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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, but

distributed it miserly. The product of industrial civilization has been distorted by an
ownership 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 but
on 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 to
achieve the promise that seemed ready to manifest itself after WWII. Simply being
aligned with the economy, as owner, manager, or consumer, has absorbed the
energy 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 form
of a house surrounded – and hence separate from other houses – by trees, grass,
gardens and cultivation, then extends outward to green or interestingly shaped hills
or sky, streams, rivers and lakes, oceans or mountains. The human community, in
this image, feels contained and protected by a mostly benevolent natural settings
with seasonal and diurnal rhythms. We also want one or more of the landscapes
from 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 new
ideas, high art and good conversation, watching strangers and products, rhythms
and 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 without
companionship and the urban sprawl of a mind without safety?
The body must be connected to air, food, and water, but humans, often
restless, 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 the
articulation of these desires into an attractive scene that works on the eye, heart and
mind, and helps integrate the generations. We have, in 100,000 years or so, learned
from many kinds of animals, also restless, in the ways they seek out comfortable
and clean places in their environments. All human built environments have easily
discernible connections with animal styles.
Interviews I was doing prior to the 2004 election showed that even those
whose 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 not
work, in a world closer to nature.
In the cultural atmosphere post the Second World War - the image of the
future 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 an
elder. These techno-fantasies - Buck Rogers space wars environments - were really
the 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, fat
and demoralized people, and the landscape narrowly owned. What is the
alternative? 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 and
confusion, making the whole world GardenWorld, with its local variants,
dependent on climate, tradition and resources?
I propose that by blending technological advances that impact the
environment, education, local building and land remediation and enhancement, we
can create the obvious, a world where architecture, landscape, agriculture, private
gardens and public parklands - all blend into a cultivated landscape mixing
growing 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 where
I've raised the issue, people seem to remember it, even savor it, wanting to know
what's next.
GardenWorld is a balance between growing people and growing society in
ways consistent with nature. Not a balance of maximum exploitation but a
relationship between humans and the natural world that, from a human perspective
and 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 the

various projects from college campuses to the entrance to Yosemite or Niagara
Falls, we have a great tradition to build on that is attractive, with nearly universal
assent. 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 making
the US into such a cultivated world of balance, integrating humans into nature as a
place of meditation, food, movement, beauty, connection with birds and critters
who 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 fairy
tales 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. Aldus
Huxley said it was the most romantic city in the world, a lake city of floating
islands interconnected by beautiful causeways.
Rising sea levels, instead of being seen as a threat, could be seen as an
extraordinary opportunity. If rising sea water were allowed into low lying areas and
turn it into shorelines for recreation and water for aqua-culture and new attractive
landscapes, the whole issue turns around. What is important is to make sure that
the new shoreline is at least as long or longer than the old one and new uses are
developed.
GardenWorld is not a one-size-fits-all planning task like Le Corbusier’s
nineteen 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 people
discover as GardenWorld unfolds. We are looking for organic growth that
integrates people and nature, a mixture of ease and innovation, creativity and
restful 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 gives
much 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 designed
communities are conspicuously framed by new roads and inside the whole
development 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. The
GardenWorld ideas have a long history in America from the “City on a hill”, the
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image of good living and cultural leadership, of early puritans in Massachusetts, to

