A candidate for office in my county posted about how fed-up he is with the clearcutting of forests for development: “I stopped at 6 different developments yesterday in our county, and each one was totally Clear Cut, meaning complete devastation of nature that was living and thriving there before … not a single tree or blade of original grass left, no wildlife. So Sad!”
I responded: The clearcutting is bad enough, AND furthermore, the “landscaping” they replace it with is a second assault on the eye and the environment. Turfgrass, waxy cartoonish nonnative plants. Shaved, barren ponds.
I get sick of hearing people who recognize the value of trees being ridiculed as “tree-huggers.” When developers replace trees with gross, out-of-place manicured landscaping, maybe we should call them “GRASS-kissers”!
There’s no reason why developers can’t do more natural landscaping. Native plants & trees double as green infrastructure.
We can encourage the grass-kisser developers to embrace a more natural, beautiful, and less resource-hogging approach.
There are many local resources available to help us with native landscaping, green stormwater infrastructure, edible landscaping (food forests etc.)