The Anthropocene Reviewed(45)

“Well,” I answered after a while, “the Kaufmanns don’t live here anymore.”

It is truly staggering how much of our shared resources we devote to Kentucky bluegrass and its cousins. To minimize weeds and make our lawns as thickly monocultured as possible, Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields. To keep all the lawns in the U.S. green year-round requires, according to a NASA study, around two hundred gallons of water per person per day, and almost all of the water shooting from sprinklers is treated drinking water. Grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills. And then there is the direct financial outlay: We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on lawn maintenance.

We do get something in exchange, of course. Kentucky bluegrass provides a good surface for soccer and games of tag. Lawn grass cools the ground, and offers some protection from wind and water erosion. But there are better, if less conventionally beautiful, alternatives. One could, for instance, devote a front yard to growing plants that humans can eat.

I know all of this, and yet I still have a lawn. I still mow it, or pay someone else to. I don’t use pesticides and welcome clover and wild strawberries as part of the lawn, but still, there’s a lot of lawn bluegrass in our yard, even though Poa pratensis has no business being in Indianapolis.

It strikes me as interesting that in contrast to proper gardening, lawn maintenance doesn’t involve much physical contact with nature. You’re mostly touching the machines that mow or edge the grass, not the plant matter itself. And if you’ve got the kind of Gatsby lawn we’re all told to reach for, you can’t even see the dirt beneath the thick mat of grass. And so mowing Kentucky bluegrass is an encounter with nature, but the kind where you don’t get your hands dirty.

I give Poa pratensis two stars.





THE INDIANAPOLIS 500



EVERY YEAR, near the end of May, between 250,000 and 350,000 people gather in the tiny enclave of Speedway, Indiana, to watch the Indianapolis 500. It is the largest annual nonreligious gathering of human beings on Earth.

Speedway is surrounded by, but technically independent from, Indianapolis. Basically, Speedway is to Indianapolis as the Vatican is to Rome. The Vatican comparisons don’t end there. Both Speedway and the Vatican are cultural centers that draw visitors from around the world; both contain a museum; and Speedway’s racetrack, while commonly called “The Brickyard,” is also sometimes known as “The Cathedral of Speed.” Of course, the Vatican analogy falls apart if you dig deeply enough. In my admittedly few trips to the Vatican, I have never been offered an ice-cold Miller Lite by a stranger, whereas that happens often when I visit Speedway.

At first blush, the Indianapolis 500 seems tailor-made for ridicule. I mean, it’s just cars driving in circles. The drivers literally go nowhere. The race is crowded, and usually hot. One year, my phone case partially melted in my pocket while I sat in the Turn 2 grandstand. It’s also loud. Every May, I can hear the cars practicing when I am working in my garden—even though the Speedway is five miles from my house.

As a spectator sport, the 500 leaves much to be desired. No matter where you sit or stand, you can’t see the entire track, so important events take place that you cannot follow. Because some cars are laps ahead of others, it’s almost impossible to know who’s winning the race unless you bring oversized headphones to listen to the radio broadcast of the event you are watching. The largest crowd to watch a sporting event every year cannot see most of the sporting event.

But it’s been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention. The Indy 500 features open-wheel racing, which is to say that the wheels of the cars are not covered by fenders, and the driver’s cockpit is open to the elements. Some truly amazing engineering is involved in getting these cars to travel more than 220 miles per hour around the two-and-a-half-mile course. The cars have to be fast, but not so fast that the g-forces in the corners cause drivers to lose consciousness. The cars have to be responsive, and predictable, and reliable, because while driving at 220 miles per hour, these open-wheeled vehicles are often inches away from one another. For more than a hundred years, the Indianapolis 500 has been examining a question that is of serious concern to people in the Anthropocene: What is the proper relationship between human and machine?

Today, the track is entirely asphalt except for a single yard of red bricks at the finish line, but when the first Indianapolis 500 took place on May 30, 1911, the track was paved entirely with bricks—3.2 million of them. The winner of that first five-hundred-mile race was Ray Harroun, who was driving a car that featured his own invention, the rearview mirror. In fact, many early automotive innovators were involved with the Indianapolis 500. Louis Chevrolet, who founded the car company, owned a racing team. His brother Gaston won the Indianapolis 500 in 1920 only to die later that year in a race at the Beverly Hills Speedway.

Indeed, racing cars is an exceptionally dangerous sport—forty-two drivers have died at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the track’s history. Many more have been injured, some seriously. In 2015, IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe nearly died after a crash at the Speedway severed a femoral artery. There’s no escaping the uncomfortable fact that one of the thrills of racing is how close drivers get to the edge of disaster. As the legendary driver Mario Andretti put it, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”