the realization of a natural place in Central Park.
Leo Marx while professor of history at MIT, in his still extraordinary gift,
his 1965 book, The Machine in the Garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in
America, helped lay out the psychological and cultural issues as reflected in
American literature when it is read deeply. Through the great American writers, the
ideal landscape was portrayed as “A place where civilization and the wilderness
meet and science and technology can be made to serve a rural ideal.” He called this
the “middle place” showing how deep is the American desire for the GardenWorld,
and how reality of economic interests and perceived benefits kept collapsing us
towards the machine world. He shows that “in between” the urban and the
wilderness, the garden is what the real reformers had in mind.
William Cronon's Changes in the land: Indians, colonists and the ecology of
new England, showed that the New England landscape to be was founded on a
cultivated forest where underbrush had been cleared by generations of the people
already there, and hunting was easy (with skills). This gives us an image of a
region-wide approach to the natural environment made hospitable to those who
lived with it (though destroyed by those who, as the Chinese say, kan bu dong, “see
not understand”, later discovered it without seeing it).
Captain John Smith of the Jamestown Colony, earliest of settlers, wrote that
Americans, based on what he saw of their character, would ruin the American
landscape rather than love it and cultivate it as a continuous garden from New
England through the eastern seaboard to the south. Smith is an American original,
and much more interesting than we were taught in school. A good book is The
American Dream of Captain John Smith, by Leo Lamay.i[i]
Showing the sensitivity of a landscape designer, Smith suggested a scheme
for making much of America a preserve. They could carefully plan the landscape’s
later appearance and meet the common complaint about America being all woods
into a celebration of its possibilities as a great, natural garden. Occasional stands of
virgin forest could serve as windbreaks, as borders of property, as ornaments for
the tops of hills, as a natural preserve for the way nature was before the white man
came, and simply as decorations for the terrain: “you may shape your Orchards,
Vineyards, Pastures, Gardens, Walkes, Parkes, and Corne fields out of the whole
peece as you please into such plots, one two three, foure, or six, or so many rowes
of well growne trees as you will, ready growne to your hands, to defend them from
ill weather, which in a champion [open land] you could not in so many ages” By
the time of his last publication, Advertisements (1631), Smith realized with
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abhorrence that the colonists were despoiling the wilderness and that the result
would be like the worst sections of England, but he had hoped in The
Generalliistorie (1624) to preserve at least part of the original state of North
America’s East Coast: “her treasures having yet never beene opened, nor her
originals wasted, consumed, nor abused” (2:411). Like all good social thinkers, for
Smith social arrangement and an ethical view go together.
“Though riches now, be the chiefest greatnes of the great: when great and
little are born, and dye, there is no difference: Vertue onely makes men more then
men; Vice, worse then brutes. And those [virtue and vice] are distinguished by
deedes, not words; though both be good, deedes are best” pg 187.
Rockwell Kent, one of our more interesting painters and illustrators, in his
This is my Own wrote about the horror of landscape abuse and political connivance
as seen in New England in the 1930’s.
A very interesting book, not well known, is David Handlin's the American
Home: Architecture And Society, showing how generation after generation
movements arose to make better sense of village and town life in America, only to
be torn apart by wave after wave of new technology. For example, the village green
movement whose village greens were taken for the site of the new railroad stations.
ii[ii]

The Craftsmen Movementiii[iii], from the 1880’s to 1914 proposed small

cottages, “A democratic architecture for a democratic America.” These were
attractive spaces made by a cost saving through a reasonably scaled machine
tooling, creating highly customizable homes filled with artisan made crafts with
color, wood furniture, and local pottery and textiles, silver and glass. The
Craftsmen Movement was cut short by the First World War and the rush to money
in the war’s aftermath. The same kind of war-mindedness and economic urgency
prevents us from such creative thinking now.
Along with seeking out attractiveness in the environment there is seeking
advantage. The city on a hill was for defense. The city on the river was for
transportation and the city at the sea was for ports for larger scale commerce and
war. Factories were located where waste could be dumped, agriculture where land
was good and easy to cultivate which meant access to water and relatively flat,
which competed with housing which sought out the same sites for easy but
unimaginative buildings.
The result is that we live in a built landscape conflicted between the
utilitarian and the attractive. As larger corporations have come to dominate the
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cityscape a utilitarian abstractness has become more dominant. GardenWorld is an

image that seeks a new and friendlier blend between the utilitarian and the
attractive, the urban and the rural, in a full spectrum, but more integrated than
current design, which tends to fragmentation. If the worst were made more
attractive through the addition of simple landscaping, the addition of a trellis,
trees.., and the most attractive made more utilitarian, adding vegetable plots and
paying attention to the weather moderating effects of local planting, and hence
reducing energy consumption, we would already be better off.
If we add increasing population, increasing alienation and health problems,
the needs of children and older people, the needs of lovers and artists and the
simple need for rest and sociability, we see that the current use of land encourages
land hoarding by those who can afford it, and a housing and environmental crisis
for everyone else. Certainly we are moving toward a crisis in land use. The leading
statesman of the current US science establishment, Freeman Dyson, has written
eloquently about land and the future.
The shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and
cities is one of the main themes of human history over the last ten thousand
years. The shift from villages to cities is strongly coupled with a shift from
one kind of technology to another. I find it convenient to call the two kinds
of technology green and grey. The adjective green has been appropriated and
abused by various political movements, especially in Europe, so I need to
explain what I have in mind when I speak of green and grey. Green
technology is based on biology, grey technology on physics and chemistry.
Roughly speaking, green technology is the techcommunities ten thousand
years ting from the domestication of plants and animals, the in, the breeding
of goats and sheep and horsid cows and pigs, the manufacture of textiles and
cheese and wine. Grey technology is the technology that gave birth to cities
thousand years later, starting from the forging of iron, the making of
wheeled vehicles and paved roads, the building of ships and war chariots,
the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs. For the first five of the ten
thousand years, wealth and power belonged to villages with green
technology, and for the second five thousand years wealth and power
belonged to cities with grey technology. Beginning about five hundred years
ago, grey technology became increasingly dominant, as we learned to build
machines using power from wind and water-power were even more heavily
concentrated in cities as grey technology raced ahead. As cities became
richer, rural poverty deepened. This sketch of the last ten thousand years of
human history puts the problem of rural poverty into a new perspective. If
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rural poverty is a consequence of the unbalanced growth of grey technology,

