Juno News - July 04, 2022


You are racist if you have a lawn

Topics
decolonizing the lawn
Mentioned
Andrew Joni Mitchell Harrison
Canadians react to Tamara Lich’s arrest ArriveCAN is here to stay

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

197.97

Word count

721

Sentence count

51

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this week's episode of Fake News Friday, we discuss the Toronto Star's article, "Lawns are an Outdated Cultural Norm, Let's Lose Them Before We Lose The Pollinators." And we call you all racists if you have front lawns.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And we always try to end things on a bit of a lighter note.
00:00:02.460 So we're going to call you all racists if you have front lawns. 0.98
00:00:06.040 That's our version of a lighter note here on Fake News Friday,
00:00:09.260 because also the Toronto Star, interestingly enough,
00:00:11.900 they're on the greatest hits list this week.
00:00:14.120 As a column, lawns are an outdated cultural norm.
00:00:18.460 Let's lose them before we lose the pollinators. 1.00
00:00:22.000 And they say that being a lawn owner used to be a symbol of being rich,
00:00:26.000 rich enough to hold land and not need to farm on it.
00:00:28.920 But this is just an outdated cultural norm.
00:00:30.940 It's classist.
00:00:32.020 It's supposed to differentiate the aristocrats from the farmers.
00:00:34.960 And now it's just a sign of societal excess.
00:00:38.080 But this is actually part of a longstanding grievance that people have
00:00:42.360 that we can go back to a Globe and Mail piece a couple of years ago
00:00:45.600 about the need to decolonize the lawn.
00:00:48.980 We need to decolonize the lawn because a lawn is you saying that you're vanquishing nature,
00:00:54.120 which is a part, according to one history professor, of settler culture.
00:00:58.520 So if you have a lawn, you are disenfranchising Indigenous people 0.55
00:01:02.780 and you are a classist aristocrat.
00:01:05.240 I think I've gotten it right.
00:01:06.980 I think you do.
00:01:08.140 And I'm reading this quote from the Globe and Mail piece from 2020.
00:01:12.340 And it's at the back end of a longer quote from a Canadian history professor.
00:01:18.080 And he says, when he's talking about backyards this time, not front lawns,
00:01:22.420 he says, a backyard with a big lawn is like a classroom for colonialism and environmental hostility.
00:01:28.940 So I guess they're really upset about nice lawns.
00:01:33.040 And this funny thing is from the Toronto Star,
00:01:36.600 when they talk about the time, you know, the lawn is an outdated cultural norm,
00:01:41.420 we should just, I guess, bulldoze the lawns and pave them over.
00:01:45.260 And they say, of course, that the reason the lawn is a problem is because of biodiversity and climate crises.
00:01:53.140 So those competing biodiversity and climate crises.
00:01:56.220 What better way, Andrew, to solve those climate crises than to just pave over your lawns?
00:02:00.820 Yeah, we got to do the Joni Mitchell song,
00:02:02.820 Pave Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot.
00:02:04.780 So everyone needs a concrete front yard. 0.99
00:02:06.880 Now, in fairness, there are people that have turned their lawns,
00:02:09.480 I forget the term, I think it's like living lawns or something,
00:02:11.760 or they do like front lawn gardens.
00:02:13.800 And if you're going to tend to them, that's very nice.
00:02:15.400 But I assure you, if I were to turn my front lawn into a garden of some kind,
00:02:19.520 because I can barely grow grass.
00:02:20.800 So I'm not decolonized.
00:02:22.620 I'm not colonizing anyone because I can't, you know, grow anything but weeds there.
00:02:26.320 Not weed, weeds.
00:02:27.800 And this is the thing that I find hilarious,
00:02:30.880 that we all need to just like let the bees take over, apparently. 1.00
00:02:34.020 And that, I mean, this planet of the apes is going to be planet of the bees,
00:02:36.540 because that's the only way to outdate the outdated norm,
00:02:40.600 make it outdated, whatever the case is, who knows?
00:02:43.000 Well, yeah, and if you did that, Andrew,
00:02:44.820 you'd be following the Toronto Star's guideline.
00:02:47.240 You'd be following their manual in it.
00:02:48.660 They say to maintain natural debris, including dead stems and dry leaves.
00:02:54.140 What may seem messy to some people is habitat to wildlife.
00:02:56.980 So, you know, if you have a lawn, just let it go.
00:02:59.580 Let it kind of be an awful mess.
00:03:02.040 Let weeds grow in it and leave, leave a bunch of, I don't know,
00:03:07.460 you know, dead, dead branches and dead stems in it.
00:03:10.180 I mean, this is...
00:03:11.440 No, this is great, Harrison.
00:03:12.480 When my wife asked me to rake the leaves in the fall,
00:03:15.020 I'll just say, ah, I'm decolonizing.
00:03:18.420 I can't rake the leaves.
00:03:19.360 They've got to stay.
00:03:20.400 They've got to stay there.
00:03:21.420 And I'm just listening to the Toronto Star.
00:03:23.460 Yeah, well, I won't use that because I don't think that's authoritative,
00:03:26.240 but I'll appeal to our greater goals as a society to move beyond colonization.
00:03:32.280 Last year, the issue was we couldn't fly the Canadian flag.
00:03:35.020 This year, you can't grow your grass.
00:03:36.480 So do whatever works for you there.