GardenWorld Politics, the real hidden agenda.

Douglass Carmichael
[email protected]
Humans are drowning in the tsunami of their own success as a species. As our population crowds
in on itself, we increasingly feel that change is driven by the numbers out of control, such as
population, pollution, currency manipulation and abstraction. And change itself has been driving
an expanding economy and collapsing society and makes brokers rich while most people, who
assume a more "steady state" society, suffer from displacements. I believe that most people,
Democrats, Republicans and Independents, progressive and conservative, actually agree with this
picture. Difference emerges when standardized options, emphasized by the leaderships and the
press, force polarization. The manufactured differences help maintain existing institutions, which
go unexamined.
People want to live in a blend of civilization and nature, but this yearning is hidden in current
politics. It is hidden because it does not fit the needs of the financial managers and the Military
Industrial Complex. Or perhaps worse: it seems soft compared to the inevitable march toward
more coherent empires with tightly interwoven populations and technocratic management. What
I am calling GardenWorld Politics is the effort to make the civilization/nature agenda public and
to develop the politics to make it realizable. Our humanity and the environment, as a seamless
whole, require it. GardenWorld is not a plan, but an intent to innovate our way towards an
attractive life that is a better integration of the human with nature, rather than a continuing and
expanding dependency on a reductionist technology. GardenWorld is a post modern equivalent of
what the impressionists did with painting (Renoir, Bonnard, etc) to make mid 19th century
middle class life vibrant. It is not anti-technology, but looks to subordinate technological
investment and deployment to a real vision for the quality of human lives as actually lived.
Contemporary issues reveal a failure of politics to deal with problems of the economy and
environment. We have the resources to feed and house the population of the world with quality
of life, but the economic machine has its own momentum and choices that dominate the world of
investments and politics. We have lost any vision of where we want to move towards with
potential solutions. The modernist vision post WW2 has faded and nothing replaces it to
motivate in a positive way the changes we need. I start with a radical idea: any politics which
does not aim towards the gardening of the world and the humanization of its people is not an
adequate politics. The core idea of GardenWorld is that since everyone wants to live in a balance
between civilization and nature, why don’t we use our wealth to go there?
By GardenWorld by I mean the intent to enhance the full spectrum of environments from inner
city to wilderness with an enhanced garden aesthetic and biologically productive use of land,
creating an economy that cannot be exported, and, through tough environmental regulation,
drives innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities, especially at the regional and local levels. It
can give government an orientation beyond just economics. It brings back the balance between
eco-nomics and eco-logy, remembering with irony that the two eco’s derive from same Greek
eco for household, its laws and logic.
People mostly want to live in GardenWorld but have not articulated it to themselves. We need to
influence the dialog leading up to this next election, and policies enacted after, based on a
coherent view the best work in the social sciences, art, and science of the last half dozen decades,
and that answers the question that follows from Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, "Instead
of escape, what?".
The GardenWorld idea is a response to the current failure of most of us to have a vision of the
future that is plausible, attainable, and attractive. There exists an agenda that 80% of the people
would vote for if it were offered, but it is blocked by political commitments to existing power.
GardenWorld is an integrating vision that already exists in the minds of most people. But it needs
to be named in order to be evocative, and GardenWorld is an effective name. People remember it
because they already believe it. Perhaps GardenWorld is the most effective name for a hoped for
future to replace the failure of mechanized modernism, with its lack of sustainability and
unattractive simplifying and reductionist mechanicalness.
So I think most of us agree with the following five summarizing ideas.
The image of the future and the promise of progress have languished, under the pressures to
adapt to "modernism", through a failure of imagination, leadership, and resources. The promise
of a better life after WW2 has not been realized. Progress for all turned into privilege for ever
fewer in a great game of economic musical chairs.
Both major political parties are stuck and governance is not responsive. The merry-go-round
economy, works for those who are in it, but marginalizes those who are not.
Much current political activity – attitude and voting - is a way of saying "no" to the whole
system, made necessary when "no" is not one of the votable options, nor are positive policies that
would deal with the obvious issues ignored by the leadership. The strong emphasis in parts of the
country on religious tradition is a way of saying no when local culture offers no other way.
There exists a political agenda that 80% would agree to. Not an agenda of mere platitudes, but
deals with real issues. It requires mixing a new business climate with environmental rigor, and
using health and education as enablers for fuller participation. Simply turning downward the
rising curves of inequality and environmental degradation would be sufficient for a vast increase
in hope and would be a good beginning. But we need to go much further to deal with the
currently degrading environment and quality of life.
