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CHAPTER 4. TOWARD THE VISION OF GARDENWORLD -AND AN IMAGE OF A VIABLE FUTURE 
Smart enough to create opportunities, dumb enough to misuse them.
 We have created an intense and affluent world of wealth of sorts, butdistributed it miserly. The product of industrial civilization has been distorted by anownership elite that has, through law and regulation, concentrated wealth and power and off loaded costs on to others. The result is in some ways attractive buton balance is socially and environmentally unsound. Above all, through lack of vision, the way we have allowed the economy to be managed has severely failed toachieve the promise that seemed ready to manifest itself after WWII. Simply beingaligned with the economy, as owner, manager, or consumer, has absorbed theenergy of most people, and many of them are not happy with the results. Instead of shared wealth we have bifurcated society, domestically and internationally.I believe that most people have a deep image in their mind of good living,and I believe that image usually contains a natural setting, close or near at hand,clean air, flowing water, greenery, flowers, sun and shade. It usually takes the formof a house surrounded – and hence separate from other houses – by trees, grass,gardens and cultivation, then extends outward to green or interestingly shaped hillsor sky, streams, rivers and lakes, oceans or mountains. The human community, inthis image, feels contained and protected by a mostly benevolent natural settingswith seasonal and diurnal rhythms. We also want one or more of the landscapesfrom the home to open towards easily accessible work, markets, arts, and meeting places.So we are also attracted to civilization: the bustle of invention and newideas, high art and good conversation, watching strangers and products, rhythmsand information. The two desires; for rural calm and downtown stimulation are both powerful. Is there a modern place between the rural idiocy of a mind withoutcompanionship and the urban sprawl of a mind without safety?The body must be connected to air, food, and water, but humans, oftenrestless, are constantly working to improve their circumstances beyond the basics,from small improvements to the home up to and including the kind of cultivation
 
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of space and institutions that mean civilization. Politics should support thearticulation of these desires into an attractive scene that works on the eye, heart andmind, and helps integrate the generations. We have, in 100,000 years or so, learnedfrom many kinds of animals, also restless, in the ways they seek out comfortableand clean places in their environments. All human built environments have easilydiscernible connections with animal styles.Interviews I was doing prior to the 2004 election showed that even thosewhose job it is to keep this economy and its policies going, the super managers of systems - agencies and corporations, and owners of capital - desire to live, if notwork, in a world closer to nature.In the cultural atmosphere post the Second World War - the image of thefuture centered on the modern city of tall buildings, bullet trains and highways, places where a stray pigeon or cat could never survive - much less a child or anelder. These techno-fantasies - Buck Rogers space wars environments - were reallythe only "vision" of a future we have had. The reality is in some ways like that,especially the new cities in the newer nations, but with more trash, violence, fatand demoralized people, and the landscape narrowly owned. What is thealternative? People yearn for the house surrounded by trees, away from noise and pollution. But they think of living like this as the reward for superior wealth and performance, leaving an increasing majority of people behind. But couldn't their view be more inclusive and interesting, instead of leaving behind squalor andconfusion, making the whole world GardenWorld, with its local variants,dependent on climate, tradition and resources?I propose that by blending technological advances that impact theenvironment, education, local building and land remediation and enhancement, wecan create the obvious, a world where architecture, landscape, agriculture, privategardens and public parklands - all blend into a cultivated landscape mixinggrowing and making with vital human lives. I've been calling this GardenWorld,and find people take to this image, and the name. As I return to audiences whereI've raised the issue, people seem to remember it, even savor it, wanting to knowwhat's next.GardenWorld is a balance between growing people and growing society inways consistent with nature. Not a balance of maximum exploitation but arelationship between humans and the natural world that, from a human perspectiveand with evidence from a healthy environment, enhances both.From the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the gardens in Persian miniatures,the public parks of Paris, Constable's English rural landscapes, the gardens of the
 
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impressionists, the cultivated environments of Japan, to Central park and thevarious projects from college campuses to the entrance to Yosemite or NiagaraFalls, we have a great tradition to build on that is attractive, with nearly universalassent. Olmstead led the way in all these. We are fortunate in the US that many of his projects, best known for Central Park in Manhattan, set a direction of makingthe US into such a cultivated world of balance, integrating humans into nature as a place of meditation, food, movement, beauty, connection with birds and critterswho we feel closer to, rather than the frontier world of fighting the nature that held bears and wolves, snakes and mountain lions, and the grimmer images from fairytales and dragon slaying that supported urban paranoia about "the wild".There are so many past and existing models to lead us onward. For example,the Italian city of Mantua, home of Monteverdi, was a multi-islanded city. AldusHuxley said it was the most romantic city in the world, a lake city of floatingislands interconnected by beautiful causeways.Rising sea levels, instead of being seen as a threat, could be seen as anextraordinary opportunity. If rising sea water were allowed into low lying areas andturn it into shorelines for recreation and water for aqua-culture and new attractivelandscapes, the whole issue turns around. What is important is to make sure thatthe new shoreline is at least as long or longer than the old one and new uses aredeveloped.GardenWorld is not a one-size-fits-all planning task like Le Corbusier’snineteen twenties plan to replace much of Paris with a new garden city. For GardenWorld should be an evolution over time responsive to the existing buildings, the settings, preservation, and the emerging possibilities that peoplediscover as GardenWorld unfolds. We are looking for organic growth thatintegrates people and nature, a mixture of ease and innovation, creativity andrestful appreciation. Not narrowing of the range of activities, but supportive, from bustle of our ambitions to the sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.GardenWorld, by allowing for continuity between the built and the natural givesmuch greater scope for design and living conditions than is typical of even the best“communities” or new towns being designed now. It is not to design isolated“lots”, but creatively interconnected pieces of terrain. Too many designedcommunities are conspicuously framed by new roads and inside the wholedevelopment looks slightly abstract, as though it is still on the drawing board.There is no reason why a cultivated environment cannot be kind to technology, art,animals and plants at the same time, and therefore much kinder to us as well. TheGardenWorld ideas have a long history in America from the “City on a hill”, the
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