No Lawns

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What is No Lawns?

A community devoted to alternatives to monoculture lawns, with an emphasis on native plants and conservation. Rain gardens, xeriscaping, strolling gardens, native plants, and much more! (from official Reddit r/NoLawns)

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founded 2 years ago

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Just grass. Nothing but grass. Solely grass. (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

One that I'm really enjoying (though it's kind of a tome) is "Tending The Wild" by M. Kat Anderson. It goes into the interdependent relationships the native Americans had with the local flora and fauna and how the arrival of European settlement blew that ecology right out of the airlock. There's a lot of really good information both about the horrors of colonialism and genocide as well as the ways that various native species were used and cultivated.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Idk, man, I thought I knew it well enough, but it shook me a few times. One of the things that still haunts me is how the native Americans had this entire cultivated relationship with the ecology here, and the Europeans just wandered in and went "pfft look at these dumb layabouts not cutting down trees, plowing fields, and killing everything that moves when God left it here for them to exploit" and proceeded to perform what amounted to not just regular genocide, but also ecological and cultural genocide by completely transforming the ecology of California.

Also, re: hyper abundance. There's some evidence that suggests that the hyper-abundance encountered by European settlers was actually the result of the collapse of agrarian societies across the continent. De Soto describes organized, settled, agrarian societies when he first encounters the native Americans. 100 years of smallpox later, and the English find what amounts to hunter-gatherer bands. It's entirely possible that a breathtaking depopulation occurred across the American continents that basically resulted in what you'd see when you functionally eradicate the apex predator from a given ecology.