The GardenWorld vision is necessary to make the 80% solution come alive and be evocative.
GardenWorld, a blend of the organic and the technological, entrepreneurship, and serious
environmentalism, oriented for human development across the life-cycle, is that image. Garden
World is not a plan but an intent, allowing for, requiring, maximum flexibility to respond to the
emerging future. It is critical of the gridlock politics, corporations, and the financial structures
impose on preventing needed experimentation for a real quality of life on a crowded planet.
From these five ideas we can examine the context in which I write and you are reading, and most
observers agree, is that:
The economy is making the rich richer and the poor poorer in almost every country (including
the Middle East, creating the conditions for chaos there), and that the legal structures of
corporations, along with the computer enabled mischief by financial institutions are a major
factor;
The fact of global climate change is also now accepted, realizing that its changes are a mixture of
natural and manmade actions. But the actionable policies we need to make this livable with grace
and compassion have not been architected by the politicians;
The idea and practice of democracy have been corrupted and nothing yet replaces them;
Security in a crowded world is better achieved by diplomacy and pinpoint police professionalism
than by militarism, but above all by worldwide fairness and compassion;
All these problems affect the local quality of life.
From this context we can see toward the future. The long term is described by some combination
of three major scenarios (All consistent with any outcome to the disastrous war in Iraq, a war that
has distracted us from the larger issues).
1. Technocratic centralist control of the world economy as a single integrated machine, a police
world with strong media control
2. A shift toward more participation and democratic unfolding and the supporting human
development in health and education, with an emphasis on the quality of life, toward
GardenWorld.
3. And, of course, one must add, the possibilities of Rwanda like collapse where human needs
overwhelm the social system.
GardenWorld, the second scenario, is the viable and more attractive possibility. To get there
might require some more aggressive changes, such as rethinking corporate charters, the way our
financial institutions are allowed to work, the way congress works, land use, and international
cooperation. But I’ll emphasize that great progress can be made simply by shifting the rules
enough so that increasing concentration of wealth and income cease and measurable and visible
decreases in wealth concentration are sustained. Much of this is tax code. But other small
changes could make a big difference. Take for example local land use, which, in its current legal
state, keeps most land locked into current use, or held for profit. What we need is more complex
multiple use of land, but society cannot under current rules afford it. We have to get beyond
treating the increase in value of private land as something the state must pay for if rezoned, or in
other ways partly "taken". Just as the loss of value to the owner is real, the increase in value is
usually due to roads, schools, water service and other public goods that have helped increase the
value. Just as no legitimate value should be taken from the owner, nor should any increase due to
public expenditure be taken from the community. Balance and fairness need more commitment
and support in law.
A future that is a mere continuation of the trends we are in is not promising. We live in a time
when the economy is doing well, while the people are doing badly, The national policy is to
protect the rich in a time of national decline, and there is no national policy to help the country
cope with meeting local needs with local jobs while acknowledging globalization. I’ve done
many interviews over the last 10 years with red state conservatives and blue state liberals. From
those interviews I concluded that the differences are far less extreme than portrayed in the press.
In fact both share common values of family, community, opportunities for children, the healthy
and safe community, where education and health enables participation in the economy, an
economy that is environmentally responsive, entrepreneurial at the local and regional level, and
deals fairly with security and justice.
The Right fears big government, the Left fears big business and a big military. Each sees the
other as supporting bigness which they have projected on the other. Their critiques cancel each
other out, and bigness wins. But an alternative, a society based on what people want, is
completely feasible.
Why is leadership and benefit so narrowly distributed, not only in the U.S. ,but in the rest of the
world? The economic machine has room for those who can add to its production and
consumption, called wealth, but not for those who would dilute it. I call this machine the merry-
go-round and show how people must choose either to align themselves with it to be included, or
be marginalized. The capacity of the merry-go-round is intrinsically limited and cannot extend to
the whole population. We have a worldwide business culture that knows how to create money
wealth, but not how to distribute it.
Religious affiliation is one way of saying "No" to the current political direction when the
political process does not offer the possibility of a "no" vote, or an attractive GardenWorld
alternative. Most people do not like the direction society is taking. That direction is perceived as
environmentally and economically destructive, making any quality of life increasingly out of
reach for a larger number of people, trashing the environment and making jobs scare. But the real
resistance is to the loss of community, hope and meaning. Under pressure, people revert to what
is close at hand, and in most parts of the US and the rest of the world that means some kind of
religious orientation. Hence the rise of religion in politics is a reflection of social discontent on a
large scale lacking any means of political action.
