accept our visual environment as inevitable
One of my greatest moral quarrels with American society is our obsession with grass. We build entire suburban societies around lawns. There is more land and more water devoted to grass in the United States than corn and wheat combined. The amount of grass we have could cover all of Italy. About 32% of residential drinking water is devoted to keeping non-native grasses alive.1
Yes, non-native. The grass that unfortunately lives in my yard, Bermuda, is from Africa. Kentucky Bluegrass, the most common type of lawn grass in the country, originates from Europe and the Middle East.
Lawns have a couple origin stories, so its not super clear how we got here. But it seems like some wealthy individuals back in the 1500s thought they could display their wealth by basically wasting a bunch of resources on growing acres of useless grass instead of planting something agricultural like most people did. 2
And, as is common throughout the course of history, people started to emulate the wealthy. It’s sort of like how Ikea copies fancy furniture design companies, or how Zara copies high fashion, or how wedding dresses are only white because some queen wore one.3
Sometimes the world feels a bit unchangeable. But it hasn’t always been this way.
If we zoom out a bit, we realize that mostly everything that exists around us was not there not so long ago, and pretty soon none of it will be there again. The issue with this is that while its a fun thought experiment, its not very practical, because most things at a cultural level take generations to shift.
And the static feeling of our environment can be discouraging. I know that we as Americans spend tens of billions of dollars on lawn maintenance every year, and that using a gas powered leaf blow for an hour has about the same carbon output as driving a Ford F150 from Los Angeles to New York City (how are these things even legal???), but I also know that if I don’t take care of the lawn I’ve inherited from other people’s status games, I have to pay a fine. 4
The status quo. The existing state of affairs. Things are the way things are because that’s how they are.
The world is full of this sort of thing. Many of our systems are the way they are not because thats the best way for them to be, but because that’s the first thing someone thought of an nobody has done the hard work of changing it. The act of changing a system is hard.
But we do have a level of agency over it. The problem is systems want to stay how they are. They resist change because friction keeps things from changing and systems are heavy and bulky and have a lot of friction.
The way things are is not an inevitability. Other things could’ve happened. But by chance, they didn’t.
But what if they did?
There’s a whole genre of speculative fiction known as alternative history. Generally, they change the outcome one or two big historical events, and it changes the course of history. It’s the butterfly effect.
An even more extreme version of this is Kcymaexthaere (don’t ask me how to pronounce it). Eames Demetrios, grandchild of Ray and Charles Eames, has created a fictional parallel reality without our actual reality. It’s a fascinating concept. They basically put different plaques around the world that mark historical sites that didn’t actually occur outside of the fictional world. 5
It’s a reminder that our world is not as inevitable as it seems. Things could’ve been and can be different.
As we create our vision for the future, both independently and for the society we all share, it seems like a good idea to challenge the status quo. Sometimes the way things are is great, but sometimes there are some significant improvements sitting right beneath the surface. The process of curating our lives helps us live more intentionally at the individual and the societal level and everything in between. Most of the time all it takes is acceptance of new perspectives, because diversity drives progress.