You are racist if you have a lawn
Episode Stats
Words per minute
197.96815
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
sentences flagged
Hate speech
1
sentences flagged
Summary
In this week's episode of Fake News Friday, we discuss the Toronto Star's article, "Lawns are an Outdated Cultural Norm, Let's Lose Them Before We Lose The Pollinators."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
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And we always try to end things on a bit of a lighter note.
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So we're going to call you all racists if you have front lawns.
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That's our version of a lighter note here on Fake News Friday,
00:00:09.260
because also the Toronto Star, interestingly enough,
00:00:14.120
As a column, lawns are an outdated cultural norm.
00:00:18.460
Let's lose them before we lose the pollinators.
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And they say that being a lawn owner used to be a symbol of being rich,
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rich enough to hold land and not need to farm on it.
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It's supposed to differentiate the aristocrats from the farmers.
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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
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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.
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So if you have a lawn, you are disenfranchising Indigenous people
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And I'm reading this quote from the Globe and Mail piece from 2020.
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And it's at the back end of a longer quote from a Canadian history professor.
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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.
00:01:36.600
when they talk about the time, you know, the lawn is an outdated cultural norm,
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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.
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So those competing biodiversity and climate crises.
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What better way, Andrew, to solve those climate crises than to just pave over your lawns?
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Now, in fairness, there are people that have turned their lawns,
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I forget the term, I think it's like living lawns or something,
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And if you're going to tend to them, that's very nice.
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But I assure you, if I were to turn my front lawn into a garden of some kind,
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I'm not colonizing anyone because I can't, you know, grow anything but weeds there.
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that we all need to just like let the bees take over, apparently.
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And that, I mean, this planet of the apes is going to be planet of the bees,
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because that's the only way to outdate the outdated norm,
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make it outdated, whatever the case is, who knows?
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you'd be following the Toronto Star's guideline.
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They say to maintain natural debris, including dead stems and dry leaves.
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What may seem messy to some people is habitat to wildlife.
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So, you know, if you have a lawn, just let it go.
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Let weeds grow in it and leave, leave a bunch of, I don't know,
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you know, dead, dead branches and dead stems in it.
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When my wife asked me to rake the leaves in the fall,
00:03:23.460
Yeah, well, I won't use that because I don't think that's authoritative,
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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.