GardenWorld is a way of framing the solutions 80% of the people would vote for. 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, because 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. It proposes a relationship between humans and the natural world
that, from a human perspective and with evidence from a healthy environment, enhances both.
We need to outgrow the view that we live in progress and that the goal of history is to tell the
story of that progress. If human excellence and the quality of lived lives is the “object” of history
it is clear that progress is a shaky concept. Plato, Shakespeare, Confucius, Cicero – were these
not interesting lives? And compared to our own? We fell for the logic that the greatest good for
the greatest number is the measure – but that avoids the obvious: that twice as many people with
half the quality of good is the same number as we have now. GardenWorld asks us to be smart
about these measures.
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. GardenWorld should be an evolution over time,
responsive to the existing buildings, the settings, the possibilities of preservation and the
emerging opportunities people discover as GardenWorld unfolds. We seek 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 for both the bustle of our ambitions to
significant leisure.
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 bounded spaces of perfection but to create
interconnected pieces of terrain. Too many designed communities are conspicuously framed by
new ugly 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.
GardenWorld is not an end point, but a guide to a future that gives us a way of making decisions
and initiating experiments now. Because GardenWorld is already conscious or near to
consciousness in most people, it is not only an arrow toward the future but a way of reorganizing
and emphasizing or deemphasizing things already in place. It means finding what people care
about and bringing those together under the imagination of GardenWorld. It does not sacrifice
the present for the future, but enhances the present for the near future and creates an approach
which has organic flexibility for further future experimentation, which, given energy, climate and
population crises, it looks like we will need. GardenWorld shifts the balance from engineering
planning methods to organic planning attitudes. But balance will be key as we move from
industrialism through finance capital to the Internet and on to bio and nanotechnology.
The aim of GardenWorld is not to make a homogeneous world of forest or pasture, but a world
that has wilderness on one edge and urbanization at the other, both being included, neither
excluded, with all the design and functions connecting them. GardenWorld is a continuous
experiment in blending the natural with the civilizational. We do already have such an
environment that does such integration and includes New York’s Central Park, and the National
Parks. It is just too poorly and partially done now in too few places. We are talking about
enhancing all of nature and urbanization integrated with appreciated human beings whose lives
are enhanced, and includes farms, suburbs, manufacturing districts, new industrial zones, and
garbage dumps in a new comprehensive participatory design process of continual
experimentation. It’s a question of intent.
The promise of the West since the Renaissance and the promise of the discovery of America have
been truncated by our failure to realize that promise after World War II. Gary Wills in Inventing
America treats the US as an invention whose roots are clear in the desire for life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness, and the avoidance of tyranny, but recent developments suggest the founding
fathers were not considering the rise of corporations nor the management of complexity. Because
the US approach to governance was an experiment, it can be revisited to see how we have done,
and reinvented if necessary.
The 80% proposal, the politics people would vote for if offered, starts with a few basics. For
example: Reverse the legislation that, cumulatively, is leading to concentration of wealth and
extremely unequal incomes. Because wealth is the sum of income saved over time, whereas
income is only for a given year, wealth distortion is much greater than income distortion. Either
is gross enough to say without equivocation, something is rotten in the republic. The solution
may be as simple as reinstating the inheritance tax for estates above say 2 million, and raising the
upper income tax brackets by 5 or ten percent, and extending Social Security tax across all
income.. I believe these three changes would bring us into an era where the current increasing
concentration will turn into slowly decreasing disparities. The very fact of this shift in direction
would mean that most people would have rising expectations. The result would be increased
hope and a desire to participate in politics, family life, and the economy.
The larger platform beyond these three, which may be necessary to explore, probably requires
looking at longer term political trends and the need to question the laws of incorporation, land
use, national security, and the role of governance, if GardenWorld is to be more fully realized.
The strategy should start with things that can easily be done, such as reversing the tax changes
that led to such concentrations of wealth. And building on the results an analysis of emerging
needs - food, energy, land, go beyond these simple steps.
The role of technology in society has its human potential clouded by its tendency to align itself
with the elites, and undercutting the potentiality for technology to move towards GardenWorld.
But GardenWorld is an entrepreneurial approach to social change, using strong environmental
regulation to drive technical innovation and create local jobs for retrofitting our current built
environment.
We have to learn how to be comfortable with questioning the current chartering process of
corporations if we are to be able to achieve the needed flexibility, since it allows them to be so
self-serving, becoming instruments for reducing the complexity of their environment (complex
inputs – skills, environment, and simple output; product and profit). Our problem is not markets,
but the corporate control of markets through government regulations and subsidies. The problem
is not the dead hand of government planning, but that the dead hand of planning has moved into
the corporations, most of which want, more than anything, control and continuity.
