Good evening everyone, how's your Sunday been going? It's almost 6pm here and I'm not sure where my day went. 🤷 We did go shopping at the Pan Asia store for monthly supplies and then it's been a day of laziness I suppose. I'm not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. 😠
Have a good night friends! 🌃 🙂 I stepped outside for some air and snapped a picture of my middle America suburbia as seen from my front porch. My slice of the pie. 🍰
After visiting my wife in her suburban western Sydney care home, I drove around the corner to see... Emu!
Long before housing development, we would see emu and roos as we drove past the old ADI site. I haven't seen emu anywhere in western Sydney in decades, although we had roos on one uni campus.
The woman I spoke to said they still get roos, too. I was so pleased to see they're still there and apparently thriving!
Suburbanites in the fall: expending time, energy and/or money removing dead leaves from their lawn (instead of simply mulching in place with a lawnmower).
Suburbanites in the springtime: expending time, energy and/or money to import and apply fertilizer to their lawn (instead of relying on the now-biodegraded mulchings from the fall).
Stories of suburban insanity: there is a gentleman who lives a five minute walk from our place. When we moved into the neighborhood, it was one of the first houses we noticed on our walks because of the holiday decorations.
This person drove old corvette stingrays, I believe? As best as I can tell, he’s had at least two, perhaps three in my time here. He regularly wrecks the car because when someone on the road revs their engine at him, he can’t back down from the challenge. (1/x) #Rockville
Recently, his latest corvette which had recently been wrecked, caught fire. A neighbor had reported an explosion and the car on fire. It’s been sitting on the street since. On Sunday, I walked by and saw the car with a trailer full of gas cans and the air smelled of diesel.
This guy is stealing gas and selling it to people in the alley behind his house. He was pumping some into an RV recently. Two weeks ago, he had racing fuel and was selling it before getting caught. #suburbia (2/3)
One of the single most impactful climate emergency changes: Allowing front-yard and driveway businesses.
This would make neighborhoods walkable over night. New jobs in local places. Cafes, grocery shops, repair clinics, tool libraries, arcades, and beyond - right on your street.
Destroying oil demand, commutes, and car dependency over night.
This policy change can happen in as little as 3 sentences, according to Hazel Borys and Strong Towns. pHow can we make this happen everywhere?
Check out the full video, "Why Did We Make Front Yard Businesses Illegal?", which shows some awesome examples and gets into what we can do today — from About Here, Urbanarium, and Uytae Lee.
And share and boost to get people talking about this. This is one of the first and most important changes we can make, for climate emergency transitions. From a path dependency standpoint, it needs to happen first too -- making what we can walkable and low energy to start, and then seeing what we need.
Now that the nights are drawing in, I think I might revive an old project that began during the pandemic.
When I was working nights from home, I began taking long, rambling walks around the area where I live to de-stress before trying to sleep.
Using only my mobile phone, I started recording scenes that caught my eye, and the Night Walks In Suburbia project was born. #photography#MobilePhonePhotography#night#suburbia
Lawn is “covering around 40% of the planet’s land surface, lawns are monocultures made up of a handful of species that require frequent watering, fertiliser and – often – pesticides.
Lawn is “nature under totalitarian rule”. Michael Pollan
"At a larger scale they also suggested a permanence and control that assuaged anxieties about the fragility of colonial control. Andrea Gaynor, professor of history at the University of Western Australia, argues that while some settlers appreciated the beauty of Australian landscape from early on, that “didn’t override the necessity to provide a civilised veneer that meant the colony could project an image of itself as stable, settled and prosperous, and therefore an attractive field for investment. So the cultural aspect is deeply entwined with the economics of the whole enterprise.” Simultaneously lawns helped encode and reinforce racial and social hierarchies. “Lawns were understood by Perth’s white residents as the antithesis of, and vastly superior to, Indigenous landscapes and cultures,” says Gaynor."
“Even in a drying climate we’d rather run desal[ination] plants than do away with lawn. It really shows how deeply ingrained lawn is in Australian culture as a symbol of civilisation and environmental control.”