In a "heartwarming" story, Down East Magazine talks about how Heather McCargo "wants to destroy your lawn":
“All hands on deck today,” said executive director Andrea Berry, who was hired when McCargo stepped down in 2021. WSP has since doubled its staff size as well as its membership. To date, the organization estimates some 1.8 million native plants have been grown from seeds it has distributed. Objectives before 2030 include reaching a quarter of all Mainers with WSP educational content, getting a quarter of Maine’s land-conservation organizations to prioritize native-plant diversity and abundance, and persuading the Maine Department of Transportation to rethink management of roadsides and medians, which are mowed into de facto lawn but could instead support wildflower meadows.
How about no? While the headline is a little sensational, don't think for a second government coercion to make you do something (stupid) that you (wisely) don't want to do isn't their end goal.
The rapid growth of the Wild Seed Project coincided with a broader war on lawns gaining traction across the country. Lawns in the U.S. cover a land mass about the size of Iowa, accounting for as much as half of all residential water consumption and a quarter of the use of several popular herbicides. Gas-powered lawn and garden equipment puts an estimated 20 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, and the emissions footprint of nitrogen-heavy lawn fertilizers is as bad or worse. Across the country, particularly in the parched West, cities and towns have started mandating the removal of turf grass and incentivizing permaculture, and more-naturalistic lawn alternatives have even begun catching on in New England, as the region slogs through years of severe drought.
When Heather and her cronies come for your lawn, you fertilize it with their corpses.
Bonus lol: Yup, like all (generally female) aged hippies, she's a total loon:
The Wild Seed Project started selling seedlings a few years back, but McCargo remains a devoted defender of seeds. “I grow everything from seed,” she says. “I’m for sexual reproduction. It’s critical to keep native plants sexually active.”
McCargo had the sex talk with me one afternoon last August, sitting in her backyard, a double plot ringed with pagoda dogwoods, with flowers spilling out from gardens and hundreds of baby perennials in pots throughout the yard. She had just noticed some activity near one of her pots: a hummingbird hovered at a shockingly red flower — Lobelia cardinalis, a cardinal flower — dipping its tongue inside the plant’s tubular, two-lipped blossoms to collect sweet nectar. The stamens essentially feather-dust the hummingbird’s head with pollen, so that, as the bird moves on, it pollinates the next flower.