it is possible that a shift in the balance back from grey to green might cause
rural poverty to disappear. That is my dream. iv[iv]
Climate change, natural and industry induced, has social implications in the
way the environment supports where people live, how they are to eat, their morale,
and culture. Climate change will produce migrations and threaten existing
relationships. Rethinking land use is in our future and we should see it as an
opportunity. I suspect that land use is one of the key issues for the future, driven by
new population, climate change, and much higher energy prices with the trend
towards local energy production – which requires land for solar or bio fuels. The
Democratic and Republican leadership never mentioned this issue. Even “housing”
goes unmentioned. The threat is so high and the fallout likely to be so extreme, but
the living conditions for the lower half of the population are increasingly
expensive, and there will be consequences. The hope in the “climate change”
debate is that technical and regulatory solutions will emerge – and we will not have
to do anything. But the reality is that increased population, energy costs, and
climate change, will force the need for action. We need solutions.
And we are writing in difficult times. Each day it seems we are closer to
Middle East chaos, destructive economic ripple effects, migration woes, and a
profound failure of governance and the emergence of corporate feudalism.
Lovelock says that the global warming is enough out of control and our knowledge
is partial that we must anticipate the strong possibility that the tropical regions
become uninhabitable because so dry.
I would like to see this as an opportunity to better our lives. The 80%
solution enlivened by GardenWorld should move us in this direction. The eighty
percent solution includes the kinds of tuning the system that would reverse the
curves of income concentration, wealth concentration, corporate size,
environmental pollution and decline of education, and a health crisis. We also need
a new energy policy and a much friendlier foreign policy. All these are tied
together. Imagine if Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a human development
agenda for California that looked at education and health as enablers for future
success in the context of seeing the obvious connection between health, schools,
jobs and prisons as a single system. I am convinced that 80% of the voters would
vote for this solution if it were offered to them. He is already talking of the
California economy has centered on agriculture and biotech. This framework is
much more realistic than of trying to educate high school students to the older
technologies of silicon valley.
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The need for vision.

"A worldwide business culture
that knows how to create wealth
but not how to distribute it."

“without a vision the people will perish”v[v]

To support the changes I've been proposing, we need a believable and

achievable vision divergent from the present momentum to which most people are
still trying, out of necessity more than conviction, to stay aligned. It is hard to
make changes, especially difficult ones, unless there is a fairly wide spread
acknowledged vision of where we want to go. I think such a vision exists and
much of it is already widespread. A solid alternative, vital, alive, aesthetic,
humane, respecting the need for beliefs and meaning, with a desire for the quality
of real lives, is necessary. With such a vision we could bend the current world trend
towards a better future, and if we can’t create such an alternative, the current trend,
unsustainable, probably breaks into a much rougher world, or, if it coheres, will be
in a tighter more controlled world.
To create a vision that includes at least the elements in that list I keep
working the elements, and playing with alternative scenarios. Here is the frame
that has provided some insights, and I find audiences of many kinds like it. Follow
along with me.
Let’s start with a pair of the largest unknowns about the future: vi[vi]
 Will we solve the major problems? Environment, population, war,
education, families, quality of life?
 Will we do this with large globalizing institutions, or with smaller,
regional and local ones?
This generates four different outcomes, if we move toward the paired
extremes. The scenarios can be summarized in a diagram:
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First, in the upper right, is that we will solve the problems (or at least keep
them managed) with large organizations. This is a kind of official future
describing the way Europe, the United States and parts of Asia seem to be moving.
This is market globalization or technocratic centralism.

