I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the grass on the main quad is getting soggy again.
Poor thing, it’s gone through a lot. This winter has been particularly dry. When it rains, the soil quickly becomes oversaturated. The water sits in misshapen puddles on the lawn. Yellow and irritated from prolonged thirst, the grass finds itself drowned with every sudden downpour.
Recently, it has also endured a bench burning — and it shows. Black marks streak the few shreds of grass that were left after a herd of excited students trampled the lawn when Duke beat UNC at the home game on Feb. 1. Lots of fun — but the lawns are a mess.
Either I’m psychic or I’ve just started noticing patterns, but I can feel the “Lawn Restoration in Process” signs coming. College decision deadlines are fast approaching, and Duke will want to comb its hair and straighten its bow-tie before welcoming potential Dukies to campus.
For us students, it’s sort of an annoying process. When the ropes are stretched so as to enclose the lawn, we can no longer cut through the grass to speedily get to our next class (because God knows that the tiled pathway is never the optimal path). Pythagoras is shaking his head — but I could even live with having to go around the various bends. What’s really frustrating is witnessing Duke’s wasting time, money and resources as they “restore” their beloved bright-green winning lawns over and over.
As opinion writer Shambhavi Sinha pointed out earlier this year, every “restored” lawn at Duke looks the same — unoriginally perfect. Nauseatingly so: “The lawns I once loved, now made me feel sick: Because what I loved was never real,” she wrote.
Yet the to-be-restored lawns are somehow worse. Brown, stagnant. It looks like they’re being force-fed dirty water and can’t quite get it down.
In fact, these prefabricated strips of lawn have a multitude of problems: The soil is not porous enough and the single slim-blade grass variety is not well adapted to the North Carolina climate.
Most importantly, covering large stretches of land with only one species of grass is highly unnatural. One variety of grass doesn’t make up a self-sustaining ecosystem. Instead, low-lying plants are only a first step towards an eco-friendly habitat.
This is not revolutionary thinking. Environmental scientists have known this for years. No single organism can or wants to live in solitude. Even in less biodiverse environments, species help each other out in unexpected ways. But not on Duke’s lawns. Our grass has to make it all on its own.
I’ll stop personifying our grass soon, I promise — but give me just a second longer. Duke’s lawns are irrigated several times a day. They are fertilized often. They are even “aerated” thoroughly once in a while. And the grass still dies.
Perhaps, that’s because those utopian carpets of perfect lawn laid out every couple of months here at Duke aren’t what the Earth really needs.
But you know what doesn’t die easily? The wild grass and weeds that grow in the few neglected patches of dirt on campus.
Hear that? Neglect is great for nature, if we’re the ones doing it. Clovers, dandelions and buckhorn plantains pop up all over campus, defying Duke landscapers’ weeders, sometimes even finding a home among their dead comrade — the once-perfect sod. And within them thrive bugs and other little creatures, who now find the soil no longer drowned in fertilizer but consistently rich with nutrients.
It’s really quite a beautiful image, that of our campus nature thriving — and one that lots of us at The Chronicle feel strongly about. But I didn’t start this rant just to talk about grass. That discussion is not an end in itself. Nor did I prod this hot topic to criticize Duke — I’m sure they have a good reason to keep reordering replacement lawns. Even if that reason is just that perfect lawns sell, I’d understand. We are a private institution, after all.
Instead, I’d like us to notice why the unnatural, bright green lawn keeps dying time and time again. Its environment is plain and bleak. Its prospects are poor.
We can’t let the same happen to us. Thankfully, we’ve seen colleges desegregate and club teams become coed. We’ve seen a push for more balanced diets that include all food groups. Our curriculum embraces a variety of classes — there are enough majors, sports clubs and opportunities to give us a tummy ache.
As students, we have some agency. We can’t choose which species of grass to have on our campus lawns, but we can choose who to hang out with and what classes to take. We can choose what to have for lunch and where to eat it. We can cultivate our experiences and sow all kinds of seeds in our gardens.
And these small choices have big consequences in the aggregate. The more we diversify our environment, the more ideas we’re exposed to, the more sustainably and successfully we can advance our personal goals. If you’ve been having lunch at the same gloomy table in the corner of WU all winter, try having lunch outside on BC plaza and see what it does to you.
Small choices can seem inconsequential to our lives as a whole — but that’s not the case. It’s just difficult to see their effect from up close. We should step back more often and make sure the canvas of our lives is sufficiently colorful.
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Variety is almost always a good idea. And even if Duke doesn’t make that choice for its poor lawns, we can make it for ourselves in other aspects of our lives — and thus thrive.
Anna Garziera is a Trinity sophomore. Her pieces typically run on alternate Sundays.