Pacific Northwest Meadowscaping

Pacific Northwest Urban Meadowscaping (PNUM) is a collaborative effort to develop lawn alternatives using native bunch grasses and wildflowers well suited to the Pacific Northwest’s Willamette Valley. As homeowners become more aware of the environmental impacts of their landscape choices, naturescaping programs are receiving more requests for lawn replacement options. Although common, lawns provide little benefit to storm water infiltration, water quality, or wildlife habitat and require polluting inputs such as fertilizers and mowing.

The goal of PNUM is to provide public education, technical support and assistance with the planning, planting and monitoring of meadowscapes on residential landscapes and in public parks to increase wildlife habitat and stormwater infiltration in the urban realm. Continuing analysis of available data will be used to determine best management practices for installing and maintaining urban meadows. In addition to answering practical questions, PNUM aims to cause a paradigm shift in what people think of as a beautiful “lawn.”

https://wmswcd.org/programs/pacific-northwest-urban-meadowscaping/

our lawns are killing us

Pristine turf grass lawns are as synonymous with America as baseball and apple pie. For those of us who grew up in the suburbs, waking up to the lulling drone of lawnmowers signaled the start of a summer Saturday with all of its anticipated pleasures. I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t enjoy the smell of fresh-cut grass. And deep down, even those of us who are staunchly anti-herbicide harbor a secret hatred of dandelions, if only for the glares they evoke from our neighbors: Do they think I’m lazy? Or letting my property go downhill?

Yet despite what Scotts®, Bayer, TruGreen®, and other corporations in the so-called green industry would have us think, lawns are far from green, environmentally speaking. (They’re not American, either.) We’ve known for decades about the harm lawns cause, but we are still mowing and blowing: Irrigated turf grass covers nearly two percent of the land in the United States, more than 40 million acres. Every square inch of it replaces diverse habitat for wildlife with a monoculture of nonnative plants, and we keep it going with fossil fuels and chemicals toxic to most living things.

http://www.ecolandscaping.org/07/lawn-care/lawns-killing-us-time-kick-habit/

icon of the anthropocene

Gameboy, circa 1983

the subtext of stone

So my previous post is what I'd consider a primary reason for the selection of stone as my medium for this project.  Stone stands the test of time and acts as a marker for climatic and geologic change.  As Walter Benjamin put it so succinctly in Art and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: 'Art remains, the world vanishes...'

But I'd like to offer another, more optimistic reading...

Perhaps the world that is vanishing is our old, out-dated industrial model based on fossil fuel exploitation.  Maybe this sculptural stone row with its fossilized imprints, angular seating and ephemeral words writ in water marks a new chapter in the anthropocene.  A time when we begin to recognize our common humanity and kinship with all living things on this precious blue orb.

To chart this new path, we must reduce our collective imprint...

The Uninhabitable Earth

"The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster..."


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

stone circle memories

Recalling our '06 trip to England, Scotland and Ireland and some of the stone circles we visited.  Stonehenge, Castlerigg, The Hurlers, etc.  The kids loved climbing on the stones while we enjoyed the tranquility of simply sitting on warm stone and contemplating the surrounding countryside.

Could I bring a little of that feeling to Oak Tree Park?