Second, that we will solve the problems, but with smaller, local and
regionally focused efforts. We can call this the Jeffersonian Democracy scenario.
Trying large systems and failing, as Germany, Russia, England (more
gracefully), and now the US is dangerously close to, if we follow Jarred Diamond
and Chalmers Johnson, tends toward fascism, the militarized failed large state.
Trying with small local and regional effort and failing, which means scarce
resources, leads to local mafias that try to make deals of security in exchange for
participation and acknowledgement of new tough local power.
Failure on the right side leads towards the left side. This suggests the
importance of staying on the right side.
The major result from these is to notice that the managers and owners that
are propelling us toward the Official Future also prefer the Jeffersonian for their
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personal lives. They want semi-rural homes, even if just for weekends and
vacations, and they would like their children to live in a detached house
surrounded by trees, and even “acreage”, with a school they can walk to and a dog
that can roam with them. This suggests that polarizing between the Technocratic
Future and more regional and local development of Jeffersonian Democracy is not
smart. We need a policy of blending the two with mixed strategies, social policies
that support some degree of globalization, but with renewed focus on local and
regional development. This would pull most people together and prevent the
conflict that would also push us towards the left side of fascist or mafia
“arrangements”, where the result will be to increase policing and isolation, and to
shift the emotional climate towards these negative outcomes.
The way to achieve this complex mixed strategy is to realize that regional
and local development requires a more equitable distribution of resources, and the
education at local levels to make sense with those resources. This approach,
blending globalization and local developments, in order to bend rather than break,
requires that we all learn to deal with complexity and compassion – capacities we
are not good at.
For political dialog, with its need for simplification, contrast with other
views, and attractiveness to the ear and mind and memory, this alternative needs a
name. Major political symbols are evocative of deep meanings. Democracy,
Socialism, Freedom, Rule of Law, Nation, Community all have complex
resonances, sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Evocative symbols are
necessary for the dialog. Another range is in the words death, marriage, child, food,
money, home, art.
GardenWorld, as word and its images, is what I favor for this complex
strategy blending problem solving with the large and the small. It cuts to the core.
It has high contrast with alternatives – the dead and concrete and steel and dirt
trashed misuse of land. . The Japanese countryside gives us a hint at what a well
treated environment can look like. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon could even
help integrate our friends in the Middle East, helping to revive this great tradition.
Fredrick Law Olmstead in creating Central Park in Manhattan set an american
model for city-rural integration that is design based and organic. The environment,
through agriculture, is probably the key infrastructure for our population, much
more important than energy. A GardenWorld is attractive, healthy believable and
possible. It uses the technical, but in the service of the humane and organic. It
offers quality of life for rich and poor.
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GardenWorld is the real contrast to the Buck Rogers sci-fi techno-dominant

