S3E7 GRASS
Transcript
DH: Dan Harvey
HA: Heather Ackroyd
ZT: Zdravka (Zee) Tzankova
JF: Jeremy French
JG: Jennifer Gutman
LK: Lutz Koepnick
+++++++++++++++++++++++
INTRO
JG:
In recent years, “go touch grass” has emerged as a low-grade insult and self-help directive for the chronically online. According to Urban Dictionary, “touch some grass” is “something you say when somebody is acting disconnected from the real-life world.”
“Go touch grass.”
In one meme, a screenshot depicts what someone does after being told to go touch grass—the image shows a finger touching a Google image result for “grass” on the screen. Another shows a close up of a patch of lawn framed by the words “Go on. Touch it”
The popularity of this Internet lingo is telling: we’re aware of the negative impacts of too much screen time as well as the benefits of spending time outdoors. Touching grass seems like a cure-all for our hypermediated times. But what are we actually touching when we’re touching grass?
On today’s episode of Art of Interference, we aren’t exactly touching grass, but we’re thinking with it—the forms that it has taken historically, how we understand it today, and how grass can serve as a medium for challenging the habitual and largely unseen norms that contribute to contemporary environmental crisis.
Grass is often reduced to the most mundane layer of ecological experience—the unremarkable grounds for a summer picnic or kickball game. But its persistent presence in our everyday lives is precisely why grass deserves our attention. Perhaps in attending to grass, we can rethink the critical role that it plays in our lives and planetary condition.
We will speak with artists and experts who work with grass, from the living grass portraits of Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey to the native grasslands studied at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. Along the way, we’ll consider the lawn as a symbol of national character and think about how rewilding our yards might also help to rewild our imaginations.
Part I: What is Grass?
LK:
So, Jen, probably no surprise to you, but I have to admit I’m not super familiar with the “go touch grass” Internet meme.
JG:
You know, I’ve seen it used a couple of times, but maybe it’s a good sign that we’ve never been personally directed to go touch grass before.
LK:
That’s true enough. But I want to return to your question, just what are we touching when we’re actually touching grass?
JG:
Right, I’ve been thinking about this a lot too. For me, the first image that comes to mind is what’s growing outside of my house. I was curious about what’s out there, and thanks to the trusty plant identification feature on my phone, I was able to identify some cool stuff. Apparently I’ve got white clover, hairy vetch, broad-leaf plantain, violet, dandelion, and my favorite, black-eyed Susan.
LK:
Well, that sounds lovely. But aren’t lawns usually more uniform than that? I’m thinking of the bright green lawns of my neighbor’s that look like they just got a fresh buzz-cut.
JG:
Yea, I know those lawns. And that’s a strong association for me too. And it makes sense. According to the National Association of Landscape Professionals, 81% of all Americans have a lawn and turfgrass is actually the largest irrigated crop in the country. It covers an estimated 40 million acres of land in the contiguous U.S.
LK:
Wow, that’s a lot.
JG:
Yea, and turfgrass is what we imagine when we imagine a typical residential lawn or perhaps even more vividly, a golf course. It’s the type of grass that’s been specifically cultivated to tolerate foot traffic and mowing. And it does really good in those conditions–it spreads and thickens and becomes the lush green carpet that we know of as lawns. And then of course there’s artificial turf, or AstroTurf, which is the synthetic simulacrum of turfgrass. And that was invented in 1965 by none other than Monsanto and it was originally marketed as ChemGrass.
LK:
I have a bunch of thoughts about Monsanto but I’m not going to go down this road right now. But I guess their AstroTurf is what makes a lot of kids soccer possible, but not really what you need to truly play the beautiful game.
JG:
True enough. But the turfgrass and artificial turf industries in America do have deep roots. I was reading an essay by Ted Steinberg called “American Green,” and he talks about how in the colonial era, American diplomats returned from their travels to the grand estates of European aristocrats with a new affliction: lawn envy.
LK:
Lawn envy, huh?
JG:
Yea, they were apparently enamored by the great lawns of English manors and thought that modeling these landscapes they could somehow escape their reputation in the mother country as rough-hewn and unkempt. But in the process, the lawn’s symbolic value was transformed in the process–rather than represent elite nobility, American lawns became an extension of democratic ideals and values.
LK:
That’s really interesting. Kind of reminds me of Michael Pollan’s essay “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns.” Have you read that?
JG:
Yes, I love that piece!
