Lawn, control and the colony - Life after lawns

Lawn is “covering around 40% of the planet’s land surface, lawns are monocultures made up of a handful of species that require frequent watering, fertiliser and – often – pesticides.

Lawn is “nature under totalitarian rule”. Michael Pollan

"At a larger scale they also suggested a permanence and control that assuaged anxieties about the fragility of colonial control. Andrea Gaynor, professor of history at the University of Western Australia, argues that while some settlers appreciated the beauty of Australian landscape from early on, that “didn’t override the necessity to provide a civilised veneer that meant the colony could project an image of itself as stable, settled and prosperous, and therefore an attractive field for investment. So the cultural aspect is deeply entwined with the economics of the whole enterprise.” Simultaneously lawns helped encode and reinforce racial and social hierarchies. “Lawns were understood by Perth’s white residents as the antithesis of, and vastly superior to, Indigenous landscapes and cultures,” says Gaynor."

“Even in a drying climate we’d rather run desal[ination] plants than do away with lawn. It really shows how deeply ingrained lawn is in Australian culture as a symbol of civilisation and environmental control.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/02/no-mow-is-australias-long-love-affair-with-lawn-ending
#Lawn #colonialism #SettlerCulture #monoculture #suburbia #landscapes #CivilisedVeneer #FossilFuel #pollution #biodiversity #conservation #climate

Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui?

"Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating water theft."

"All over Maui, golf courses glisten emerald green, hotels manage to fill their pools and corporations stockpile water to sell to luxury estates. And yet, when it came time to fight the fires, some hoses ran dry. Why?"

"This is a classic case of the most craven disaster capitalism: a small elite group using a profound human tragedy as their window to roll back a hard-won grassroots victory for water rights, while removing civil servants who pose a political inconvenience to the administration’s pro-developer agenda."...
by Naomi Klein and Kapuaʻala Sproat

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/17/hawaii-fires-maui-water-rights-disaster-capitalism
#bushfires #disasters #water #rights #theft #golf #plantations #developers #resorts #SettlerCulture

Loss of terrestrial biodiversity in Australia: Magnitude, causation, and response

"Australia’s biota is species rich, with high rates of endemism. This natural legacy has rapidly diminished since European colonization. Extinction rates, already far exceeding the global average for mammals, are predicted to escalate across all taxa, and ecosystems are collapsing. Severe degradation of Australia’s natural world began ~250 years ago, when European colonization began removing Indigenous peoples from the land they had managed for >60,000 years."

"The authors “focus here on biodiversity loss since European colonization, particularly the contemporary processes shaping the status of biodiversity and the conservation response... More than 7.7 million hectares of the habitat of threatened species was cleared between 2000 and 2017"

“Australians have much to learn from an increased respect for, and application of, Indigenous ways of knowing. Embedding human social, spiritual, and general well-being objectives as an emergent property of healthy ecosystems is a core principle of the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7870

Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
https://www.cbd.int/gbf/

#StateForest #BellingenLogging #GKNP #SettlerCulture #Australians #degradation #logging #EcosystemDegradation #IndigenousKnowledge #koalas #biodiversity #extinction makers

“I don’t think we want to live in a global #suburbia. Why do you want to go to a place and see the same weeds you can see in your back garden?”

“We’ve introduced #ferals to the bottom of the world. They’re destroying it
Research published in Scientific Data this month suggests humans have introduced 1125 new species to the Southern Ocean islands, which surround #Antarctica, and 135 to the frozen continent itself. The list reads like an exotic menagerie: budgerigars, canaries, geese, terrapins, opossums, hedgehogs, pigs, reindeer, hamsters, foxes and even monkeys. These species have hunted local #seabirds and destroyed native plants. The problem is going to get worse. Australian explorers noted #dogs so feral they had basically become wolves.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-ve-introduced-ferals-to-the-bottom-of-the-world-they-re-destroying-it-20230420-p5d1w1.html
#BiologicalInvasions #Cryosphere #AlienSpecies #Livestock #AntarcticTreaty #SettlerCulture