Update oct 21 Here is a continuously updated rough draft of a very short version of Gardenworld Politics. The larger book is at Amazon. Rough, because why hold back?
Where are we?
We are approaching a consensus that there is no human intervention that can stop the burning of fossil fuels. This means that temperature will continue to rise, even with no fossil fuel burning. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will keep trapping heat and atmospheric temperatures. And remember 1.5 degrees is not just being added to your favorite beach on a spring afternoon, but the increased heat means greater turbulence in the atmosphere, and hence both colder and warmer, wetter and dryer events, spread around the world. We probably are at the end of the fossil fuel energy regime.
It is important to remember that climate change is not occurring in isolation but is a symptom of deeper changes occurring on the earth. Fish in decline, both by warmer water and by over-fishing, are typical of the problems that mix natural and human activity, as part of a general culture we are now in, a culture of extraction of wealth from land and people without renewal. An important example is soil depletion, (the sucking of nutrients necessary for human health out of the soil. We share this planet with many other species from whom we have learned housing, eating, hunting, camouflage, song and so much else. We don’t really know where we are, Any emergent system will have antecedents in our present.
Is a high-tech AI and big data infrastructure emerging? By intent or spontaneous integration of multiple trends? Could such a network of nodes be used to manage the world's resources with a new understanding that we and all the other species and the earth to co-exist with co-action? We are coming to see ourselves as ecosystems embedded within ecosystems.
What is Gardenworld?
I believe that Gardenworld, the blending of gardens for food and shelter Most talk of what to do stops with diagnosing the problem over and over. What is not discussed are images of what we might hope to live like, long-term or intermediate is the livability of intermediate stages for getting to a better future. for living should be built, designed, and experimented with in the same space. Such villages provide meaning and safety for children and old people. It is toward concrete images of how we could live with each other through the human life cycle with grace and appreciation. Along with color, music and fresh food comes cuisine. The experimentation with food taste, look and preparation in the world right now is one of the great movements of our time, complementary to regenerative agriculture.
Gardenworld is not anti-technology, but a generator of legitimate uses of it. Berners-Lee's proposal that the internet is free of brokers has irs dangers of being just entropic -high confusion - rather than organizing around aproaches. Village co-managing resources and sharing stories of what works and doesn’t will be ubiquitous if the electricity to run them can be found.
Of course, the context of humanity struggling with an emerging blanket of catastrophes makes this difficult, but still the best path to work towards with some hope. Gardenworld needs to be visualized and plausible.
Gardenworld is not a simple technical solution in isolation made by anonymous people. It is an expression of vitality, color, and art by people engaged with their lives. Villages around the world have vegetable markets and communal spaces jazzed up with color from many sources, from the color of many varieties of vegetables to ribbon, paper, carvings, textiles clothes highly decorated in village-shared patterns and draped over poles protecting conversations, construction of food stalls entrances and exits, often with music and playgroups with children.
Gardenworlds will probably face integration on increasing in scale into watersheds, bioregions, continents, and earth. Bit Gardenworls are key to vitality and meaningful lives. It is not degrowth but a serious shift in regime. As one element, from factory manufacturing to 3-D printing.
How did we get here?
From hunter-gatherers till now. we watch each other. mimic each other, are curious and inventive while holding on to tradition. The Dawn of Everything shows the spectrum of human conversation and political invention. Obviously, population and tech have developed together. What is less obvious is that there has always been an elite and they have more or less kept control from the beginning of history to the present. Along with the political forms we have largely ignored narratives about who we are, stories that suggest the human intellect and imagination are caught up in deep streams of meaning and belief. The lack of interest in these deeper layers makes modern civilization very vulnerable to bad ideas. We can l; learn songs’perhas its the way we learn cultures, not as truth out there but as performance here. The shift from surface harvesting to digging coal and pumping oil has led us to overshoot earth's capacity to sustain us.
What can happen:
Can we reconfigure the way we live? No aspect of contemporary life will be isolated. The system is highly interconnected and therefore "solutions” are not going to help because changing one thing is likely to make others worse. A green economy clearly just increases fossil fuel use. We are being very stupid about systems. Future scenarios — what can happen and what we can do are tentative because so much is changing: war, technology, governance, and cultural values. The very meaning of the material world is changing as it incorporates more living matter and reduces the influence of dead matter - things. The current drama and tragedy in the Middle East highlight what can happen when a million people are threatened. Large events such as war and desertification will mostly hide but not entirely obliterate local efforts at survival with grace. Some places will survive as survivable for a longer time than others. Can these pull together and create long-term human futures? Open questions but engageable by us with courage, caring, and toughness.
What should we do?
Can we be thinking activists? The steps toward Gardenworld: begin with reading everything and refraining from acts that make the climate worse. Hard to do because most of what we do is in the culture of fossil fuel-produced energy, largely electricity, and this will be vastly reduced, gone. We will need to learn how to live with misery around us, if not locally, certainly on other parts of the globe.
We lack the skills to support ourselves. Imagine back to burning wood from houses and furniture. facing the loss of the last knife, the holes in clothes with no seamstress in our small gatherings. Where will the next pair of jeans come from? Some of us will make the effort to respond but many won't.
Gardenworld can be attractive but it is a lifeboat strategy. The monasteries were somewhat similar, pulling together in small communities to create survival with threads of civilization.
Keep in mind that all our constructive acts can be informed by the implicit goal of building our chosen community as Gardenworld.