2563. Gardenworld atmosphere

We are disoriented. Moved out of our normal zone of semi stability. It hasn’t been perfect but we could imagine a life. We need to land somewhere. Gardenworld is, in the ideal, probably a garden with lots of vegetables next to buildings where people live, and maybe there’s a small amphitheater for classes, entertainment, and community meetings. The way it will be implemented will depend upon local conditions and resources, sometimes city ruins, sometimes so on the margin of wilderness. The variety of implementations will be huge. Food, aesthetics, the human life cycle and good governance are design criteria for what I am bluntly calling Gardenworld. Since we all want to live in some combination of civilization and nature, from a vase of flowers in the living room to a path in the wilderness, and even a pathless wilderness, let's use our wealth to go there. Gardenworld is not a plan, but a guide, Plans are brittle, guidelines are flexible and dependent on local creativity and judgment.

Gardenworld is quite profound, an entrance into a different world, with different feelings. Instead of cities and traffic there is more calm, more stirring up inner thoughts no longer crushed by mechanical noises Instead of surrounded by lots of things that are separate from us, we are immersed in a flow of nature we feel part of. Animals: Squirrels, deer, crows and all the leaves on bushes and tres each alive. Even the rats and mice hint at successful survival; which we will need.

In the future we will need new experiments in agriculture to feed us and stay healthy and educated, and new approaches to structures and housing families and institutions meeting new energy requirements. We will need these to work across the whole human life cycle while weakening class structure. Nature will always be larger than we are and never fully known, from mosquitos to the big bang. Instead of our centuries old strategy of separating ourselves from a controlled nature we need to develop and manage our entanglements with nature.

Gardenworld is the place where humans and the earth come into intimate contact. That relationship has been subjected to exploitation by one segment of humanity - the one percent - taking resources from both earth and the rest of the population. We need to manage this relationship with different governance, different politics, different education and different expectations. We probably are going there but it is wide open as to what it will look like.

Gardenworld is an evolution within economics. The Greeks joined the word for eco - household to nomos, man made law (in contrast to logos, natural law). The goal was the sensible management of estates in all their details. The idea moved into the monasteries with the extension to the management of god’s estate, still using the word economy. _

How to do this is messy. We have the current condition of creeping systems failures. A better future means dealing with ownership, politics, power, love, food, sex, ethics, and the reactions, defensive ad creative, of the human spirit in the context of a world less favorable to human thriving than it has been while we have lived in anticipation of a better not a worse world. We have become part of the project of evolutionary adaptation.

from chapter 3 of Gardenworld politics, Gardenworld: what is it?