The messy process of getting there, the politics of how to get to GardenWorld, probably starts
with an examination of the history of some legislative initiatives, and the nature of resistance.
For example, land ownership becomes a tremendous point of resistance to land use experiments
that may be necessary under new pressures of water and energy problems, increasing population,
and rising sea levels. Sea level change could be an opportunity if we used it to increase shoreline
rather than decrease it, and allow inundations for aqua culture and recreation. Current shoreline
owners will use their political power to defend what they have rather than let socially useful
innovations occur. GardenWorld helps us cut through the resistance by making clear that there
are better ways. But governance in its current form is not up to the task of governing complexity
with compassion and fairness. We need something better.
The right will claim "communism" and the left will claim "fascism." both are nearly right. We
need to do better, pragmatically that allows experts and democracy to work together. Al Gore's
Reinventing Government and National Performance Review, were great initiatives in reforming
bureaucracy. Both the right, as seen in Bush failure to realize that governance was even part of
his job, and on the left, where programs are still tied to existing bureaucratic styles, are not
sufficient. It was cynicism inside the White House (as I saw it as a participant running a network
for internal discussions of the NPR) that prevented it from being a mainstay of the Clinton
presidency, and part of the failure of Gore campaign for the presidency in 1999 to take credit for
this major initiative.
Human nature and its relation to urban civilization and GardenWorld suggests using a framework
such as Eric Ericson’s eight stages of the human life cycle as a design template to measure the
value of social change proposals. We need to look at our proposals in terms of the good for the
individual and society, and they need to be robust across the life cycle, safe for children and
adults, aware of the interweaving of the generations. We humans have an inheritance from
animals of instinctual energy including a warm emotional life. Human thinking is the key to
civilization but it also allows us to be colonized by ideologies. Our conceptual maps are never
the reality and always need reform and reflective criticism. No conceptual regime can be
expected to get it all right. GardenWorld is seen as a framework that holds human nature in
quality of life together. It is pragmatic, spiritual, artistic, scientific and technological.
Technology in society tends to align itself with the elites, and undercutting the potentiality for
technology to move towards GardenWorld. But GardenWorld is an entrepreneurial approach to
social change, using strong environmental regulation to drive technical innovation and create
local jobs to retrofit our current built environment. Bio and nanotechnology will be key
ingredients with potential for harm and the possibility of good. What we believe in will help
make the choice.
A society that does not offer believable belief misses a key ingredient in the quality of life.
GardenWorld reintegrates the human and the natural in complex ways: technological urban and
wild, with a special emphasis on agriculture and aesthetics. Meaning rather naturally arises in a
GardenWorld world and through the compelling political process of getting there. It is the
framework for thinking both humanistically and scientifically, pragmatic and spiritual.
To Rehumanize Everything is the goal: to evaluate our future in not only economic terms for
those who can afford to, and are allowed to participate, but also in the more full environmental
human dimensions of the quality of life. It renews a theme throughout the book that a
recommitment to the very American values of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" without
resorting to tyranny is necessary.
Much is being written in this direction. I’ve got a wonderful set of books shelves with suggestive
and helpful books, among them, Joseph Tainter's work starting with The Collapse of Complex
Societies, Jarred Diamonds Collapse, and Chalmers Johnson's trilogy starting with Blowback lay
out many of the issues. Writers such as Freeman Dyson point to the future possibility of re-
greening the planet as we recognize that a well distributed resource, the sun, is rather democratic
and decentralized, of Witold Rybczynski who in books from Taming the Tiger to The Perfect
House, and Alaine DeBotton’s The Architecture of Happiness, show the power of landscape, as
does Simon Schama in his majestic Landscape and Memory. And we need to remember
Olmstead’s very successful efforts in enhancing cities with parks. Chris Alexander in his Order
in Nature, is strongly encouraging a return to a more organic form of architecture and
organization. New kinds of science, springing from Illia Prigogine’s work, such as Manuel
DeLande’s We have had a Thousand Years of non-linear History, are very suggestive of new
tools to think through what is happening to us and how we might do better. Learning how to
foster strategic conversations can be enhanced by recognizing the value of time lines on how we
got here, situation maps of current messes, and scenarios of future possibilities. We tend these
days to be much smarter privately than we are publically.
The way forward is to make visible the currently hidden agenda of GardenWorld, and to make it
our own agenda, informing our actions in every place we actually are, and to fight for the politics
that will help rather than get in the way. GardenWorld is a mobilizing goal needed now for the
dual crises of society and environment.