CHAPTER 5. GARDENWORLD ELABORATED
i[i]
The caption reads, “Marcelina Figueroa treats her roost in East Harlem likea combination takeout counter and dispensary offering ice-water coffee, food, Band-Aids or Tylenol to those who are in need. “
ii[ii]
What lady Figuroa is doing isalready GardenWorld, but it could be enhanced with a few geraniums in that window.
GardenWorld starts and is, everywhere. It is a question of working withwhat’s good, looking for connections, and keep going. I’d like to talk aboutchange. GardenWorld is an approach which looks at everything as an opportunityfor human and nature co-enhancement.GardenWorld has a deep continuity in cultural history and it is already present in nearly everyone’s mind, only unnamed. Remember, GardenWorld is notan end point we can see clearly now, but a guide to a future that gives us a way of making decisions and trying experiments now. It is not only an arrow toward thefuture but a way of reorganizing and emphasizing or deemphasizing things alreadyin place. It means finding what people care about and bringing those together
under the imagination of GardenWorld. It is not sacrificing the present for thefuture, but enhancing the present for the near future and creating an approachwhich has organic flexibility for further future experimentation, which, givenenergy, climate and population crises, it looks like we will need. GardenWorldshifts the balance from an engineering planning method to an organic planningattitude. It is consistent with the idea of sustainability as allowing for futuregenerations opportunity’s at least as rich as our own.The promise of GardenWorld is not just good medicine, but helps us visionan attractive way to live, releasing creativity for engineering, arts and biology – aswell as new forms of governance and respect for the human life cycle.There is a fascinating project called The Long Now. The idea is to encourageus to longer term thinking. The founders, such as Brian Eno and Stewart Brandestimated that since complexifying civilization began about 10,000 years ago, whatcould civilization looks like 10,000 years from now? (Dante thought that theChristian world would last 2700 years and that being in the middle in 1350 he was privileged) Obviously we don’t know what ten thousand years will bring, butthinking about what it could be like, good and bad, leads us to make differentchoices now. One of their projects is to build a clock that could last 10,000 years,as the pyramids have, so far, lasted 4,000. GardenWorld is mindful in the sameway, suggesting that if we are more organic and less mechanical we have a greater chance that flexible evolution can survive across climate change and socialcollapse. What amazes me is the degree to which ordinary citizens grasp this issue – and are becoming basically, more tentative, more humble, more flexible andmore fair, with increased sense of the need for local solutions. Yet popular consumer culture, driven by business through a combination of production,advertising and subsidies, wants us to favor mere consumerism as a way of life.
Alternative to dominant consumerism
GardenWorld is a reaction against a thing oriented consumerism. Not that products or “things” are bad, taken them one at the time, but out of balance. The business community sees a world where “there is no human need without asatisfying product.” If we think of the human in his or her lived totality, the psychological plays a large part. Theories – actually social criticisms – of alienation, lack of beauty and lack of “humanism”, are aspects of many reactionsagainst the marginalization of experience and the front and center star quality given
to mass produced commodities. We push buttons and avoid spills and relationships.Hand – eye – ear coordination and pleasing others is given up to a world of peoplestrangers to each other and anxiously content with readymade things. We replacenuance with buttons, rubatto with its heart pauses, and glissando with its ear teasing, with clicks.Theodore Roszak
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in 1992 wrote
The Voice of the Earth
, a penetrating book making common cause between the beauty of the environment and our inner life. Experience is whole, and includes what came to be called internal andexternal, and our well being is based on our being situated in, in continuity with, ahealthy environment. This way of approaching the environment goes beyondRachel Carson’s earlier book in 1951,
The Sea Around Us,
which opened at us andup to the idea that while the ocean was large, it could be polluted. Her writingmade many of us aware for the first time that the earth was small. I just reread my1992 notes on
The Voice Of Earth
and see how much I was influenced by this book. Roszak’s attractive thinking about our personal health being a reflection of the health of the earth also led him and others to a movement called “eco- psychology” which as an educational discipline stressed the intimacy betweenenvironment and psychic well-being. I attended a workshop at Findhorn, theorganic community on the north coast of Scotland, where this movement had itsfirst gathering. It was one of the most deeply attractive meetings I’ve ever attended. The participants had lots of real world experience and - yes, and - stillhad a deep compassion for everyone and a desire for the creation of a healthyworld for all. Of course such a GardenWorld environment is in contrast to theworst sins of modernism in design, with its aloof coldness and its abuse by narroweconomic interests of cubic feet and bottom line logic without regard for larger system costs. Le Corbusier actually wrote of the “efficiency” of grid streets.Later – I am only reflecting on a few from the many critical books publishedin these years - James Hillman and Michael Ventura wrote
We Have A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World Is Getting Worse.
The idea is that wehumans have exquisite sensitivity to the surrounding environment, and theenvironment is all messed up, so we feel bad and go to the psychotherapist, who,having heard us, asks us about our childhood. The result is that psychotherapymakes political idiots of us all, breaking the link between our experience of our surroundings, how we feel, and what we might do about it. Hillman uses the world“soul,” not as a thing, but as a quality of our experience. There is no question butour own “soul”, the quality of our experience, is deeply affected by our surroundings: a crowd fun to walk through, an art museum, a beautiful garden of dancing colors and sleeping shadows, home full of taste and care, where porcelainand silver, paintings and oriental carpets, flowers and fruit, or the simple textures
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Chapter 5
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