of clover are prized as signs of civilization, marks of culture...
...Those woods in their day had provided fuel for cooking and heat and lumber for the farm buildings...
...We preferred baseball...
...All species are now welcome in our lawn...
...His religious writings had offended both Catholics and Protestants and his books had been burned in both Paris and Geneva...
...We calmly explain to people that our ragged lawn is "ecosystemically sound...
...From the air, in season and out, fell a rain of limbs, leaves, and those junky tassles from walnut trees designed by God to clog up gutters in order to teach us humility and discipline...
...Though we are Catholic we feel that there's something vaguely Buddhist or perhaps animist in what we are doing in our back yard...
...Perhaps it was his form of quiet rebellion for the way the government condemned my grandfather's farm and surrounded our yard with a chain-link fence guarding the perimeter of a vast federal scientific research center...
...We accept weeds now and we feel good about it...
...Many, I suspect, become "tillers and keepers" of both the grasses and the wild weeds...
...He suspected that his friends were plotting against him...
...It had been in the family since before the War of the Northern Invasion...
...My father was filled with envy...
...Then came his deep sadness at the death of his wife, my mother...
...Do what you can...
...He concludes that we should turn from the conquest of cities or nations to a common human conquest of nature...
...Certainly my father's stroke diminished his concern about lawn upkeep...
...At our house the state of nature-our yard- was part of the woods of my grandparents' and great grandparents ' farm-Bellevue...
...Where once we accepted the dogma that natural forces are the chief threat of chaos and destruction, now we fear that our own advancing industrial, technological, and military powers are the chief potential sources of radical chaos and disaster...
...Accordingly, my father rightly perceived our yard as under siege...
...I am making a modest beginning with chickweed...
...Greenpeace goes up against harpooners...
...In it James argues that though war has been rendered obsolete by the monstrous advance of weapons technology, we must find a viable war substitute...
...We cultivate crab-grass...
...Were we not given "dominion" and charged by God to "subdue the earth...
...I think that he views them as somehow on his side now, as kin, as colleagues of sorts, as fellow pilgrims...
...We never reflected on why exactly crabgrass was an enemy...
...But time works change...
...In a world seemingly intent upon chopping down the vast tropical forests and extinguishing the most interesting animal species, the least we can do is let wild species have the run of our lawn...
...We coveted their lawn...
...Many factors have contributed to my father's growing acceptance of the rights of weeds...
...We have thrown off the shackles of monocrop lawn design...
...A section was cut as needed, thus the clearing became part of the "new grounds"- a pasture for a period, then a new cycle began a growth of oak, maple, dogwood, and tulip poplar...
...Though he never read James's essay, my father raised three sons and drafted us into James's war against nature...
...Perhaps what drove him in this crusade during those years was fear at the chaos of world events-World War II, Korea, the nuclear arms race, assassinations, Vietnam...
...Younger men and women must similarly become the defenders of elephants, rivers, mountain gorillas, the atmosphere, and all that is of the earth...
...He felt himself a failure...
...From the ground in summer came chickweed, dandelions, crabgrass, yellow jackets, and moles eating shrub roots...
...Perhaps weeds reminded him of the wildness that haunts the edges of our lives-the dark waters of the womb, the enfeeblement and final corruption of our bodies in aging and death...
...Religious and moral fervor heightened the energy of our crabgrass wars...
...If we took a survey I think we would find that many old men and women practice this sort of "letting go" of lawn care in their maturing wisdom and come to experience a sense of kinship with what Aquinas called the "community of creation...
...william c. French William C. French is an assistant professor of social ethics in the theology department of Loyola University of Chicago...
...Now that our technological clout has extended horrifically we are realizing that we dare not damage the biosphere or we damage ourselves and our children...
...His chief sources of happiness and restoration came to be long afternoon walks and the study of plants...
...the quest for an ordered lawn drew energy from the primal tendency to perceive home as sacred space, tended land as holy order, and control over nature as moral obligation...
...For whatever reasons, we have let go of lawn care...
...What are weeds anyway...
...Crabgrass and dandelion appear as hostile and alien threats to our ideal order...
...Perhaps my father was frustrated in his job as a research engineer working on the first American guided missile system and, later, on hydraulics problems...
...When William James endorsed the expanded conquest of nature, our technology was not strong enough to do truly extensive damage...
...While we harvested ancient beer cans, broken bottles, horseshoes, hunks of barbed wire, our neighbors' lawns annually emerged lush and green...
...Botany became his newfound solace...
...We tell the busybodies that we are engaged in "bi-oregional research" promoting ecological diversity and "bio-spheric stability...
...We "tended the garden" and kept wildness at bay by chemical and mechanical warfare...
...We fought in the backyard, the wooded side-lot, and the garden...
...What is the cult of lawn care but displaced warfare-a mortal conflict against the forces of disorder and ugliness...
...In spring the thaw heaved up iron and glass objects...
...Our new tolerance of crabgrass is certainly born of laziness, but still it is good to know that our sloth converges with ecological and theological wisdom...
...New fears of great magnitude have shown the old fears about weeds to be inconsequential...
...At the end of his life Rousseau was deeply troubled and paranoid...
...We coveted neither our neighbors' house nor wife, and our neighbors owned no oxen or asses...
...Advancing years may have bred appreciation for all that pulses with life...
...Where once my father hated weeds, now he accepts them as fully integral to our lawn care program...
...For years the section that was to become our yard had been used by locals from town as a free trash dump...
...Perhaps he was angry at his boss...
...The "manly virtues" will be fostered not in the practice of killing each other but in having our youths join in "the immemorial human warfare against nature...
...Only an urbane Parisian philosopher like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who knew not crabgrass the way we did, could celebrate the "state of nature," we felt...
...My father had us uproot any intruding forces of chaos- chickweed, crabgrass, and other species alien to a well-managed lawn...
...In his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Penguin, 1979),he describes his turn from society to nature...
...At least we could control the crabgrass...
...Such wars exercised my father though...
Vol. 116 • August 1989 • No. 14
