I love when life delivers amusing synchronicities. Several years ago, I removed the lawn from my back yard. It was ratty looking and, living in a desert region, I didn’t want to water grass, which has no value for pollinating insects. I cut out the sod, hauled in some large natural paving stones and filled the space with mulch. It looked nice.
It worked great when I just had a relatively lazy, middle aged Rhodesian Ridgeback dog. Then I got Olive, an anything-but-lazy Border Collie. By the time she was two, she had ground the mulch into fine dust. But not long after that, Freya, the Ridgeback, passed. The mostly dirt yard continued to work OK because Olive and I get out running and doing agility a lot and she didn’t spend a lot of highly active time in the yard.
The whole equation changed nine months ago when I got the second Border Collie, Micki. As soon as the two became friends and Micki was big enough to hold her own, the back yard became a wrestling ring. As the girls ran, rolled and jumped, dust would billow so thick it looked like smoke, as if my yard were on fire. Joyously they would explode through the pet door surrounded by a cloud of fine particulate matter that would waft through the house. They looked like Pigpen from the Peanuts comic. On the occasions of rain, it was the same scenario but with mud instead of dust.
In the last nine months I have probably spent more time dusting and scrubbing floors than in the previous five years combined. I could have literally started cleaning in one corner of my house, dusted and scrubbed to the opposite corner, turned around and started again all day long and not run out of dirt.
Something had to change.
A month ago, I ordered a thousand square feet of synthetic turf and began looking forward to its arrival with the excitement of a little kid during Christmas week.
The unexpected synchronicity showed up in the form of a book loaned me by a friend. The Worst Hard Time is a masterfully written work by Timothy Egan describing the Great Dust Bowl “dirty thirties” era. John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, Grapes of Wrath, told the tales of those who fled, but Egan describes the experiences of those who stayed and survived.
Egan’s writing is so good the historical account reads like an engrossing novel. As I battled my own personal Border Collie induced Dust Bowl, I gained new insight into the depth of devastation and suffering that played out across the Great Plains.
Despite warnings from Native Americans and some farmers, “sodbusters” looking to build homesteads tore up the vast grasslands at a voracious pace. Widescale land conversion coincided with a decade-long drought, and literal mountains of topsoil took flight in the incessant winds.
I had learned about the Dust Bowl in high school, but I hadn’t understood, hadn’t grasped the scale or horror. The dust storms were so large and intense they would blacken the sky and generate electrical charges strong enough to stand horses’ hair on end. The static electricity was so powerful it could short out automobiles. Blue flames could be seen running along barbed wire fences. People greeting one another with a handshake could get knocked to the ground. Wind driven particles functioned like a sandblaster, blinding cattle and other animals left outside unable to find shelter. Thousands of people died of “dust pneumonia.”
As Olive and Micki ripped around and attacked each other in my yard, I’d watch the dust float up and coat my deck and the outside of the patio door. In the thirties, homes were far from sealed. Many reported that as the skies began to darken in advance of an incoming duster, they would wet blankets and rags and stuff them into cracks, but the fine dust seeped and flowed through the tiniest of openings.
In a time of escalating, human-caused “natural” disasters, the Dust Bowl is a cautionary tale about the price of ignoring nature’s laws and boundaries. Nearly one hundred years later, humans continue to ignore such lessons.
Two weeks ago, researchers delivered a study warning that New Orleans was beyond the point of no return due to rising sea levels and the erosion of coastal wetlands. The researchers estimated the city, “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.
Low-elevation southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels and strengthening hurricanes driven by global heating, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry. Ordinarily sediment from the Mississippi river would help rebuild coastal estuaries and wetlands but the river has been so heavily altered by levees and navigation channels the sediment flows straight out into the sea.
Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates and pumps erected after 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. But research shows that the levees, already in need of hefty repairs, will not be able to save the city in the long run. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion, equivalent to the size of Delaware, with a further 3,000 square miles set to vanish over the next 50 years. A football field-sized area is wiped out every 100 minutes.
As noted in this piece in the Guardian, relocating the city faces financial, logistical, political and cultural challenges and currently there is no plan for doing so.
Another massive-scale ecological crisis is playing out in Mexico City, which is now sinking by approximately ten inches per year due to overdrawing of the groundwater. One of the world’s most sprawling and populated urban areas, at 3,000 square miles and some 22 million people, the Mexican capital and surrounding cities were built atop an ancient lakebed. Many downtown streets were once canals. The subsidence is causing historic buildings to tilt and damaging critical infrastructure such as the subway, drainage system, potable water system, housing and streets.
Forty-three percent of the 22 million residents face chronic water shortages but there is no current plan for reducing groundwater withdrawal, recharging the aquifer, or relocating the millions of people.
Homo Sapiens is a hard-headed species, but Nature bats last. We are the first generations to face stark limits to growth and even the necessity of degrowth in many areas. The Latin definition of Homo Sapiens is “wise man”. As I head back out for another stretch of back-breaking manual labor in my quest for a dust-free habitat, I will be holding the hope that one day my species may live up to our self-appointed label.
Note: For any fellow DIYers out there, here are a couple of vids tracking the progress of my yard transformation. Four 225-pound rolls of turf arrived yesterday, and I am now at the stage of wrestling those into the yard, cutting in the contours and flowerbeds, glueing the pieces together and staking them down. I’ll give an update on the final product in an upcoming post.
Here’s a vid of me tackling the dirt work.
Here is the spread out 12,500 pounds of ¼ minus gravel!
First chunks of turf dragged into the yard!
Every couple of years I get into a DIY project that is so big it leaves me crying at times and sort of laughing at myself through the tears. This turf project is one of the biggest but so far, I haven’t cried – fingers crossed!
You are Invited to a Live Conversation with Me and Marianne Williamson!
Tuesday, May 19th, at 11am Pacific, Marianne Williamson and I will be talking about politics, spirituality, and how to stay healthy and peaceful in these wild times. Hope many of you will join us!
Much Love,
Cylvia
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