Page 125 - ECOlogic Book

the well-rehearsed rationale and make matters worse. My approach is more
conciliatory. I hope to win people over, not alienate them.

The pressure to do things the way everyone else does them is subtle but
powerful, perhaps the moreso if unacknowledged. So far I’ve received no

complaints about my wild lawn, though a kindly neighbor offered to mow it
for me. I’m lucky to have found a place that’s rural enough so that the
pressure to conform isn’t nearly what it was in the cheek-by-jowl subdivision
I lived in before I moved here. But living in the country is no guarantee, as
my friends, Robin and Greg, who live in an area that’s even more rural than
mine, found when they tried to grow a wildflower meadow near their house.
On the complaint of a neighbor, they were cited by their township for not
mowing their “noxious weeds.” The pressure to conform is sometimes not
so subtle. This kind of pressure will diminish, I believe, as antiquated weed

laws are changed and more and more people wake up to the emerging
ecological paradigm.

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