Plastic grass for kids? What are we doing?
Doesn’t this playground I saw the other day look lovely?
Can you see that soft, rich, green lawn? Doesn’t it look like a perfect place for children to play? I lush lawns like this more and more.
How do they get it so green in late January?
It isn’t grass. It’s plastic. It looks more like grass than any Astroturf so far. Why do we use it? Because it’s cheaper and more durable than grass.
This is what we’ve come to.
We give kids the illusion of grass lawns with the reality of petroleum by-product because we’ve taken away the space per child to sustain living plants and aren’t willing to devote resources to maintain them,
Somehow no one seems to complain, I guess because it looks like grass and kids won’t hurt themselves when they fall like they would on concrete.
But they’re playing on plastic. How long might kids go without playing on grass? Their whole childhoods? What connection to plants and the Earth are we cutting off?
The trend is to disinfect everything all the time, but I am confident we will rediscover than we have symbiotic relationships with the life in plants and dirt, that we will find children who get dirt under their fingernails will live healthier lives than those who don’t. What have we gained and what have we sacrificed?
This blog is about meaning, value, importance, and purpose. What should we value more than our children enjoying nature?
Come to think of it, I saw the “lawn” the same day I stood by the Cheesecake Factory. I can’t be the only one to see the similarity. No grass in our “lawns,” no fiber in our “food.”
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