LK:
I’m thinking of the following quote, when Pollan says:
“The American lawn is an egalitarian conceit, implying that there is no reason to hide behind fence or hedge since we all occupy the same middle class. We are all property owners here, the lawn announces, and that suggests its other purpose: to provide a suitably grand stage for the proud display of one’s own house.”
JG:
Yea, and, you know, that’s debatable–the details of that quote. But it brings up an interesting point, and when I think about the history of the American lawn, I think about how in the Great Depression, yards really served the utilitarian function of farming and food-production. But certainly by the postwar period and the economic boom of that era, lawns signaled the achievement of the so-called American Dream. In planned communities like Levittown, for example, every home came with a lawn and every homeowner was expected to abide by certain mowing regulations in order to create a uniform look to the community.
LK:
There must be all sorts of regulations out there that enforce norms around mowing, from the time of day you can mow to how high you can let your grass grow. In such environments, lawncare can start to feel more like a punishable mandate than a household chore.
JG:
Definitely. And these strict regulations have an environmental cost. I recently spoke with Zee Tzankova, associate professor of the practice in climate and environmental studies at Vanderbilt, about this.
ZT:
Subdivisions and developments that have homeowners associations and this private governance tend to have more intensive yardscaping practices, partly because HOA rules require certain standard of lawn care, and they enforce it. And that was very disturbing to me as a social scientist who’s concerned about social and economic justice and environmental justice moving forward together because HOAs and these gated communities and subdivisions, which are one of the fastest growing housing segments in the US, are a way to kind of opt out and build a wall around yourself and your family.
JG:
In order to achieve the Platonic ideal of the pristine American lawn, local conditions must be overridden through aggressive applications of pesticides and herbicides.
ZT:
Affluent, well-educated, pro-environmental homeowners or renters are willingly exposing themselves to the herbicides and pesticides that are mixed with lawn fertilizers that you could get from Lowe’s or Home Depot, et cetera. And we’re doing this, and maybe we’re doing it partly unwittingly, but it is a voluntary act of chemical exposure, which is ironic. It’s like, oh, rich people are nuking themselves, and their pets, and their kids.
LK:
Wow, that’s a truly powerful image.
JG:
Yea, it is! And it all comes back to the strong social and cultural associations that the American lawn has taken on, like conformity, civic pride, and national character. But as Zee points out, the symbolic draw of pristine lawns didn’t come out of a vacuum–it has been intentionally constructed by corporations that stand to benefit.
ZT:
Lawns seem like a pretty unique part of American culture and aesthetic, but when you’re thinking about larger structural patterns that produced our really toxic, water intensive, and socially and environmentally unsound approach to managing our yards, it was not a bunch of people suddenly deciding that grass is cool.
I came across this AstroTurf group called RISE, which is Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment. It was established in 1991, and it’s an affiliate of CropLife America, which is an agricultural chemical industry association that defends the interests of the industry. And this RISE and other industry groups are reframing yard care, saying like, “This is about safety from pests. This is about families.” And if you look at their website, it is very Orwellian, in my mind, like knowing the impacts of pesticides and then you see the RISE website, and it sounds like it’s just the most amazing idea in the world, and they’re helping everybody live a better life.
There is a distinct industry and a distinct set of industry corporate players that benefit from the current, status quo of intensively managed lawns. So yeah, it’s like everything else, this calls for a more structural solution. But there is room for culture change and trying to figure out how we could collectively work our way outside of this aesthetic.
LK:
So lawns are primarily an aesthetic–rather than an ecological–problem?
JG:
Well, perhaps they’re an ecological issue as much as an aesthetic one. A writer named Giovanni Aloi wrote that lawns are “the grave of biodiversity.” Modern, treated lawns are essentially wastelands, and they’re a hugely extractive and resource-depleting industry. But I think what Zee is saying is that a main lever for change as we approach this issue has to be aesthetic or cultural. We have to train our eyes to see and appreciate lawns differently before meaningful change will occur. This is a job for ecologists, sure, but it’s also one for artists.
Part II: Ackroyd + Harvey
JG:
You know, Lutz, I learned recently that some of the greatest strides in modern art have revolved around the subject of grass.
LK:
I am quite certain you are not referring to great soccer places using a perfect pitch to display their athletic beauty. It’s probably more about artists like Édouard Manet, right? His masterpiece, “The Luncheon on the Grass,” which scandalized the 19th-century Parisian art world by translating mythological tropes to everyday modern settings on the grass.
