...(They) Americans have traditionally looked on (their) front lawns as nothing less than an institution of democracy. Beginning in the 19th century, at the urging of such landscape designer-reformers as Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing, we took down our old-world walls and hedges (which they had declared to be "selfish" and "undemocratic") and spread an uninterrupted green carpet of turfgrass across our yards, down our streets, along our highways and, by and by, across the entire continent...

...Front lawns, we decided, would unite us, and, ever since, their maintenance has been regarded as an important ritual of consensus in America, even a civic obligation. Indeed, the citizen who neglects to vote is sooner tolerated -- and far more common -- than the citizen who neglects to mow: in hundreds of communities the failure to mow is punishable by fines. That's because our quasi-public unhedged front yards all run together -- in a sense, the White House lawn is contiguous with every other lawn in the land -- and the laggard who neglects to tend his lawn spoils the effect for everyone...

...The democratic symbolism of the lawn may be appealing, but it carries an absurd and, today, unsupportable environmental price tag. In our quest for the perfect lawn, we waste vast quantities of water and energy, human as well as petrochemical... But the deeper problem with the American lawn, and the reason I believe the White House lawn must go, is less chemical than metaphysical. The lawn is a symbol of everything that's wrong with our relationship to the land. Lawns require pampering because we ask them to thrive where they do not belong...

...Turfgrasses are not native to America, yet we have insisted on spreading them from the Chesapeake watershed to the deserts of California without the slightest regard for local geography. Imposed upon the land with the help of our technology, lawns encourage us in the dangerous belief that we can always bend nature to our will. They may bespeak democratic sentiments toward our neighbors, but with respect to nature the politics of lawns are totalitarian...

...What we need is for the President to take the lead -- to stride out onto the South Lawn, drive the sharp edge of his spade into that unnaturally plush sod and toss the first chunk of White House lawn onto the compost pile. To do so would constitute an act of environmental shock therapy...

...The President's choice of a replacement for the White House lawn gives him an unprecedented opportunity to reinvent the American front yard -- and, in the process, promote a saner approach to the environment...

A propósito del nuevo huerto de los Obama en la Casa Blanca. Extracto de un artículo de opinión del NY Times escrito... en 1991!

Nota al margen:
...la naturaleza no puede quejarse y la doblegamos imponiéndole nuestra voluntad. Es así para domesticar su/nuestro progenie/sustento. Pero también es un elemento más de diseño. Una manifestación cultural. Un tema clásico en cualquier clase sobre historia del paisajismo. Recreación romántica frente a geometría renacentista. Jardines ingleses (ruina incluida) frente a parterres barrocos. Recomiendo echar un vistazo al precioso jardín silvestre de la Fundación Cartier en París para ver que otro jardín es posible...
...y, preocupaciones mediambientales y paisajísticas aparte, con un poco de cuidado... y tacto, podríamos extender la reflexión de este articulo al campo de las civilizaciones humanas. Nuestra bien ganada democracia es válida para nosotros y nuestro vecindario, pero cuando intentamos extenderla a otras civilizaciones se convierte en un totalitarismo...

Yes.. We.. Can , por Will I Am

Song and video, featuring a star cast, by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. Inspired by Barack Obama's 'Yes We Can' speech.
Celebrities featured include: Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, Nick Cannon...

"I believe he is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime leader that can bring our nation together and restore America's moral leadership in the world..."
Bill Richardson, hispano, gobernador de New Mexico y cinco veces nominado para el Premio Nobel de La Paz.

"A more Perfect Union"

He seguido la campaña de las primarias estadounidenses con curiosidad. Hasta ahora con cierta distancia. Pienso que el mundo no es un lugar cerrado, acabado; sino un espacio perfectible que podemos cambiar y acercar a la medida de nuestros propios sueños. Hay gente que es capaz de liderar esos cambios. En mi humilde opinión Barack Obama podría ser una de esas personas. Hace unos días pronunció este discurso sobre la Union y la Raza, podría circunscribirse a la Union de los estados de America del Norte. Pero creo que el mensaje puede servir de una forma más amplia, para reafirmar que existen diferencias entre seres humanos, culturas, etnias y paises. Diferencias en las que trabajar y que nos alejan de nuestros sueños. Negar los problemas y las imperfecciones es no poder trabajar en ellos, es ceder la capacidad de alcanzar los sueños de todos. Es un magnífico discurso, que ha conseguido emocionarme... umm... no sólo una buena película, una obra de arte, o una canción pueden hacerlo... las palabras también importan!


A continuación os dejo un artículo de opinión publicado por Roger Cohen en el New York Times a propósito de este discurso titulado "America´s Original Sin"

There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.

As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!

The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.

Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.

The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.

A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.

Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.

A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.

Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.

It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.

I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?

Yes. It. Can.

The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.

Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.

The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”

But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”