world that is our current official direction.vii[vii] GardenWorld allows the humanists,
the religious, and the scientific to have a shared goal of a realizable better world.
Without such a goal, we will see increased terrorism, where each new freedom
fighter embraces a last and self annihilating action in a social field of utter despair.
A person only becomes a suicide bomber when they feel that to not be also
destroys them and their loved ones. One should re-red Camus’s The Rebel, where
he argues that saying “no” is always simultaneously a way of saying “yes” to
trampled on values.
We are dealing with meanings, which the progressive professional
technocratic class forgot to cultivate beyond a scientism that was serving masters
they didn't care to recognize they worked for. There are great traditions of science,
art, governance, and yes religious thought, and only by integrating them in a new
and tolerant way can we avoid factionalism and what the founding fathers feared,
"Interests." We are no longer viewing two potential futures, but comparing where
we are now, the over-commodified and “unnatural” world, to a potential called
GardenWorld. The GardenWorld alternative is worth a new look, with deeper
appreciation for its necessity and benefits. People are ready, with the ugliness
already around us, to move toward a realizable alternative, rather than just vaguely
anticipated “progress”. The wider understanding of income divergence and
environmental stress has decidedly increased people’s desire for new leadership for
a new vision.
We need to bend toward GardenWorld rather than follow the current path
aligning ourselves along the axis of finance, or the systems on which we all
depend, economics, corporations, governments, health, and education. If we don’t
ned thea path we will break. We need to give the religiously inclined a way to
participate in a better future rather than using their own religious beliefs as a way,
out of deeply felt frustration, of saying “no”. We need to provide the technically
and scientifically inclined a real possibility that their creativity will build a better
world. Besides, GardenWorld is a beautiful vision, and worth all our talent to work
for.
“Working” is also becoming increasingly abstract, driven by the
informational aspects of work and the drive for profit and cost cutting. Even the
road crew, agriculture workers, truck drivers, and all “operators” are increasingly
network tied in isolated work spaces, and increasingly live within computer driven
time demands. We needed a more attractive image and experience of work in
society, both to meet our needs, and to create meaning. That is, we need to know
more about what we are doing. A simple example: garbage trucks in many places
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used to have a crew of three, a driver and two loaders. They often switched roles.
You could see them singing, telling jokes, measuring their styles of handling big
cans against each other in a spirit of play. The jobs got redesigned. Now the
trucks have one driver who picks up the cans with a machine forklift. The driver is
alone in the cab for hours and without exercise. Was this job change designed by a
reasonably thinking person? Or slave to the logic of efficiency? Progress?
Dreams, waking and sleeping, can help clarify the issues. A few years ago I
was working with the local Smart Growth Coalition, and we were talking about
how farmers took one of the local valleys and cut it up, across the stream and then
each developed a personal style for their own land. The valley, instead of looking
like a natural or flowing landscape, looked like a collage of pictures of very
different farm images. The result was the “valley” could hardly be seen.
That night I had a dream that at the Louvre there was a discussion among the
Board of Directors about increasing maintenance costs and the threat to the budget.
One of the members suggested auctioning off the Mona Lisa to raise funds. One of
the lawyers on the board suggested that it be cut up in pieces and each sold
separately so more money could be raised (farmland divided is worth more than
farmland in tact). This was done, and each successful buyer ran off with their piece
to hire an artist to “improve” their piece so it would be the most famous of the
fragments.
The point is that our surround is not just us and our private living space, an
office, some frequented stores each an isolated Lego block of personal property,
but we live in a culture that is a whole, which is a manmade fabric, and currently
deteriorating. We have been a part of a whole, we remain inescapably imbedded in
a whole cultural and econo-social context and we will be. Seeing this continuity
across past present and future is the first step toward being able to reinvent and
take responsibility for it, choosing our discontinuities rather than being victims of
them.
The coming of the internet and the virtualization of relationships and
locations lets us gain new perspective on the human creation side of our current
lived environment, and the possibility of rethinking it as easiy as we rethink the
internet environment. “Second Life” suggests that we can also revisit First Life.
(See the parody at http://www.getafirstlife.com/.)
One’s whole life is hard to envisage fully, since it takes having lived one to
get the full idea, but our society is designed around money which means around
business which means around laws and institutions favorable to business. This
biases against the child, the mother, the artist, the old person.
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Erik Erikson a psychologist and artist took a deep look at human

development as he tried to put together his psychoanalytic experience with children
and his travels in different cultures. I find his work helps understand the way the
social world and the natural world can support the development of individual
human lives. Erikson’s perspective on the human life cycle can be very helpful in
mapping human nature into institutions – and GardenWorld. Erikson, uniquely
interested in children, was well aware that children are the core of the next
generation. The path from childhood to maturity is thus a structure in time
integrated with society and with surrounding generations.
It is becoming common to talk about “cradle to cradle” (that is, the end of
one life is the beginning of another) design principles for materials and buildings.
We need to extend that logic to social design and the cradle to cradle life cycle
perspective on human development and the interweaving of generations. Erikson
worked out a “schema”, a kind of road map, of what life is all about, how the
biological interacts with the social to create the self. Most importantly, each stage
is an achievement –or failure – to be integrated into the next biologically emergent
capacity.
I am proposing that we use Erickson’s eight stages of life as a design
template for GardenWorld. In his first work, Childhood and Society, he writes
eloquently about the balance between the mind, the body and society. Any
achievement, or failure to achieve, by a growing person involved all three at the
same time. In that book he presented the model of what he called the human life
cycle, the stages of life, with echoes of Shakespeare, who wrote for Jacques (I
quote at length because we need to be reminded that we have a culture.)
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking* in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
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Even in the canon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon* lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

