Touch grass. It’s what the kids say. (Or it’s what the kids used to say. I’m apt to question the freshness of any slang by the time it reaches my desk.) And what it means, to the best of my understanding is: Go outside. The expression is reserved for those who have become too saturated in the infinite battles of online life. Engage with the living, breathing, non-digital world, it says. Put down the phone. Let your fingers feel plants, let your lungs breath fresh air. Remember again that you are a monkey.
Touch grass. It’s a noteworthy anti-tech directive from the first generation raised on the stuff, the generation of iPad babies and screenagers. Moreover, it’s a directive toward the botanical realm.
Help! the kids seem to be saying. SOS. This is not a drill.
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In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, writer David Foster Wallace tells the story of two fish swimming along who suddenly come to realize they do not know what is meant by the word “water.” Wallace uses the parable to illustrate that, “the most important and obvious realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and to talk about.” The observation may strike some as banal and platitude driven, but Wallace insists, “in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.” Like water to a fish.
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I sometimes wonder at the community garden near my apartment in Portland.
Ten such gardens exist throughout the city, and though demand is great, the spots are not easy to come by. All ten have waitlists which require annual re-upping (applicants often wait multiple growing seasons for a plot to open), and if a bed does become available, Garden Guidelines must still be agreed to, and a lot fee paid, before users who otherwise might not have access to airable land in their urban environment are free to grow flowers, herbs, and produce. Many Mainers—especially those on fixed budgets and/or arriving from places where sustenance farming is the norm not the exception (remember that most of the world eats farm-to-table and always has)—rely on these scattered growing fields.
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Questions that may contain something of a thesis:
Has post-Industrial-Revolution life in the Global North commodified natural resources to a point that the human animal can now be considered in exile from its natural habitat? And in this exile, does some atavistic part cry out for the streams, forests, and jungles we’ve traded for convenience, comfort, and safety? The desire to live close to Nature even as Nature is being undone all around us? Is there not something at least strange about clearing forests to build cities and then people in those cities joining waitlists to rent small plots of what are essentially mini faux reconstructed forests? Is there meaning in this strangeness? And if so, what is it? Is there something too facile, immature, or over-romantic in these questions? And if so, what is it?
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I know a poet in Scarborough who was willing to make a significant investment to have her lawn converted into a meadow.
My dentist has books on native plants and permaculture in her waiting room.
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A computer science major at a good school told me recently that he was startled to learn only in his junior year (in a philosophy class, not a course required for his major) of the tremendous ecological toll imposed by Artificial Intelligence. For three years, his CS classes spoke of engineering and code, commercial application, proprietary rights, benchmarks and holy grails. Never the swaths of land required for data centers or the water needed to cool servers. “I saw natural resources being protected to sustain artificial life, not human life,” the student said. “It altered my course of study entirely.”
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Toward the end of the 19th Century, as chemical, steel, and petroleum production proliferated—birthing giants like US Steel, General Electric, Standard Oil—Maine became Vacationland when cosmopolitans living in industrialized Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. discovered it did a body good to spend time in more wooded landscapes. The outdoors became something to drive to, something to visit, to look forward to, a treat, a summertime novelty alongside wading clothes and blueberry pie.
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In the novel Jurassic Park paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler clocks a poisonous fern from the Triassic period being used for decoration in the park. Sattler uses the plant as an example of the park owner’s priority of aesthetics and displays of new technology over safety concerns and foresight. Her colleague seconds: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
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With the invention of the suburbs post-WWII, the well-kept yard became a symbol of prosperity. Everyday people (though certainly not all) could now oversee their own versions of the lush topiaries, flush hedges, exotic blooms, fruits, and pseudo woodlands that were the norm for royals long before, each palace display more dazzling and verdant than the next. Stationary plants became global, crossing oceans, and deserts, and mountains, to arrive in environments of all kinds, many unsuitable and unaccommodating, ecosystems not equipped to handle such rapid botanical travel. Have you ever walked the grounds of Versailles? The Taj Mahal? Buckingham Palace? They are breathtaking.
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In the summer of 2025, the White House Rose Garden was paved over and tiled to better accommodate guests wearing high-heels.
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Near the end of his address to the graduates at Kenyon, Wallace returns to his two fish. In the face of truths whose ubiquity renders them invisible, undiscussed, and unreckoned with, Wallace’s solution is the practice of a willful and (he concedes) difficult attention, a conscious and educated decision to remind one’s self, over and over, “this is water, this is water.” The alternative, he supposes (i.e. ignoring what is plainly before us), “is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
Perhaps.
But when it comes to our fledging planet, I am not so sure we need reminding. It is easy to read in all of our mowing, clipping, mulching, seeding, watering, and planting a plea for the infinite thing to stay. Maybe you feel it too? A longing to preserve the unique calm that accompanies a walk in the woods? Or time spent near the ocean? Watching the sun drop behind the horizon from a folding chair in your plot of the community garden? Are these not small attempts to grasp whatever chips of the beyond-human world we might hold? A tacit recognition of their supreme value? Rooted in some deep part? Perhaps the part that spurs young folk to implore: touch grass, touch grass? Is not the first lesson of Abrahamic faith that no sentence can be more dire than banishment from the garden? ▪️
