One boomer was remarking about the rabbits and squirrels in their yard. The rabbits are there because we no longer have foxes because the boomers poison their yards. The squirrels are a food source for our at-risk birds of prey, while their ecological role spreading plant seeds adds to biodiversity and landscape regeneration in important ways. She called them "vile little creatures" and wished there was a way to kill them all.
The other's yard was 90% dedicated to Kentucky bluegrass. Purely ornamental, green concrete that's too poisonous for the rabbits to eat despite their effort. When I arrived she was pulling clover out of the only garden bed. When I left an hour later, she was still pulling cover out and asked if I could spray the bed with glyphosate to kill them. I said she might want to keep that species because it's important for pollinators and adds to the health of the soil for her other flowers. She opted for a $150 glyphosate treatment which makes the ground carcinogenic and takes two weeks to work.
I fucking hate these people. I hate their settler-colonialism toward nature, their sociopathic need for domination, and their utter tastelessness once they've achieved that domination at the expense of every other species that once lived in that yard. In this desert these deranged freaks will spend thousands of dollars per year to preserve their lawns. The violence behind their bullshit community fetish is only ignored because their neighbours are worse.
Before their lot was developed, it would have been classified as oak scrubland: https://thenaturecollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Overview_Quercus-dumosa1.jpg
When I as someone transitioning into ecology look at that, I see it in terms of available niches and energy transfer. In a habitat that rich you're talking hundreds of roles for life to carve out and untold numbers of calories for them. A very fragile highland ecosystem where their other migration options involve fewer calories and places to hide. To develop that plot is violence. It's displacing the wildlife that aren't eradicated, and like humans you can only displace them so far before they're no longer able to meet their needs. But now they have their plot and its 5 species of allowable plants, only one of them native. So the insects/animals that evolved to consume those native plants in abundance find a few shitty ornamental specimens. If they consume them, they're poisoned by the herbicides and insecticides used to protect the ornamental value. That starvation is violence even if the insects and animals aren't poisoned. Then you get the inputs. 4lbs of nitrogen per 1000 square feet of turf, and it goes straight to the water table where it gives us algae blooms and Lou-Gehrig's Disease: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-algae-blooms-linked-to-lou-gehrig-s-disease/ . Broadleaf herbicides that target whatever are the non-carcinogenic treatment option, but they don't do anything to control weeds longterm either so you have to poison it 5x a year every year. Insecticides help temporarily control the numerous species of destructive mites and beetles, the only life the lawn supports. The nitrogen and phosphorus used to fertilise the lawn is agricultural-grade and are specifically the kinds we're desperately short of.
If for all the effort and poison that lawn looks beautiful, nobody but you can use it. You can't risk to damage it, it's your property and carefully cultivated domain, the world is a threat to it. Its existence is deprivation of habitat, calories, resources, and space to everything except you. The prestige value of an aristocrat shouting "look how much land I don't need to farm" to starving peasants with their lawn is translated into modern systems of expansionary colonialism as we destroy undervalued habitats for overvalued housing. Fuck lawns to death.
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Hmm, that's interesting I didn't know the connection to ALS.
I think that might still be regarded as correlative but like hell am I keen to find out how causative it is. Of course these lawns have storm drains emptying into rivers right outside of them.