garden,

a layer of purposeful care and feeding on wild nature, historically variable (up to trimmed grass and geometric vegetation, at times) but always distinguishable from the untouched state — until a decisive, if gradual, perspective shift made the old-style forced garden unthinkable: until centuries of work transformed much of Earth into “the new garden” whose subtle artificiality takes effort to notice. The eternal vision of Garden Earth (otherwise dissimilar, all paradises have lush flora and fauna) has changed with us but survived.  ■    “Converting efficiency into sustainability” was modernitys redemption: permaculture, stealth agriculture (growing useful plants inside natural biomes, with hummingbot harvesting), “going feral” hinted at the answer back when humans still depended on biology. When they no longer did, the consensus became “leave Earth alone,” “finally we dont need anything from nature beyond its being there” (early genomic interventions in the wild — big trees, long-lived “friends” — were limited, controversial); following cleanup and dissolving of abandoned constructionry, unguided and unwatched reforestation rushed in. For almost a century, humanity was “occupied elsewhere” — and the hiatus was beneficial: returning humans brought the hard-earned wisdom of their own biological Change and a quieter, deeper vision of the eternal home they wanted the planet to become “for all sentients, bodied or not.” Heavyfoots cant attend to wildlife personally enough without trampling, so the true all-scale, hands-on gardening only began with flight; long lifespans cured the instinctive fear of change that made gardeners of old cling to a climax community and perceive everything else as a backslide: the “new we” can control and relish slow ecological successions — “millennia we can wrap our minds and loves around.” Before, an apocalyptic forest fire was painful but inevitable; now, in a gardened biome, controlled rejuvenation is constant but unobtrusive, affecting only a segment of local life at any one time: compare deep sleep displacing death.  ■    Ecology understood dynamically (evology, evosystem); direct genomics, morphing multiple species in concert; upholding diversity, enriching life chemistry, matching and balancing niches; stopping degradations, extinctions, building new and resurrecting extinct biomes: Earths biology now comprises, in implicit form, more knowledge and intelligent work than all cities and libraries of the past. Inevitably theres stratification: the elite of specialist collectives advance the science of bioengineering while the rest of us tinker with our daily gardening: plant, clean, tend, groom and bloom, tidy our favorite hairtangles — whether by settling in a locality for a life or by picking multiple lots across continents for brief tenures. Gardeners hierarchize, some working on large-scale bioscapes across whole provinces, others focusing on a single valleys large plants and animals, still others tending a single tree or meadow with en eye on smallest wildlife; museum keepers — “gardeners of artificia” — are a frequent presence as well. Domain stacking catalyzes stable collective-like associations (predominantly human) that, despite gardenders coming and going, establish continuity by accumulating genomes, history, maps, testaments, lore. Successful gardeners tend to take on larger lots with age — but many “country captains” also have their tiny nooks for zoom-in gardening.  ■    Domains tend to be fuzzy and overlapping, usually uncontroversially but sometimes with neutral zones where neighbors avoid encroaching on each other; for such inherently competitive pastime as gardening, however, boundary conflicts and strategic disagreements are rare. A casual intake of a fly-over land may start a lifelong enchantment — “the here” may become your next garden, however long a story it may be to take it over: researching the lot, its biomes and neighborhoods across seasons and climate oscillations; getting to know the maintainers, learning to recognize them in the lands charm; elucidating your vision, sometimes arguing — but more typically apprenticing; and being ready for a rejection: Earth is big. ■    “The best excuse to not Leave,” gardening is an ethically charged activity: any intervention, from weeding a leaf of grass to introducing a new species, needs more than just a model of long-term effects: it needs justification as to why its a good thing to do. So long occupied with themselves, humans are finally venturing into the new territory of human-to-world ethics, with global gardening being our largest experiment ever — so massive and so unplanned as to satisfy the strictest demands of live ethics empiricism. After adverbiality (a perfect gardener is “as imperceptible as a Nature Mind”), the foremost gardening principle is diversity that makes biology robust and future-proof; “upgrading the low-complexity bioscapes” — to turn more of the Earth into window sills between densely packed preserves — remains a focus. Inevitably though, some biomes have been growing at the expense of others; even if the overall diversity goes up (e.g. species counts are at an all-time high), the slow planetwide shifts, unblameable on any single practice or group, spark fierce debates on favoring the “evolutionary avant garde” (“propelling the entire biology forward”) versus rescuing the discriminated biomes.

< game of i  |  grassgrowing >

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License