Weaver Street Market/Community Realty Share
Environmental Landscaping Award

With global warming comes traumatic climate changes in all areas of the world. Whereas some areas are receiving more rainfall than ever thought possible, other areas, like Carrboro are receiving record inches of less rainfall. Community Realty and Weaver Street Market, adjusting well to their role as community leaders, have taken the bull by the horns, and developed a landscaping technique that is both stunningly beautiful and very efficient.

As a joint effort between the two mega-organizations in the forefront of ecological/poor people advocacy, and with a modesty as small as their success is large, neither organization will take responsibility for the landscaping, so we at The Carrboro News will give them a joint award.

The success of the landscaping lies in the complex images one sees, depending on whether they are close or far from the landscaping. From far away, you see a desert landscape with little tufts of greenery, which offers just enough green to make it look like a living desert, but not too much that our precious water resource would have to be wasted on it.

As you move closer to it, almost before your eyes, it is transformed into a hardwood forest, that has been clear-cut, with only the bark from the chainsawed trees left behind. The gravel walkway, replicates the walkways the happy lumberjacks would trudge down, swinging chainsaws in hand, as they happily cut down the 200 year old trees to make paper for our Sunday newspapers.

Maintenance also is as simple as raking a few globs of bark here or there or blowing it back in place with a leaf blower turned on to it's highest power, but that is only necessary in the event of an exceptionally heavy rainfall when the bark mulch has a tendency to flow down with the water. Save the watery deluge, this landscaping motif is maintenance free. In an attempt to limit the maintenance even more, a Carrboro company is sending it's lumberjacks into the petrified forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains to cut down some of the trees. "The petrified bark with it's heavier mass will be more resistant to the erosive forces of water", explained lumberjack Swade, "Once we can figure out how to cut more of the petrified wood, I believe we'll have a nice little solution, but as it stands, we're just going through way too many chains to make this a profitable venture!".

"The real advantage, other than the water conservation and ease of maintenance," explained the architects of this brilliant idea, "is it's multi-purposefulness and the ease with which it can be quickly converted to another purpose. If we need extra parking, we just rake everthing to the side and presto!- we have eight more parking spaces. We got that idea when we went to the Hurricanes game and watched them skating on ice, the very next day we saw a concert on the floor erected over the ice."

The Carroboro News wishes Swade luck with cutting down the Petrified Forrests and congratulates Community Realty and Weaver Street Market for their innovation their approach to water saving landscaping techniques.