We need to get rid of outmoded regulations on lawns. There’s a growing movement to restore native plants to our yards, and they have many virtues.

Homeowners with native gardens from Florida and Maryland to Missouri and Kentucky have gotten slapped with fines or even have their yards mowed without permission. The reason – taller native plants can get mistaken for weeds. Many cities don’t allow weeds to grow above a certain height, and they don’t have the time or staff to find out what’s what. But native plants have a lot of benefits for the planet. For one, they keep the land cooler. Indiana University biology professor Heather Reynolds says they use heat from their environment to pull water up from the soil and out their leaves.

That got me wondering…how do we define weeds? Is big bluestem ( Andropogon gerardi) a “weed”? That stuff grows to be 8 feet tall with roots diving down 10 feet — it was the native grass that grew all over the region I’m living in, which has since been mostly replaced by corn, which also grows to be 8 feet tall, but has much more shallow roots. Is corn a weed? I live in one of those cities that defines “weeds” by their height. The city of Morris has defined 8 inches as the acceptable height for plants in our yards.

SEC. 10.21. MAINTENANCE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Subd. 1. It is the primary responsibility of any owner or occupant of any lot or
parcel of land to maintain any weeds or grass growing thereon at a height of not more than eight
(8”) inches (except for native grasses and wildflowers indigenous to Minnesota, planted and
maintained on any occupied lot or parcel of land, set back a minimum of ten (10’) feet from the
front property line as part of a garden or landscape treatment, which are exempt from being no
more than 8”); to remove all public health or safety hazards therefrom; to install or repair water
service lines upon any property which is improved with commercial or habitable structures; and
to treat or remove insect-infested or diseased trees thereon. It shall also be unlawful for any such
person or persons to cause, suffer or allow noxious weeds or plants identified and defined by the
Minnesota Department of Agriculture to grow on any such lot or parcel of land so as to endanger
the health, safety and welfare of the City.

I’m pleased with the exemption for native plants, as long as they’re not too close to the front of the property, but I’d like to see a different standard. Let’s call Kentucky bluegrass a weed. Let’s condemn any lawn that is too uniform, that doesn’t support species diversity, that is lacking in flowers to support pollinators.

Who needs a privacy fence when your lawn is made up of grasses and forbs climbing up above window height? Think of all the interesting insects and spiders you’ll get, too, and the birds that will thrive in that environment. It might be a problem when the bison come back and start migrating through your yard, but I think that would be amazing. (Sorry, can’t come in to work today, I’ve got a small herd of a few thousand bison blocking my driveway.)

Tomorrow, we go on a field trip to the UMM EcoStation.

Today, I suffer with an Achilles tendon flare-up — I have nasty bone spurs on my heels that sometimes stab my tendon, triggering inflammation, and I’m reduced to hobbling about. I’m still going! I may end up just sitting under a tree and looking at ground spiders, while the students range about. It’ll still be good.

Right now, it’s ibuprofen and ice.

Morris, Minnesota has won a prize!

The Morris Model team was recently notified that they were among 67 winners in the first phase of the $6.7 million Energizing Rural Communities Prize. The competition was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is focused on supporting innovative partnership and finance plans to help rural or remote communities develop clean energy demonstration projects.

The Morris Model will receive a $100,000 prize, in-kind-mentorship services, and eligibility to compete for another $200,000.

This prize, managed by DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), challenges individuals and organizations to develop partnership and financing strategies that support community-driven energy improvement projects in rural or remote communities.  The Morris Model Partnership seeks to make Morris a model rural sustainable community through clean energy and community resilience.

The DOE has a nice logo to go with it.

Yep, that looks like us. Except you’d have to erase the mountains and hills, and paste in a lot more cornfields.

My wife actually asked me if we could see the Barbie movie, which is opening at our local theater this weekend. Of course we can! I was looking forward to it already. It looks to be trippy and fun.

As the media have frequently mentioned lately, because they do love a contrast, the Oppenheimer movie also opens this weekend (but not at our theater.) Cool, I’d like to see that one, too, even more than Barbie. They’re different movies, there isn’t any real conflict between them. Here’s an article that says ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story.

The underlying premise of all the jokes — that these films come out on the same day but are about hilariously different subjects and have wildly different tones — is misguided. The two movies actually have a fundamental, and disturbing, common ground. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind our nuclear age, and Barbie — a toy that takes over three cups of oil to produce before it lingers in landfills around the world — both tell the story of the dawn of our imperiled era.

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” each offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene, the suggested term for our present geological epoch, in which human beings have become the most significant influence on the natural environment at a planetary scale.

That’s an interesting connection: how do we define the anthropocene, by all the piles of plastic or the global dusting of radioactive isotopes?

Either works for me, they all coexist in a narrow slice of time, only a century long. On a geological scale, either one provides a sharp boundary.

Like I said, I’d like to see both movies. Unfortunately, Oppenheimer isn’t booked locally in the near future. Instead, we’re getting served Sound of Freedom after Barbie, a conspiracy-theory fueled abomination of a movie (see Rebecca Watson for why it’s bad). I predict it’ll clean up at the box office in our little corner of Red America.

After that post about the horror of the lawn, I thought I’d do a quick comparison.

Here’s what the majority of the campus looks like:

Here’s a narrow strip of prairie plants near the science building:

Which looks better?