EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

The Somewhat Greener Grass of Home

A couple of years ago the City of Edmonton launched a public service campaign encouraging its property owners not to bag their grass clippings and put them out with the trash. The persuasive argument stated that sheared clipping were 70-per-cent water anyway and that they would quickly dry up on lawns and act as mulch. This free mulch would keep tonnes of waste from making like more sardines in landfill. I bought in, the premise seemed rational.

Urban Albertans mow their lawns about 12 times a year by my count. The frequency diminishes as spring and summer dwindle into late September. I’ve always enjoyed the chore because I can get a lot of thinking done, multi-task as it were, but was pleased to learn it was now acceptable to skip a step. I was also mildly taken aback by the fact that something I’d been raised and taught to do was now wrong, but wasn’t always wrong because nobody knew better back then and had never considered the consequences of trying to dispose of hundreds of thousands of giant plastic bags of grass clippings year after year. The flame of enlightenment was tiny, it wasn’t “You mean Earth isn’t flat and the sun doesn’t revolve around it!?” Still, it gave me pause while mowing a diagonal pattern in the backyard. What else do I believe that is hopelessly misguided?

The City’s slogan was WE GO BAGLESS, sort of lame cheeky, saucy, ‘going commando,’ a smiley faced official spin on a slackening of standards. One morning, I left the house and encountered an election-style ‘bagless’ lawn sign on the property. I was a tad disturbed because I’d no idea who’d put it there. Also, was this promoting an initiative or just shaming my neighbours? Or both? Ironically, the sign was silk screened onto corrugated plastic. Plastic is indestructible, it won’t fade away into organic molecules like grass clippings. Any action whether progressive or regressive will always be accompanied by a retinue of unforeseen issues and consequences.

This town, my town, perched on both majestic banks of the meandering North Saskatchewan River is gorgeous, a very fine place to live, renowned for its setting and extensive greenspaces. In 2015 Edmonton ceased the use of herbicides in the city’s parks and on its boulevards. One of the rationales was that some of the city’s citizens were allergic to chemicals. My take on that was, “Too bad, cope with it,” because I’ve learned over the years that if you peel away the layers of most do-good complainers and self-described activists, you will often hit a deep vein, a mother lode, of narrow self-interest. The second City rationale was the mounting and unintended scourge of herbicides on the world’s bee population. Bees are a vital element in the planet’s complex ecosystem; everything’s connected. I bought that argument, albeit with reservations.

The result has been unbecoming for a provincial capital. Edmonton now appears neglected in a post-apocalyptic kind of way. Dandelions and noxious weeds have partied like it’s 1899. I’m convinced too that a fair number of citizens take their cue from the City. If municipal properties look shabby, then who cares about smaller tracts of private property? Unsurprisingly, addressing one problem has created another problem that needs addressing. So it goes.

The proposed solution is either insanely clever or bat-shit crazy. I haven’t made up my mind because I can’t get past Julie Andrews warbling, “Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo,” the lusty words of the lonely goatherd. The City’s latest weed control pilot project involves 200 goats, herders mounted on horseback, guard dogs to ward off curious coyotes and temporary fencing because goats apparently tend to wander rather than stand and graze like sheep.

Our over-reliance on fossil fuels and petroleum products has led to a near disastrous state of planetary affairs in something less than a blink of an eye in cosmological time. The internal combustion engine alone is responsible for dehumanizing urban design. We plan and build and maintain our cities to accommodate cars, not people. But I can confidently state that the streets of my town are no longer unsanitary quagmires of mud and horse shit.

Goats are like horses and us too, what goes in must come out in some form or another. My hunch is that a grand public park dotted with goat droppings will be more attractive than one overgrown and populated with weeds. Everything will be fine until an Alberta scientist isolates some previously unknown type of goat scat virus and designates it a threat to public health. If that scenario shakes down, then what? Grass. I’ve just written nearly 800 words about grass, so simple and yet so complicated – just like everything.