I’ve been thinking a lot about work over the past four years or so, mostly under the influence of my friend Anthony Graves, the way he lives and works, and his reading of Marxist writers and my own reading of anarchist writers, and Wendell Berry, and Masanobu Fukuoka. The American lawn seems to me a sickeningly apt objective correlative to an unsustainable and just plain mean idea of labor rampant here in the U.S., and now throughout the world, thanks to the U.S.

My lawn dissent started fairly undeliberately (as is maybe appropriate), about five years ago when I first bought my house in Elberta, and before that with the half-acre lot I purchased in Frankfort, the other town on the Betsie Bay. I got my first notice about mowing my lawn two or three summers ago, I think. I had told my brother, who was renting from me, not to mow. But then the notice came from the Village, and he went ahead and did, which I understood. He had to borrow a power mower to do it, because the grass was so tall and all I had was a push mower. From then on, I decided I was going to do everything I could to avoid ever having to mow again, or at least for as long as possible in any given season. My effort not to exert effort has required quite some doing. That’s one problem with revolutions—they’re too difficult usually.

The ecological, energy conservation, and even practical-gardening case against mowing, even with a push mower, has been made elsewhere, and I could get into that here and probably will. But to me the most interesting thing about my lawn dissent project has to do with postcapitalist economics, labor, and control; control over people, control over nature. What happens when you simply let go?

I daily think of what Fukuoka wrote. “Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.”

So I “let” my grass grow. And it does. And this where my revolution starts and maybe ends.

My name is Emily, and I’m a workaholic in recovery.