JG:
Yea, precisely. And maybe it’s surprising when great artists make grass the subject of their work because it’s so mundane, so ordinary.
LK:
Most of the time, don’t we just walk and spread picnic blankets on grass without thinking twice about the complex ecosystems underfoot, let alone imagine it on the walls of the Musée d’Orsay.
JG:
As movements in land- and eco-art grow, though, it’s become more common to see grass used as a subject for art. And for British visual artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, grass serves as a medium in its own right.
HA:
Hello, we are Ackroyd and Harvey, and I’m Heather Ackroyd.
DH:
And my name’s Dan Harvey.
HA:
And we are artists. We work within visual media, although our work we would probably describe as being interdisciplinary because we move through many different areas of interest.
JG:
In 1989, Heather and Dan were brought together through their respective appreciation of grass as a medium for art.
DH:
I was working with a gallery in Soho in London and had works of art that were casting figures in grass roots, and Heather had a show on at the ICA in London.
HA:
I was directing and devising a performance with a group of fellow artists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and that involved growing this huge kind of carpet of grass that transformed this barren garden into this beautiful, lush idyll.
DA:
One of the first pieces I did was an old Bible that I found outside Cardiff Prison and it was rotting and starting to return to the soil. And I just introduced grass seed between the pages of the Bible, opened at the Parable of the Sowing of the Seed, and the grass consumed the book.
HA:
My introduction to working with grass was inspired by a well-known artist called David Nash. And I was part of a small field study of students who went to visit his studio and his land. He’d just planted the ash dome, this large circle of ash trees. And it just really struck me that you could work with living plant material as a sculptural material. And I started to work with grass, growing it in such a way without using sod or soil so that I could sort of use it as this almost fabric, this sort of living material that had a sensuousness to it.
LK:
Experimenting with the sensuous materiality of grass would serve as an operating principle in Dan and Heather’s celebrated collaborative work, which spans almost four decades and has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and international public spaces.
DH:
The first work that Heather and I did together was in a village in Northern Italy that was an artist community occupied in the ’60s, and we had use of a big vaulted ceiling room space. We had the idea to grow this in a chamber with seeds. So we literally covered the walls with a, um, very special sort of mix of a very sticky clay base into which we pushed the seed and then watered the whole space.
We had one halogen lamp and a very large window at one end of this big vaulted room, and this very strange curved ladder we left in the space leaning against the wall. And when we actually later during the exhibition we moved the ladder, we became aware that its shadow had imprinted in the wall in yellow grass, and that started us to think, well, perhaps there was some way that one could develop this as a photographic process.
HA:
And so when Dan and I observed this yellow imprint, we weren’t going, “Oh, the grass has been, uh, starved of light, and therefore it hasn’t produced chlorophyll.” You know, we weren’t thinking that way. But I do remember that evening, we both had this complete elevation and excitement because I think we realized that we had stumbled onto something really, really profoundly, and potentially very important.
And in fact, the following year, we were invited to a group exhibition where we were working in this kind of decaying, huge, former entertainment palace near Lille in northern France. And we occupied what had been the former caretaker’s apartment. And, you know, as Dan was saying, we were really playful. We were just coming out with so many ideas and we decided to try and do one of these photosynthesis works in the end room of the caretaker’s apartment. And we thought, “Look, if it doesn’t work, we’ll just close the door, and nobody will be any the wiser.”
JG:
Heather and Dan are best known for their photosynthesis portraits, a process that they’ve pioneered by experimenting with the light sensitivity of chlorophyll. They create large-scale, photo-realistic portraits on living grass that resemble actual photographs except the black and white scale is rendered in various shades of green.
HA:
Scale really works for us because we have suddenly, you know, hundreds of thousands if not millions of seeds that we’re working with, all pushing out the blade, and each blade is waiting for that photon of light to hit it so that it can split the water molecule, release the oxygen, make the starch, and produce the chlorophyll. You know, chlorophyll has evolved completely in relationship to light. It’s a semi-magical pigment, and scientists still do not understand quite what is happening on a biochemical level when that water molecule is split, which we find really, really fascinating.
And we have made this discovery, but we often discuss it as almost a collaboration with the plant material. I mean, I have learnt so much through this relationship. You know, Dan and I collaborate together as artists. The material that drew us together was grass, but the medium that really binds us is chlorophyll.
