Manual reel lawnmowers and the broader implications of what they represent

For about 5 years now, I've been using a manual reel lawnmower. I don't have a particularly small lot -- 50' x 130', and my house is small, so a lot of that is land -- but it's still not that much of an ordeal. It is really no heavier than a manually-propelled gasoline lawnmower, thought it has a narrower cutting path and requires a few more traversals of the lawn to get it cut.

There are some basic rules that you have to observe to get along with it:

• don't less the grass get too long: if the grass gets too long, it will be difficult to cut and you will need to make multiple passes
• keep it sharp: you don't have to sharpen it very often (maybe once a year, if the blades are of good quality), and sharpening is very easy if you use a gelatinous sharpening compound
• make sure it's adjusted properly: if it's not adjusted properly, it will still cut but will be noisier and more difficult to push

One of the interesting things about the above rules is that you can make the same mistakes with a gasoline mower, but when your own human energy is at stake, rather than the energy stored in a fuel sold to us by violent dictatorships in exchange for our financial support, you tend to pay more attention to them. All of the above will cause a gasoline mower to use more energy to do the same job, but it's invisible to us because it's economic to use brute force to overcome them. Gasoline is relatively inexhaustible when compared to our own body energy. We have to rest if we get tired, but if we run out of gasoline we can just drive to the gas station to get more. There, too, lies another example: we wouldn't push a couple of thousand pounds of steel to the gas station for no reason other than to go to the gas station if we had to expend our own energy to do it. Even if we hired someone else to push us, we'd do it in something a whole lot lighter.

This is just a tiny example of how tolerant we are of waste if it doesn't affect us materially. It is duplicated many times over in the most seemingly-insignificant things we do every day. It makes me wonder how different our world in general would be if we had to live more closely to the real consequences of our behaviour.

The garbage strike in Toronto, for example. What if we had no-one to clean up our mess for us? What if we had to live next to the garbage we create? It can be done. If you only used natural products from the environment around you, none of the waste would be garbage that couldn't be used in one way or another for something else. It would also be apparent when we were over-using those resources because we'd just be able to see that the trees and shade were all gone, the water had all dried up, and the animals weren't coming here anymore to participate in the ecosystem.

You get time to think about these things when you're behind the relative quiet of a manual reel lawnmower.