One block, one barbecue, two eras, and the herd that ties them together. On the left it's a Saturday in 1957: new cars, mown lawns, food from packages and a siren on a pole. On the right it's someday: the same houses and the same table, but the food comes from the neighbours' gardens, sheep crop the old lawns, bison graze the commons past the last house, and people work at crafts. Then everyone heads to the Beautiful Hensel Thicket for the City Barbecue Festival. Drag the divider to move between eras, and click anyone to hear what they do.
Everyone at the barbecue has a small tag. Click a person (or a tag, or the list below) to read what they do and how they live. The first click also starts the sound: lawn sprinklers and a transistor radio on the left, birds, bees, sheep and a fiddle on the right, crossfading as you drag.
A prairie is kept by grazing and fire. Bison eat the grass and leave most of the flowers, roll out wallows that hold rain, and move on so the grass can rest; that is how the tallgrass stayed tallgrass for about ten thousand years. A lawn is the same ground held still by mowing, fertiliser and gasoline. In the someday half, the animals do the work the mowers did: sheep crop the old lawns and verges on the block, young shepherds move them every morning, and a bison herd grazes the commons and the park. The barbecue is where the neighbourhood shares what the land and the herd gave.
We connect you with grazing and browsing livestock from a herder nearby. They eat what the mower and the blower used to deal with, a young shepherd checks on them twice a day, and we clean up the poop if you want. Tell us about your yard.
How the estimate works. Rough numbers, not a quote. Each kind of growth holds a typical amount of edible dry matter per square metre (lawn least, brush most), and the animals take about half and leave half to regrow. A sheep eats about 1.5 kg of dry matter a day and a goat about 1.3 kg. Sheep get the grass, goats get the brush, vines and brambles, and neither is ever sent alone: both are herd animals. Manure runs about 1 to 2 kg per animal per day, in pellets.
Then they learn the way to kitchen-safe, and teach the next one:
Fermented cabbage slaw is the old way to keep cabbage: shredded, salted and left a few days to sour, like sauerkraut or curtido. Miso and tempeh are fermented too. It's a very alive menu.
The whole city gathers in the Beautiful Hensel Thicket for Tejano barbecue, the best in the land and as close to a sacrament as food gets.
Most things on the left have a counterpart on the right, in the same spot. The siren pole holds bat boxes now; the fallout shelter is the root cellar; the sprinkler became a pond; the driveway is beehives and an apple tree; the paper route became the shepherd's round.
The block needs bread, plates, honey, cloth, wheels and music, and pays the people who make them well. If you're very good at one thing, you can make a living doing it.
When the need for your work dips, the block keeps you going until you find a purposeful use of your time again: learning a neighbour's craft, teaching, building. Nobody has to pretend to be busy.
Daily jobs nobody would do all day, like moving the flock, are shared out and paid. Young people start on them at about 13, the way a paper route used to be a first job: every day, rain or shine, trusted with something.
Where would the support come from? This page doesn't settle that. People have tried versions of it for a long time: medieval craft guilds kept relief boxes for members who were sick or out of work; friendly societies and unions did the same; most countries now run unemployment insurance; and basic-income trials, such as Finland's in 2017 and 2018, found that people's wellbeing improved while their employment barely changed.
Mostly one paycheck per house, often from a big employer; a mortgage made cheap by federal loan programmes; and a car, a TV and a refrigerator bought on monthly payments. If the plant laid you off, unemployment insurance paid part of your wage for a set number of weeks. Those cheap loans and new houses were, by federal underwriting rules and by clauses in the deeds, mostly closed to Black families, which is why this block's 1957 side looks the way it does.
Opens a short form with no name or email field. It carries over only these three answers and a few things about how you used this page (where you left the divider, which scene and season, who you clicked on, whether you turned the sound on). You can add your region if you like. "I like my lawn" counts just as much as "yes, tomorrow". Only totals are ever published, such as "40% would let the animals keep the grass".
A separate mailing list for news when this page improves and when the lab's next app comes out. Your email is used only for these updates, is never linked to your answers in the form, and you can unsubscribe any time.
Our promise. The form collects no names, emails or exact locations, and only totals are shared. The mailing list keeps only what it needs to send updates. The two are kept apart and never matched.