DH:
What it is with the grass is that it is so light-sensitive. If it was any less light-sensitive or more light-sensitive, it would be impossible to do these prints that are equivalent to a black and white photograph but in tones of dark green to an acid vibrant yellow. So they have this very hyper-realistic quality to them. I suppose each blade is a bit like a pixel. So especially when we do the larger pieces, the definition and the quality in the image is astounding.
HA:
The image is manifesting on a molecular level in the blades of grass. Nothing is being laid upon, placed upon. It’s happening through the activation of water and warmth. Those are all the seed needs initially. It doesn’t even need light. You can grow grass in the dark, and it will grow as long as it has the warmth and the water. But in fact, it’s bright yellow. It’s called chlorastic. So there are pigments which are non-light dependent, which are giving the grass its color.
LK:
These molecular effects are ultimately fleeting. In time, the images they conjure are subject to the same processes of age and decay that afflicts grass and humans alike.
DH:
To exhibit the works, unless we’re doing a very short-lived day or three-day event, then we tend to grow the pieces and nurture them, and then we have to put that whole process into reverse and suck the moisture out and dry the pieces. And in a dried state, we’ve exhibited pieces for easily over a year. Chlorophyll is a natural pigment. So if we were to exhibit them in a living state with a lot of light on them, the yellow grass will start to green up. Once we dry them, if we exhibit them with a lot of light on them, then the green grass will start to go yellow. So you’re always trying to hold this sort of very finite line of these images that are almost like a mirage, but they’re there and they will fade over time unless you keep them in very low light levels, and then they can last.
JG:
In works like Dear Earth, which features portraits of London-based climate activists, the subjects stare out at you like time travelers from our own disturbed present, imploring viewers to act before it’s too late. The contrast between the light-enabled and light-deprived grasses seems to suggest something of our own vital yet depleted planetary condition.
HA:
The portraiture, uh, is very, very moving because, you know, we know that our time and lives on this planet, if we’re really, really lucky, we may live 100 years, but we’re looking on average, you know, 80-plus years, which in the bigger, bigger, big scheme of things is just a infitesimal time really. But it’s a cherished time, and we hold huge sentiment for our families, for our friends, for our extended relations. And somehow just holding the portraiture in the grass is very poignant because we can hold it, and we can conserve it. But we also know if there’s too much light, the image will start to bleach out. We have to really, really protect these pieces almost on a conservation level to keep showing and displaying them
Interference: Grasslands
LK:
Jen, I don’t mean to disrupt this conversation with Ackroyd and Harvey, but can I add something here?
JG:
Sure, Lutz, what’s on your mind?
LK:
Well, Heather’s point about conserving their grass portraits makes me wonder how all of this relates to grass as an ecosystem, and one that is under considerable threat.
JG:
I’m really glad you’re bringing this up, Lutz. I was wondering the same thing while putting this episode together. Heather and Dan’s art uses grass to convey messages about ecological crisis. But grass is itself an ecosystem in crisis. To get a better sense of this, I spoke with Jeremy French, Chief of Ecological Restoration at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute in Clarksville, Tennessee.
JF:
My main role is not only geared towards planting flowers on landscape. We do a lot of that—that’s an important thing. But really it’s about uplifting the need for grassland conservation in the east to a national, state, and regional level.
Our team goes where the grasslands are. And it’s about returning things to the landscape, you know, like the species that have been lost, and trying to help people remember what the land has never forgotten. These grasslands were here for hundreds of thousands and in some cases, millions of years—old growth ecosystems. And really in the past 100 to 200 years, we’ve watched 99% of them disappear in front of our face. And even today we’re watching them fail and disappear at an alarming rate.
LK:
Hm, old growth ecosystems. We’re not talking about forests, here, are we?
JG:
No. Jeremy enlightened me to the existence of old-growth grasslands–sounds kind of oxymoronic, right?
LK:
Right–I can’t help but associate grass with the new: new growth, new life, the turnover of a new season.
JG:
I see what you mean. But when it comes to grasslands, apparently centuries worth of life might be stored in the least conspicuous field.
JF:
If we go into a high quality prairie site, let’s say in Tennessee or a savanna, it took that ecosystem hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to assemble. And the flowers in that ecosystem, oftentimes individuals can live to be hundreds of years. Now, that takes a deeper level of scientific understanding and nuance for the general public because most people going up through grade school, they learn how if you cut down a tree, you can count the rings and, you know, tell how old that tree is. Can’t really do that with flowers. But a lot of these flowers are extremely, extremely old, and the diversity pales in comparison.
