It’s spring cleaning time and the house is a wreck.
That’s an embarrassing admission to make.
”Home” is now considered an extension of oneself, after all personal worth being so complexly bound up in real estate.
Then there’s our massive home improvement industry, urging Americans to aim for ever-expanding standards.
The upscale home is now a well-secured fortress of appliances, digital screens, walk-in closets, decks, immaculate lawn, climate control, pest control, gourmet kitchens, marble counters, entertainment centers, basement vaults, entire padded soundproofed theaters where one can spend days oblivious to rain, blizzard, drought, birdsong or natural disaster.
Maybe that’s why it’s easy to forget about that other real estate.
This property would be the old home-place, as we say in my part of the Appalachians. The Great House. Our inheritance. The only real asset we can leave our descendants.
This homestead has fallen into severe dilapidation. In fact, it’s bringing down the neighborhood. It would not pass home inspection were anyone to get out there and bother to inspect its neglected, ramshackle shambles.
Anybody Home?
For several recent generations, we’ve learned the mindset of looters, not heirs.
In 1915, farm horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey regretted that we Americans do not “exercise the care and thrift of good housekeepers. We do not clean up our work or leave the earth in order,” but in disrepair, “unthoughtful of the future, uncharitable to those who must clear away the wastes and put the place in order.”
Our trashy ways have expelled countless fellow occupants.
Entire songbird species, owls, toads, microbes, marine life, ancient forests residents whose faithful housework kept the place flourishing for millions of years have been evicted within a few brief decades.
Each absence leaves a gap in the planetary chore chart those faithful housekeepers tended.
When pollinators grow weaker and fewer, from pesticides and the conversion of flowering native landscapes to monoculture lawn, planetary gardens and orchards also decline.
The same deforested monoculture expels our native songbirds. We then lose their art of nontoxic pest management besides their astonishing beauty and music.
Deforestation, globally, banishes rain clouds. Deserts encroach, topsoil blows away. Whole planetary regions of parched residents – human and wild – become displaced refugees.
And back home, that shadeless lawn-and-asphalt landscape (now encroaching across the United States) shuts off the plumbing meant to storehouse the rains that do fall.
Stormwater now overwhelms creeks and rivers, carrying nitrates, trash, silt and pollution.
This turbid, warm, fish-gagging flood then pours into coastal waters, fostering algae, depleting oxygen and replacing marine habitats with dead zones that can’t do the great planetary housework of a living ocean.
That’s just one glimpse of our broken domestic infrastructure. Yet it shows, in its very disorder, how we might begin repairs.
A Place for Everything, and…?
Orderliness is the basic cleanup skill we learned in kindergarten. Big boys and girls put things back where they belong.
“Cradle-to-Cradle” architect William McDonough has been making that case for years. “A toxin is simply something in the wrong place.”
Like carbon.
“Carbon belongs in soil, not in the atmosphere,” he points out. “For billions of years, Earth has been taking atmospheric carbon and sequestering it in the soil and things grow.”
Smoked back into orbit, carbon holds radiant heat. Climate is thrown off the longtime balance within which ecosystems evolved.
Next, this carbon falls into our oceans, where it becomes carbonic acid souring seawater and corroding marine life. Fishing economies collapse.
McDonough’s team helps corporations and cities restore order – their economies mindful of the whole House.
Sewage system nitrates and phosphates, costly to process as stream discharge, enrich local soil instead.
Rainfall gets to recharge valuable local groundwater through permeable surfacing and deep-rooted plants and trees, reducing flood damage. Sunlight becomes food and passive heating; tree canopy cools buildings; organic waste becomes compost and compost, local food.
This kind of housekeeping doesn’t require teams of experts. Love for the place and common sense work great.
Try This at Home
Here are sample basics from the job jar.
– Protect your dearest household valuable: water! Porous parking areas (at home, school, office, church), deep-rooted natives, trees and roof-water barrels keep this liquid asset in house.
– Sun and wind dry laundry at no cost.
– Household/landscape chemicals are often poisons with pretty labels. If you don’t want it in your water, don’t buy poison. On one planet, everybody lives downstream.
– Lawns are a costly, wasteful eviction of residents needed to keep the house in order. Native wildflowers, thickets, trees, roots, rainwater, leaf litter, topsoil, fireflies, toads and birds evolved together as one flourishing household. Please help them come back home.
Liza Field teaches English and philosophy in the Virginia Governor’s School and Wytheville Community College. This column is distributed by Bay Journal News Service.