Alternative Recursion

empty class

We have all seen graphs similar to this, but i think most of us tend to view our consumption as necessary, or at least useful.

Gasoline lawn mowers pollute roughly as much in an hour as a car does in 100 miles, not to mention all of the pollution and resources wasted in the machines themselves. (granted; lawn-mowing gas consumption is less than 1% of consumption by passenger vehicles in net)

environmentilists say to use push mowers.

I’m going to go one step further, the last step, and say why have a “lawn”?

Is nature such an eyesore?

Does the fact that you put effort and resources into your yard impress the neighbors?

Is someone who’s impressed with resources and efforts spent on your yard worth impressing?

Is it practical to specifically plant something and set up some sort of psuedo-ecosystem on your land that requires external maintanance?

Yes i realize people do this to get respect and essentially gain socio-economic class in the local scene, as is probably all consumption if you think about it enough.

But lawn upkeep is one of the class-climbing things that seems easy to cross off the list without any real loss, especially now days when playing the environmental card can bump you up more than what little a well kept lawn ever could.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 04:30 and is filed under social science. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: classism, environment, human behavior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.