The stages of life provide a framework for thinking about how society
works, and could work. We can use Erikson’s work as a design template for society
–that is to see what social institutions are necessary and attractive at each stage in
the human life. He saw that each stage could be characterized by an opportunity
and the crisis and the resolution of the stage provided the platform for the next
stage with its own unique qualities. Here is his original model.viii[viii] The diagonal
shows that each stage is built on all the major and minor effects of the success or
failures at previous stages. The stages build upwards as a life does and each stage
is characterized by the emergence of a new biological capacity that creates
opportunities for success or failure, and all the possibilities in between.
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Stage One Oral-Sensory: from birth to one trust vs. mistrust feeding

Stage Two Muscular-Anal: 1-3 years autonomy vs. shame toilet training;

Stage Three Locomotor: 3-6 years initiative vs. guilt independence;

Stage Four Latency: 6-12 years industry vs. inferiority school;

Stage Five Adolescence: 12-18 years identity vs. confusion peer relationships;

Stage Six Young Adulthood: 18-40 years intimacy vs. isolation love relationships; work

Stage Seven Middle Adulthood: 40-65 years generativity vs. stagnation parenting; leadership

Stage Eight Maturity: 65 years until death integrity vs. despair acceptance of one's life.

The focus here is on the unfolding life.

But we can add to the stages for the child the social conditions that are
necessary to support each stage. There is a famous quote, “But who will teach the
teachers?”. We see as that at every stage adults are necessary to help the
developing child, and these adults themselves are in some part of their own life
cycle.
That is, healthy development requires parents, schools, work, and society.
We can add these to Erikson’s diagram, running down the right side.
 16

Stage One Oral-Sensory: from birth to trust vs. mistrust feeding parents
one

Stage Two Muscular-Anal: 1-3 years autonomy vs. shame toilet training; parents

Stage Three Locomotor: 3-6 years initiative vs. guilt independence; parents

Stage Four Latency: 6-12 years industry vs. school; teachers

inferiority

Stage Five Adolescence: 12-18 years identity vs. peer relationships; Teachers, peers
confusion

Stage Six Young Adulthood: 18-40 intimacy vs. love relationships; work Lovers, children
years isolation leaders, teachers,
workers, bosses

Stage Seven Middle Adulthood: 40-65 generativity vs. parenting; leadership Lovers. leaders,
years stagnation workers, grandchildren,
bosses, society

Stage Eight Maturity: 65 years until integrity vs. despair acceptance of one's life. Lovers. leaders,
death grandchildren, workers,
bosses, society

So, for the eight stages, we have four significant social institutions that must not
fail the child.

 Our society needs to provide the conditions were ordinary human beings
can, in their 20’s and 30’s be good parents,
 Our society needs to provide educated and humane teachers and the settings
for education of their students.
 Our society needs to provide work which provides for dignity and creativity
at work and the resources for intimacy outside it.
 Our society needs to provide an interesting milieu that allows each person to
bring together the threads of their life into a meaningful and attractive
pattern.
 17

Society is a complex mosaic of interdependent generations. My local county

government is arguing with needs for new jails and the fact that jails are filled with
people 70% drug dependent and 20% mentally ill, but the county has not talked to
the schools about a joint program and joint metrics to cope with the obvious
independencies.
These life cycle and intergenerational dependencies are essential guidelines
for GardenWorld. Taken together they can be used as a design template, or
guidance, or reference point when looking at any policy in the GardenWorld
context. If the policy does not work well in one or more phases the legislation or
policy proposition should be redesigned, or at least more integrated into policies or
implementations that can balance the consequences. Not only do we need
conditions that support the growing person at each stage but we need people who
themselves are growing to be available at each stage. The picture is of the
interdependencies of generations rather than of one just replacing another.
Children are really stressed in this society. Their choice of violence, drugs,
and video games puts them in control in a world that is so afraid of them getting
hurt, or causing hurt. Traffic, guns, and crowding have been lethal for childhood.
Children used to be able to use the woods, fields, hills, and streams to come to
know themselves in the context of nature. The lack of fit between children’s needs
and the modern commercial environment is a serious design flaw.
The intelligence of a community is largely the ensemble of skills and
routines that are part of the life activity of the people in it. Our reservoir of skills is
shifting. It is not clear how. Kids pay in the interface with buttons rather
cooperating through family, school , sports or work. Adults are also button pushers
rather than tinkerers. Old crafts, especially in building, are gone. Newer autos and
computers do not support tinkering and home repair.
Using Erikson’s sages as a design template, and looking at the consequences
for the older generation that administers each stage, we see a complex
interweaving of generations with specific consequences age by age, that a good
society should support. Put simply any social innovation should work across the
life cycle, having a positive or at least not negate impact, at each phase. This
should be one of the frameworks for analysis any social policy ought to undertake.
In parallel with environmental impact statement we could have “Life cycle” or
“generational impact” statements.
Hanna Arendt, looking at the process of history, was keenly aware that the
next generation took some and not all, added and subtracted, and hence the future
was not entirely predictable nor controllable, nor repeatable. She wrote, “The
 18

