First things first: Touching grass does work. If you’re hard at work, logging hours in a potentially PFAS-infested building, or a heavily insulated and asbestos-lined apartment, drinking polluted water through a months-old Brita filter, anything helps — especially stepping out of your apartment, house or study station and rubbing your hands on that sweet, sweet grass. 

However, grass helps less when you realize Bermuda grass, the grass in Stafford Commons, Miller Fields and much of the rest of our campus, is misleadingly named, invasive and a product of an elitist custom we’ve inherited from English manorial culture.

Bermuda grass is not from Bermuda; it’s actually a tropical grass native to Africa and was established as a staple grass in the Southern states as early as 1751. 

And it is, well, nice. Personally, I enjoy the tough grass. It’s perfect for taking off in a sprint, and there are some excellent frolicking opportunities with every field of Bermuda grass on campus. It does, to varying degrees, provide a backdrop for clovers, dandelions and even some wild onions, a lot of which are edible and quite nice. 

Looking at a field or median, you may be surprised at the sheer diversity nature has to offer even under the regime of an invasive tropical species.

Two things in particular throw this semi-rosy view into peril: what the larger Triangle area, nay, the entire Southeast once was and the vast potential of what it could be. Both of these things have to do with the University’s origins.

NC State is a land-grant university. But granted from where, exactly? Short answer, the Morrill Act of 1862. Long answer, centuries of colonialism, genocide and cultural assimilation of the Native peoples who occupied this land before the European incursion and the establishment of the United States. Both these answers have implications on how we should be treating the land.

Before Raleigh was named after that “stupid git,” Sir Walter Raleigh, it was an oak savanna, full of diverse grasslands with grazing elk and bison, with many more pollinators and birds, maintained by complex fire regimes undertaken by the The Occaneechi Band of Saponi, Saponny, Haliwa-Saponi and Coharie. Now, a lot of it has been converted into development, agriculture and lawns — the great United-Statesian garden.  

The Morrill Act of 1862 established the University as a college to advance the “agricultural and mechanical arts,” which can be boiled down to research, education and extension into the community. The University offers many service learning opportunities and collaboration with public and private entities. The University is dedicated to the application of found knowledge and community learning. 

So combining these two perspectives, an alternative to the Bermuda grass — and don’t even get me started on the Kentucky bluegrass, which is actually from Europe — might be a native prairie with raised beds containing novel products of biotechnology and genetic breeding. Or imagine a monocropped cornfield with maxed out GMO statistics in the midst of an oak savanna with a deftly maintained border. The possibilities are literally endless.

All that would be is an externalization of what’s already going on at the University and a coalescence of many conservation projects already at work in the Triangle, including UNC’s botanical gardens, which emphasizes species native to the Triangle.

Not only would this perspective bring a better mental health alternative than touching grass, it would also allow the University to become a sandbox for maintaining novel ecosystems and restoring native ones, two issues that have a global exigence. 

This is largely already happening. On Centennial, you can find many volunteer gardens, gardens where native species naturally land. Behind Hillsborough Street, you can find native gardens, and in many nooks and crannies on campus there’s a lot of diversity and wild areas.

But a lot of these wild areas are overgrown with invasive species, many of which are not talked about enough. This is, of course, a depressing disgrace, especially against the backdrop of the University’s purpose.

There’s no better symbol of this disgrace, this misalignment with our supposed values and what we’re actually doing on the ground, than the misnamed invasive grass claiming to be from around here. That’s why touching grass isn’t enough sometimes. Sometimes, you’ve got to get under the soil.

ARTICLE SUMMARY: Correspondent Joel Beebe presents a compelling case against the grass regime on campus and presents a few alternatives based on the University’s past and mission statement.