Some time ago I fought, without success, the wretched municipal services over the mixed-herb lawn beneath my windows, home to birds and insects, but in the end it was mown, dug up, stripped of its fertile topsoil and covered with the belch…
Some time ago I fought, without success, the wretched municipal services over the mixed-herb lawn beneath my windows, home to birds and insects, but in the end it was mown, dug up, stripped of its fertile topsoil and covered with that belch of anthropogenic bad taste: turf in rolls. Some Muscovites, however, did manage to save the grasses and flowers in their own courtyard. The Village has published an interesting piece on the subject: what to do if you want to preserve meadow grasses in your neighbourhood, whom to approach, and how to respond to the oppressive effect of the municipal services on urban nature.
Why am I writing about this here, in a channel devoted to the history of world culture? Because culture and its social superstructures ought not to destroy nature; because we must realise how destructively humankind behaves in the course of seemingly innocent processes of civilisation; because the history of one's native land is not only museums and monuments, but also the history of ecosystems, soils, and animal and plant species.