human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and

reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave
in a short while’.ix[ix]
Mary Catherine Bateson .has been developing, through a series of books,
most recently in Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in
Transition, the reality that we are in fact strangers to each other even in our own
homes. The parents are from different backgrounds, and the children are socialized
to a different generation. The result is, we need mindful attention to learning about
each other and an environment that supports kindly civil interchange.
Socrates said, from the Delphic oracle, “Know thyself” and he was aware
that to do so was hard, involving constant dialog, and he never explored the
relationship with his wife, or with slaves which became tasks for later cultures,
though Greek literature of the classical period had strong female and slave
characters. GardenWorld helps provide the context where meditation and daily
perceptions of each other are possible. Self awareness is very hard without the
support of nature, with growing things, living species, the sun, the moon and the
sts, the seasons. We cannot learn about others if we do not see them in the various
activities of their lives – or be known, if our own activities are not seen.
Plato said that a society could be known through its music. Alan Lomax
went on to study music structure and social structure parallels in folk music. He
showed that harmony related to balanced sex roles in society, melody to openness
of thinking, and density of notes to density of population. We have the first known
society were the dominant music is written by and made prominent by youth. We
have no real adult music and this may be a danger sign. We have yielded much of
society making through the combination of music and marketing to youth rather
than to wisdom. This is probably a result of market forces which amplify the power
of the consuming individual and attenuate the power of a creative community. In
the adult world of work and private home and the mall, young people invent viable
communities in the interstices abandoned by the adults. GardenWorld will shift this
balance because it puts intergenerational activity in the forefront. GardenWorld
work, from actual agriculture and landscape care, to retrofitting buildings and
restoration, from the infrastructure projects to a biotech and nanotech
experimentation, and puts work into the participating community rather than taking
people out. GardenWorld would allow for greater participation of young people,
and encourage settings where youth and senior centers along the way with
incubators for startups and gardening projects would overlap through good design.
 19

I’ll never forget when a friend of mine bought three houses in a fairly
upscale development in Virginia as office space for his software company. In the
morning hundreds of cars poured out toward the highway, like water going down a
drain. His employees’ eight cars came the other way. All day there was no sighting
of people. One afternoon I saw a child out on a bicycle. She came to an
intersection, stopped in the middle, and looked around. Absolutely no sign of life.
The development was rather green, but there was no human presence. I imagine
that in GardenWorld we will find it convenient in terms of cost, transportation, and
safety, to make schools and senior centers co-located, along with some commerce,
theaters, play spaces.
Child labor is usually considered the sin of earlier societies, but removing
children from work means they cannot see adults working. School was the way to
warehouse children those parents left home for work. The integrity of the family on
the farm was broken. It may turn out that separating children from productive
activity is not a good idea. GardenWorld gives us the possibility of giving
meaningful work for part of the day to all children and youth, intermixed with
adults.
i[i] Lamay, Leo THE AMERICAN DREAM OF CPT. JOHN SMITH, University Press of Virginia 1991.

ii[ii] There are many authors and books that have influenced me. Vincent Scully, Roger Kennedy,
Lewis Mumford, Rybzynski, to name a few in the rapidly expanding field.

iii[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Craftsman

iv[iv] Dyson, Freeman Te Sun, The Genome and the Internet Oxford 2007
v[v] In the words of Solomon in PROVERBS 29 v 18

vi[vi] This method of doing scenarios has a complex history. See for example Peter Schwartz, THE ART
OF THE LONG VIEW

vii[vii] That world leads to the COLLAPSE OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES, Joseph Taintor, or COLLAPSE,
Jarrad Diamond. All hope for science, technology and civilization would be lost in a sea of blood and
resistance.

viii[viii] An online summary is at http://www.learningplaceonline.com/stages/organize/Erikson.htm

ix[ix] Hanna Arendt BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, (1993, p. 61).