LK:
Wow, 100-year old flowers. Who knew?
JG:
Yea, you probably wouldn’t want to pick those!
LK:
No. So how do we know these old-growth grasslands when we see them? Is there anything that differentiates them from an ordinary meadow or grassy field?
JG:
It’s a great question, and one I had myself–what exactly are grasslands? What are their defining features and main ecological players? To help me understand, Jeremy offered a quote from Elder Reuben Ross, an early settler to the northern Nashville basin area.
JF:
And he wrote in his diaries… I’m gonna paraphrase this ’cause I haven’t read it in a while, but something to the effect of, “And here is where I met the prairie or barren hen, where the strawberries grew in such profusion that they would stain the hooves of our horses and bellies a deep red.” And what he’s referencing there is these giant grasslands in Tennessee that had prairie chickens on it. Now, if you ask most people about prairie chickens, they’d be like, “I don’t even know what that is.” But it’s a grassland bird that now mostly lives in the West. And referencing this deep profusion of wildflowers and wild berries, so much so that it would stain the horses red.
LK:
Prairie chickens and mega strawberries? Not what I typically encounter on a walk around Nashville.
JG:
Right–so much of what once defined our regional grasslands has been phased out. But it’s precisely these heirloom species that the Southeastern Grasslands Institute is working to restore.
JF:
When I think of the charismatic megaflora of these grasslands, grasses are a mainstay. You know, species like big bluestem and little bluestem and Indian grass are these charismatic soil holders that are ever present on our grasslands. And each one has this distinct color. Like little bluestem is this kinda short-ish grass. It’s about, you know, to your hip high, and in the summer and spring it has this lightish teal blue tint to it. Like, I can pick it out from 100 yards away usually. And then as you transition to fall and in the winter, it turns almost purplish. Like this beige purple on the landscape. It’s stunning, to me at least. And then intermixed with that, as I look out my window in my office right now where we have grassland, I’m looking at things like butterfly milkweed blooming, that’s this deep red-orange profusion intermixed with all these browns and greens of native grasses.
LK:
So what happened, here? What’s the story behind the astronomical disappearance of these native ecosystems?
JG:
Unfortunately, it’s about what you’d expect: colonialism, extraction, unchecked development. I’ll let Jeremy walk us through it.
JF:
Settling the East started degrading these grasslands before we can study many of them, ’cause, you know, as soon as you get to a place, you need to start grazing. The non-native critters graze differently than bison, but also overgrazing, right? It’s not a natural amount of grazing. Early Euro-American settlers removed fire from the landscape very quickly, and in some cases they overburn the landscape at the same time. So there was this dysregulation very early on that then as we moved west and as the country began being built, the first places that were turned into cotton fields, crop fields, they were all prairies. For a long time it was thought that that was accidental. But in the research of historical documents, we can tell that the early farmers were paying 10X more for prairie land for farming than any adjacent lands, which tells us they knew that these prairies were extremely fertile. So we saw vast amounts of the eastern grasslands destroyed by, you know, 1900s through agro conversion and overgrazing.
JG:
The depletion of grasslands only accelerated in modern times.
JF:
You continue to fast-forward, building cities becomes a huge problem. Nashville was a giant grassland historically called French Lick. And now it’s a giant city. As we continue to move forward, these landscapes get fragmented, and fragmented, and smaller, and smaller, and they are still under quite a bit of pressure largely from development, climate change, mismanagement.
And one of the long-term things that has imperiled these grasslands is the misunderstanding and the mischaracterization that the eastern US was all one giant forest. That was a sentiment that was held largely even in the scientific community until about a decade ago. And so we’re, you know, 200 years behind other conservation movements because people just didn’t know. We were wrong as the scientific community. And it’s taken people like Dr. Reed Noss out of the University of Florida, who published the book Forgotten Grasslands of the South, to really bring that to light.
I’m a very optimistic person, I promise. But what we’re faced with, if we look at it from a reality standpoint, is we are watching ecosystem collapse happen. It’s been happening for a long time, but we’re at this point now where sites that were relatively stable even 30 years ago, because of climate change are becoming unstable. And what I mean by that is it’s not so much the climate changing that is impacting those sites, but what we’re seeing is increased amounts of people leaving coastal areas and moving inland, which is exponentially increasing the rate at which these sites are being developed, and we’re just watching them just disappear off of the landscape left and right.
