To grow grass on Mars

Since we rang in 2025, climate change continues to affect us, alongside accelerating neo-colonialism, in a multitude of ways.

These effects manifest as military assaults from powerful nations on resource-rich countries, the threat of tariffs, or even pollution-driven colonization, as see in fast fashion and other industries.

The economic choices of one part of the world have consequences for the entire planet. As we speak, oligarchies around the world are playing Monopoly with its resources, doing the kind of math that only involves clients, labour forces and economic limitations.

Right here in Quebec, I could tell you about the hypothetical kilowatts for which people would dam real rivers. I could tell you about hypothetical factories for which real forests are razed. I could you tell you about the many issues driving efforts to confine Quebec’s caribou.

You can go ahead and write me off as some kind of sentimental, woke, Indigenous environmentalist, but first I’d like to tell you how I came to think this way. One of the most potent symbols of colonialism, outrageous from both an ecological and environmental standpoint: lawns.

Lawns, much like human beings, are insatiable, trying to colonize every last corner, every last scrap of land on the planet.

Don’t get me wrong! I don’t hate lawns. I happen to have some very nice lawn-related memories. You can only really roll down a hill if it’s covered in nice thick grass, not to mention running barefoot.

One of my sweetest memories was in Victoriaville, with my cousins, on a beautiful July day. I still remember the smell! Growing up in Minganie, on the North Shore, I spent every summer vacation visiting my father’s family. I remember telling my cousin, “Wow! The hay is so nice down here!” as I admired the lawn in front of my grandmother’s family home, in which absolutely nothing but well-trimmed and sweet-smelling grass reigned. I remember her giggling because I called it hay. The sweet and verdant grass, contrasted with freshly tarred blacktop, just made me want to go roll around in it.

I called it hay because that’s mostly what grew in my yard and my neighbours’ yards in Ekuanitshit. A mix of sand ryegrass, blue flag, pineapple weed, yarrow, fireweed, plantain and, of course, dandelions… all these plants grew in sufficient abundance to meet the needs of any child wanting to pick a bouquet or mix up a magic potion.

But when the time came to cut down that high vegetation with the mower or set it alight with a controlled burn, what was left was far from gentle on my little feet. So when we came across hay, soft under our feet and less likely to scratch up our calves, it was as meaningful as coming across the kind of towering trees that you don’t see in the north.

When I say “reigned,” I mean that the grass was lord and master of that yard and of the whole suburb. I often told myself, “May Tshishe Manitu protect me if I get the urge to walk on it, roll in it or even rip it up and throw it in the air like confetti!”

I quickly understood the difference between the plants on a Côte-Nord reserve and the lawns of Victoriaville: accessibility.

For my entire childhood, cutting across my neighbours’ yard was completely as natural as breathing. But as soon as a beautiful lawn, a tall fence or a sign marked “private property” appeared, they became barriers to me and my natural right to walk. At a very young age, I started to see these invisible and invented lines that created colonial borders. Turtle Island had been cut up and portioned out like a big cake. Ironically, the imaginary line between Canada and the United States has its own lawn that runs for about 2,171 km. Each country is responsible for the three metres of lawn that lines its side of the border. The International Boundary Commission reports an annual budget of 1.4 million dollars to tend to this grass. That’s a pricey mow.

To me, the arrival of grass lawns on this continent symbolized not only the colonization of the land, but also of our minds.

We’ve become prisoners of a formula, a system, an image of economic status. I can flip back to the memory of my husband showing me around his village and telling me, “The state of the neighbour’s lawn is obviously a big deal!”

Lawns are a concept that has colonized the world. Laws have been passed to protect them, to force the neighbourhood to respect them and even prevent people from replacing them with something else. And yet more and more people want to decolonize their lawns! Instead of this venerated grass, why not plant native flowers for the pollinators, set up vegetable gardens, or even just stop watering them all the time?

Lawns first appeared in medieval times with the commons, which lords made available to their subjects so they could pasture their animals and demonstrate their social status as good Christians. Now, we can go to the middle of the desert and be welcomed by a manicured lawn measuring 362,000 square metres that says, “Welcome to Dubai.”

On November 4, the Financial Times ran the headline, “Elon Musk has parked his Tesla on the White House lawn,” highlighting the additional power gained by the billionaire following the election of Donald Trump.

Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, has long spoken of his dream to colonize Mars. NASA and SpaceX intend to go to Mars within 20 years. It’s a dream he’s nurtured and hoped to accomplish for many years. To do so would involve terraforming this distant planet with the help of plants from Earth. One plant in particular: a type of moss from the steppes of the extreme desert landscapes of Tibet and Antarctica, also known as Syntrichia caninervis. Lab experiments show that it can survive extremely cold temperatures and deadly levels of radiation such as those found on the surface of Mars. Just the thing to colonize the Red Planet!

In 2024, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson emphasized the absurdity of this plan, saying, “If that’s Earth plan B, what did you do to Earth that now you’ve got to go to Mars? […] If you’ve messed up Earth but you’re good enough to turn Mars into Earth, then you can turn Earth back into Earth and never have to go in the first place!”

We should free our minds from colonial thinking and allow Earth to heal, rather than trying to grow lawns on Mars.

Why? Because the first option is straight out of science fiction, while the latter is both based in and supported by science.