Environmental: Let’s Explain Things To A Martian
By: Becky Hammond
IMAGINE MEETING A MARTIAN. Imagine trying to explain our culture and habits to someone with no frame of reference. Try football. Trust me, pretend to explain that to a Martian and you’ll start to feel like one. It’s an odd activity to observe with even minor objectivity.
Now, how would you explain fall clean-up activities?
When we moved to Ferndale almost 30 years ago, I was enchanted with leaf trucks. I’d only lived in one other town (Evanston, Illinois) where residents raked leaves to the street and big vacuums sucked them up. Those lucky enough to own cars while attending grad school there (I wasn’t one of them) were nasty enough to plow through the piles late at night, cackling like maniacs, blowing off steam and stress. This made the job of the first leaf trucks I ever saw more difficult, of course (I was glad enough to ride along.)
In rural Ohio, where I grew up, we burned leaves after playing with them. We jumped in them and we used them to outline the rooms of “hotels” where we were the proprietors. We even fashioned teepees of sticks and covered them with leaves, making huts that lasted a surprisingly long time. The saddest thing about using leaf blowers instead of rakes is that you rarely see families playing in leaves now. Since people have one machine, the work is solo. And loud. An interesting (and only mildly heated) discussion arose on Ferndale Forum on Facebook between pro- and con-leafblowers, most of us who dislike them objecting to the noise, of course.
Explain our power sources to our Martian friends. If you live in Ferndale, explain that ten miles southwest of here, a huge building contains equipment designed to burn smallish black rocks procured from afar, most of ours coming from 1,000-plus miles away in the west, the rest being former mountains to our south.
By the time you described the blasting, the equipment, washing the coal with chemicals, transport by train, truck, freighter, the 24/7 burning of the rocks, the people sickened and killed every step of the way, you’d wonder what’s up with us and this system.
In the last couple of years, we’ve brought out some heavy equipment for removing leaves. No longer does a single vacuum truck come down the street; now a big truck, a little truck, a snowplow truck, and a front-end loader arrive. For leaves.
My very first column for Ferndale Friends was called Leave Your Leaves. I had hoped to persuade that nature has always known perfectly well how to dispose of leaves. The whole world is, in essence, a compost factory; it’s making compost all the time. Since most of us still have lawns (alas) it is provident to rake the leaves off of them and onto mulch paths and under shrubs and around trees, but that’s all you have to do. There has been a remarkable difference in soil over the ten years or so we’ve left leaves. The idea is growing. The Detroit News Homestyle supplement had in October an article called, “Gardening: Leave your leaves to Mulch Your Lawn,” by Nancy Szerlag (although I’d like to flatter myself that my play on words got pilfered, that’s actually rather doubtful). Szerlag made an expert case for the benefits of letting Mother Nature improve your soil, using her own materials. The increased number of worms alone may amaze you.
If you compared pros and cons to any being with no experience in the yearly tradition / headache of dealing with nature’s seemingly unwanted bounty, they might very well see the logic in leaving them. Those trucks? Very polluting. The oil needed to power them? Ditto. Burning leaves as we did, and some in the state still do? Nice smell, nostalgic tradition, part of fall for many of us, but just not necessary, even precluding that benefit to the soil.
My small and tree-filled yard is sand. The initial reason we started getting rid of turf over the years is grass hates our sand, and sand reciprocates the feeling. Eventually, forcing something to grow that doesn’t want to, that actually has to be coerced in any number of time-consuming and reasonably expensive ways, got too onerous. We planted stuff that actually is willing to grow with almost no water ever, and that ability to survive on little water is enhanced every year the leaves remain and continue turning our sand into actual topsoil, moist and rich and full of worms.
Since we’ve upped the stakes from the vacuum trucks that pleased me years ago to equipment looking like the city is doing major construction, do you wonder what we’ll come up with ten, 20 years from now? For leaves. Just leaves. Feel like a Martian yet?
The holidays are here. Remember, regifting is cool. And Ferndale has a few funky little shops that actually sell gently-used and very green gifts. Check out Tootsie’s Corner, on Marshall west of Woodward, and Blue Moon Vintage on Livernois. Vintage is in.
Becky Hammond finds newer and odder ways to live green all the time. She admits to about half of them. Message her Facebook page, Funky Town Urban Crafts, with comments.
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