Why Is Watching Grass Grow Interesting?

Who reads this? You do. The Salish Sea News and Weather blog is 10 months old and received 2,001 visits in June. The Salish Sea Communications blog is 9 months old and received 2,456 visits last month.

The most visits by far among the 7,996 total visits to the Communications blog are 2,451 visits to the April 2, 2012 blog about “Watching the Grass Grow,” which featured the web site “Watching Grass Grow: The most exciting/boring web site in the world.”

I find that fascinating, that readers find watching grass grow fascinating.

Time-lapse photography is fascinating.

I grew up watching the Disney film The Living Desert, a 1953 documentary about the plants and animals of the desert of the Southwestern U.S. I remember there’s this big thunderstorm and flood waters, then all the desert plants burst into bloom. That fascinated me and made me an environmentalist.

Bill McKibbon, however, in The End of Nature says that documentaries like that and those that show action scenes of predator and prey spoiled our sense of the natural world. Most of the time, in nature, nothing happens. Nothing you can see really happens— and we get bored. Like some people get bored watching baseball. Or watching grass grow.

On the news and weather blog, something’s happening— or seems to be happening-- every day.

On the communications blog, the second most-read blog was about eating: “Toro, Poke and Ceviche”

Thank you, readers. You fascinate me.

--Mike Sato