Just A Dry Sense of Humor?

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Have you always had a brown thumb and any plant, no matter how robust, dries up for you? Wonderful, then you have winning potential! Have you consistently forgotten or even deliberately withheld from sprinkling your lawn last summer, and it looked like the dessert outside your living room window? Even better, after all, it increases your chances of becoming a world champion.

Next summer, simply send a photo of your pitful, dried-out lawn to the initiators of the competition “The World’s Ugliest Lawn” to Gotland, Sweden.

The winner will receive a used T-shirt.

The dry humor, of course, has a serious background. On Gotland, precipitation has been decreasing for years, in 2018, just three millimeters of rain fell per square meter between April and September.

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The beautiful Swedish island is a very popular travel destination. About 60,000 tourists come to visit during the summer, many own houses with large plots of land, and of course, they are supposed to look pretty, so everybody waters their gardens and laws and this is why the water levels in the reservoirs and lakes are falling and the groundwater reservoirs are emptying much faster than they could be replenished in winter.

On the island, people have been trying to save water in various ways for years. When the city officials banned watering last summer because of drought, they also tried to make a virtue out of necessity.

A contest was started, «Gotland’s fulaste Gräsmatta», the ugliest lawn in Gotland. The dry sense of humor must have struck a chord worldwide. The contest website and associated Instagram posts have been clicked 788 million times.

While it sure makes us all smile, actually, however, this competition is not funny, but a kind of preventive action. Unesco has long warned of a “global water crisis.”

The number of people suffering from water shortages will more than double from 930 million in 2016 to 1.7 to 2.4 billion in 2050. Mimmi Gibson from the Gotland Regional Office explained that the competition is basically about bringing positive change and showing that sustainability doesn’t have to be boring.

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Since it is also expected to become much drier on Gotland in the future, the municipality has repeated the competition this year. In addition, according to Gibson, the serious nonsense, together with other initiatives, has led to a five percent reduction in water consumption on the island. In a report, the OECD praised the initiative as an example of how to save water and at the same time initiate a debate on the possibilities of saving water.

The jury was sure that Marcus Nordström had the ugliest front garden to offer.

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They praised his property as a really lousy meadow that lives up to all our expectations of Gotland’s ugliest lawn. Norström hadn’t watered a single time all year, you don’t see a blade of grass anywhere, only some deep-rooted weeds still seem to get some residual moisture.

This year, too, the jury was full of praise when they praised Stina Östman’s property for its ugliness:

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The winners will be paid for the visit of a landscape architect who specializes in sustainable gardens for periods of low rainfall. Östman also inherited the T-shirt with the inscription “The World’s Ugliest Lawn” from Norström.

From other parts of the world, front yard owners also came forward and asked if they could participate. One Berliner, for example, argued that the German capital has always been a global hotspot of ugliness. Ranjeet Tate from California captioned his desolate photo: “This is the ‘front yard’ after a futile attempt to turn it into a vegetable garden. The ground is so hard that even the squirrels have given up.”

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For its worldwide competition, the municipality has now even been able to win over the Hollywood actress Shailene Woodley to conduct an interview with last year’s winner Marcus Norström from Gotland. It was probably intended as a kind of smooth info section with celebrity glitter but the organizers did the math without the gardener.

For people with a convoluted understanding of irony, the interview is a pearl of the art of entertainment, as Norström consistently resists all small talk, and his syntax is as sparse as his front yard. Woodley tries several times to tempt him into something like a surprisingly blossoming subordinate clause, but to do nothing, Norström sticks to his dry-as-nails one-liners: Yes. No. Maybe.

Only once does he allow himself to be tempted into a whole sentence, when Woodley asks what the secret of his impressive dessert is, he says: “Keep the garden consistently dry, the children play on it one way or another.”

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While some still live in denial, most of us are fully aware of the climate change we are already seeing and we know, this is just the beginning.

How people deal with it, and how they adjust interests me. I find it fascinating. From humor in Gotland, Sweden to a floating city in the Maldives we are capable of change -always have been.