LK:
This sure sounds bleak, Jen. But surely a place like the Grasslands Institute wouldn’t exist unless something could be done about it.
JG:
Right. People like Jeremy who are on the frontlines of restoring critical habitats like grasslands still seem to have a pretty well-informed hope for the future.
JF:
I truly believe that the future of our species is tied to the biodiversity of the landscape, and these grasslands are the most biodiverse ecosystems on the landscape. And if we want to create a resilient future for our kids and our grandkids it comes hand in hand with restoring, and stabilizing, and rebuilding lost grasslands.
Part III: Windows in Time
JG:
In his 2014 graphic novel Here, Richard McGuire depicts a corner of a room through deep time. The book opens in 2014. The living room is plain, unpopulated, ordinary. As the book progresses, we see this same room as it was at different points in history. With each turning page, panels from different time periods crowd into the living room backdrop—a bison from 10,000 BCE appears next to a woman from 1970 lying down next to it. In 1964, a woman plays piano, but superimposed outtakes from a moment in 1990 show a group of friends sitting on the couch, laughing at a joke. A woman in a pink dress from 1957 stares off into a forest from 1623, before the house was built. A black cat from 1999 appears in the bottom right corner, licking their paw.
LK:
Heather and Dan’s living grass portraits can have a similarly destabilizing effect on our sense of place, of time, can’t they? Take, for instance, their installation for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The installation features two large-scale portraits of an intergenerational family unit—Uncle Charles ‘Chicka’ Madden, a widely respected Gadigal Elder, and his granddaughter, Lille Madden, an environmental and First Nations activist. The portraits offer a full-body view of their subjects standing at five meters—or about 16 and a half feet—high.
JG:
Set against the stately marble columns of the gallery, the rectangular portraits remind me of McGuire’s graphic experiments with room corners, superimposing panels from different times to give a sense of space as a complexly occupied plane of experience. And I don’t think this association is unwarranted. When I spoke with Heather and Dan about these pieces, they seemed to be thinking deeply about occupied territory and the layered experience of time and space in their work.
HA:
The history of the British arriving into Australia is a fresher, younger history than, for example, in North America or Canada. And it somehow feels very, very tangible. So I think we felt it’s very important if we could open up a collaboration, a discussion, a contact with Indigenous people who have heritage, ancestry within that land prior to the colonizers. And the team at the Biennale, through that process, introduced us to Lille.
DH:
What drew us to Lille was the fact that she was a very young, very strong activist fighting anti-fracking movements in Australia. Part of a young group called the Seed Mob who are trying to preserve indigenous seeds.
HA:
And when we asked Lille, this was a Zoom conversation we had, when she said, “Yes, I’d be very happy to work with you. I’d be very happy for you to work with me for the portrait.” We asked, “Who inspires you?” And she mentioned her grandparents, and she mentioned Uncle Chicka. And we said, “Do you think he may be open for a conversation?” She said, “I’ll ask,” and he was.
JG:
When Heather and Dan arrived in Sydney, the city was still coming out of lockdown. The prospect of occupying physical space together felt risky and delicate for reasons that felt distinct to the present.
HA:
We met up with Lille and Uncle Chicka for a coffee, and they were delightful, very funny. And we said to Uncle Chicka, “Okay, we want to do these monumental portraits, full-length figures so that as people come into the Art Gallery of New South Wales, there is this sense of these sentinels, these figures towering over.”
We said, “is there a place where you think or feel you could take us to, introduce us to somewhere?” And Uncle Chicka said yes, and he told us to check out the land by Sydney Harbour Bridge. And when Dan and I arrived, it was a hill. It was quite steep, and there were cannons from the British, the old cannons. And we thought, “God, why are we here?” And then we saw this low wall at the brow of the hill, and, you know, Dan and I stood on it and we were taking pictures of each other, the sky was behind, and we just thought, “Absolutely, this is a really, really incredible place to make these photographs.”
LK:
The aesthetic appeal of the location was matched by its historical significance.
HA:
When Lille and Uncle Chicka arrived, Uncle Chicka said, “The first boats arrived through this estuary. The first colonizers arrived in this estuary.” And, so that moment and that place was really, really important, and that was offered to us through that conversation.
JG:
This sense of historical tenuousness–the contact between the new and old world, the threat of this colonizing presence to Indigenous lifeways–comes through the portraits themselves. The contrasting green hues of the living grass canvases convey a sense that these images are both vividly present and very old, like unearthed archival objects whose surfaces have re-wilded.
