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Weed Laws Article on Landscaping (John Marshall Law Review) A United Slates EPA Ag.ncy The John Marshall Law Review Volume 26, Summer 1993, Number 4 A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. - - -- The Land Ethic t Page 1 of 27 I. INTRODUCTION The natural landscaping "movement "2 has taken root and its adherents are a varied lot. Attend any one of the many seminars held on natural landscaping, prairie restoration, xeriscaping, or wildflower propagation, and you will be with suburban uppies, weekend ecologists, and seniors whose retirment hobby is gardening. At the seminars you will also encounter hard -core professional scientists and botanists interested in preserving the gene pools of endangered and threatened plant species and the restoration of ecosystems. There will be some natural landscapers wearing tie -dyed tee -shirts who look as if they just left a Grateful Dead concert.3 In the Northeast, these people are re- creating the dense layers of the native American deciduous forest; they replace lawns with understory species like dogwood, wild azaleas and native shrubs, ferns and woodland wildflowers. Midwesterners are re- creating tallgrass and shortgrass prairies. Arizonians are landscaping with Sonoran desert native species like giant saguaro, multi- stemmed ocotilo, and prickly pear cactus. They all share a common goal - -- to harmonize gardening and landscaping practices with Nature .4 Many natural landscapers, however, face municipal weed inspectors who challenge their right to "garden in Thoreau's Tradition ".5 These conflicts are the unfortunate result of the collision of opposing forces; those who favor a return to a harmonic relationship with Nature against those who promote the myth of superabundance and the belief that "progress" is the process by which the less ordered natural world is harnessed by people to create a more ordered material environments.6 This notion of progress based on domination of Nature has its foundation in the "enlightened" thinkers such as John Locke who wrote "land that is left wholly to nature ... is called, as indeed it is, waste ".7 This article argues that this homocentric view of the world is ill- conceived and the use of weed laws to prohibit natural landscapes is a manifestation of the fundamental misunderstanding of humankind's proper place within Nature. http: / /www.epa.gov /glnpo /greenacres /weedlaws /JMLR.html 2/22/01