LK:
When exhibited together, Lille and Uncle Chicka’s portraits seem to suggest something of the handing off of a generational responsibility to preserve the region’s ancestral history and its ecological relations. They kind of stand as a reminder of the iterative, non-linear nature of social struggle and the fight for liberatory conditions that would benefit people and planet alike.
JG:
While Heather and Dan feature people whose advocacy and activism they admire, their artistic practice is also political in a number of ways. They are themselves environmental activists, co-founding Culture Declares Emergency in 2019 as a way of organizing individuals and organizations in arts and culture to fight the climate crisis. But more than organize artists to act on behalf of the environment, Ackroyd and Harvey see art as a means of creating meaningful change.
HA:
I think the necessity to bring our beautiful Earth and the planet into the center of the cultural landscape is really, really important.
DH:
I know with some of the visual images that we’ve produced, you’ve seen them on the front page of certain newspapers and things, and that’s purely because they are lovely images to look at. And science maybe at times doesn’t carry that same sort of potency
HA:
Arts and culture can speak through all manner of different visceral responses that we hold. I love data. Many people do, but at the same time, you know, I love smell, I love the tactile, I love sound. I love my imagination being excited, and it has been shown that art has a possibility to actually bring people around who are perhaps a denialist around the climate or contrarian, or perhaps were sitting on the fence.
Part IV: Solutions
JG:
In her essay, “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass,” Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses the ancestral teaching that, and I quote, “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away” (159). Sweetgrass has evolved in tandem with human beings and thus rely on human harvesting to thrive. Kimmerer writes: “Humans participate in a symbiosis in which sweetgrass provides its fragrant blades to the people and people, by harvesting, create the conditions for sweetgrass to flourish” (160).
LK:
It’s misguided then to think that grass would be better off if we left it alone completely, even while there’s a need to stop the chemically-intensive ways we treat grass today.
JG:
I want to bring Jeremy French from the Southeastern Grasslands Institute back in because this interdependence is an important principle when thinking about grasslands conservation.
JF:
Grassland ecology is human ecology. Grasslands literally built the southeast. The number one trees that were used for maritime stores at the time were longleaf pines, a savanna tree. Many of the trees that built the actual infrastructure of the southeast were shortleaf pines, a savanna tree. Many of the industries that are built sitting here in Tennessee and Kentucky around the bourbon and whiskey industry of white oak barrels, those are savanna trees. And so this long history and culture is our human ecology here in the east. We are tied to these grasslands, and they can’t exist without us anymore. They need our help. And so it’s this beautiful and devastating thing at the same time, where we are connected to these landscapes. And while we always say within the team here, that the land doesn’t forget. We forget. We get removed from the land, we forget all types of things. We have forgotten how tied to these grasslands we really are from a cultural, spiritual, or a scientific way.
LK:
That’s really amazing. I had no idea how integral grasslands were to our way of life here in the South. But it raises the question: how can we actually remember something we didn’t know we forgot?
JG:
According to Jeremy, a good place to start might be getting involved with local conservation efforts and visiting grasslands themselves.
JF:
It’s easy to think of those landscapes as those weeds over there. The moment that I can walk with somebody through a grassland, it shifts their entire perspective.
When we restore an ag field or even a pasture, within two or three years, there are millions and millions of new life forms utilizing that site. I think about one of the sites that I restored for Google in Clarksville about five years ago. It was an ag field, relatively desolate place. You know, you see the same kind of generalist species use it. There’ll be some deer and turkeys walking through the ag field. Two years after restoring it, we were doing bumblebee surveys, and there’s a species of bumblebee that’s been extirpated from seven states. It’s called the American bumblebee. We caught hundreds of them in, like, an hour. It’s the dominant species out there that did not exist there when it was an agricultural field. We’ve seen species like meadow jumping mice, a very rare small mammal, return to the prairie. We’ve seen otters return to the prairie. We’ve seen species like prairie king snakes, which is a grassland snake, return to the prairie. And all that says to me is that we can rebuild these landscapes. It just takes time and elevating the need for the funding to do so.
LK:
Restoring grasslands is considerable but also really admirable work. And I’m glad to know there are places like the Southeastern Grasslands Institute devoting so much time and attention to it. But there’s got to be more that we can do outside of restoring old-growth grasslands, right?
JG:
Right. You know, I think it’s probably best we leave that to the experts. But in the meantime, there’s so much that can be done even in our own backyards.
LK:
You know, I’ve been hearing a lot from friends and neighbors who are working to re-wild their yards. They’re tearing up sod to replant it with wildflowers and pollinators. We’ve tried something in our front yard as well–ripping out the lawn that sort of existed in a rather miserable state there for many years because we didn’t water it right, and we replaced all that with native plants, flowers, bushes. It’s beautiful.
JG:
That does sound really nice. I’ve been impatiently waiting for the wildflower bed that I planted last fall to come into bloom. Apparently it could take two years.
I spoke with Z about how these practices move us away from lawncare as it’s traditionally been understood and into something more like yardscaping.
ZT:
On the one hand, I’m really heartened by this, like, bottom-up, what can we do as individuals? Because in some ways, individual actions are often insufficient to comprehensively change problematic patterns of production, consumption, land use, doing things. But at the same time, when we’re talking about lawns, we’re talking about the need to change a culture and an aesthetic that is very widely adopted, this idea of a pristine lawn.
In terms of things that any individual could do and try to persuade their neighbors to do, things like No Mow May, and ideas of, like, mowing the grass to just a higher height of grass or, like, not mowing as low, are accessible practices that have, some pretty well-understood benefits.
LK:
No Mow May. I have tried it more than once and not just because I might have been a little lazy. I think it’s a really good strategy to address things. The tiny little area that we have left of grass at our house isn’t a good area to practice this because there isn’t much to mow in the first place. But I see a lot of neighbors doing this and I’m really encouraging them to just let their lawnmowers inside the shed for the month of May. It’s also wonderful for the soundscape of the city.
JG:
I’ve tried No May May, too, but there always comes a time around mid-month where you are just so tempted to get the lawnmower out. But then you do have to stop and think, you know, mowing only benefits me superficially–it makes my yard easier to navigate, maybe, or look neater to passers-by. But not mowing has so many more meaningful benefits for the health of plants and pollinators.
LK:
And your lawn just looks so much more diverse and wild and in so many ways surprising. You find things that you never expected there. I love to walk around the neighborhood and just look at these No May lawns and discover all kinds of things you would never find otherwise.
JG:
Yea, they’re really beautiful.
LK:
But can one lawn–can a couple of lawns in the neighborhood–really make any difference?
JG:
It is a good question, and one that Zee also addressed.
ZT:
Right now in the US, publicly-minded progressive city council people have their hands tied if they wanted to restrict pesticide sale and use in their jurisdiction because of state preemption. So is there a case to be made for private governance, like community associations, like some level of more grassroots mobilization where we make and enforce rules for ourselves outside of the public policy process so we don’t run afoul of state preemption to do things differently? But that’s different than individual action, because we’re talking about people mobilizing together, because we all know, like I don’t spray, but if my neighbor does, you know, it affects everybody, and it goes into the water drainage, et cetera. And not finger-pointing either, because nobody likes to be yelled at. It took me 20 years in the field to realize nobody likes to be told they’re wrong. People like a good conversation and to figure out what can we do better, how can we do better.
LK:
It certainly gives new meaning to the word grassroots, doesn’t it?
JG:
Yes, it does. For meaningful change in our backyards, I guess we have to imagine how we’re all ecologically connected, despite whatever walls or fences we might put up.
LK:
Yea, I like that idea. And in the hands of artists like Ackroyd and Harvey, grass can remind us of a deeper, biochemical connection that we share with all forms of life.
DH:
I think grasses are the most amazing of plants. I mean, without them, most of the food crops that we have here, the corns, the rice and things wouldn’t be here. Also photosynthesis, without it, we wouldn’t have life as we know it on this planet. It’s a fact that plants can trap that sunlight, can convert it, gives us the food that we eat or the food that most life sort of consumes is all because of the fact of photosynthesis.
JG:
There’s something comforting about this idea, paring all of the complexities of the world down to the basic building blocks of life.
LK:
The elements, right? Comforting but also humbling. It shows us how we’re not so different from the buzzing, crawling things in our backyard that we may try desperately to keep out or get rid of.
JG:
And it makes me wonder: What if we invited them in and recognized them as extensions of the same simple necessities–light, air, water?
LK:
I guess we may be inspired to mow a little less.
JG:
And we might even be inspired to go out and touch some grass.
LK:
Hm, that’s sounding like a pretty good idea right now. Do you want to go offline and touch some grass, Jen?
JG:
Yea, sure, Lutz. Let’s go.