MANIFESTO TO BECOME A GARDENER OF THE EARTH
Why is nature green as a blade of grass rather than black as a beetle in a city? “It was sweet, creamy, faintly smoky, like alpine butter”1, George Monbiot after eating beetle larvae in his garden. The heavenly ‘state of nature’ perceived as pure and clean is simply a man-made ideology built upon our environmental aesthetic.
G.Monbiot, Feral:Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014 1
The gardener’s island
A PARADOXICAL ELEGY Architecture is essentially about accommodating life. However, we are living in the Anthropocene period: a geological era where human activity is the most dominant force of change.2 It began more than 12,000 years ago when human sedentism became prominent as a new stationary lifestyle.3 Humans stopped roaming around and began to settle down permanently, which inevitably led to modification and domestication of the landscape. However, the change in the biosphere only became evident following its exponential growth during the period of industrialisation and Taylorism. Epochs that both further re-enforced the idea of humans’ mastery over the planet. Nature continuously reshapes morphology and behaviour in response to man-made change. So, this paradox is not about turning the ‘green’ or ‘sustainability’ movement into gold in order to save the world with rooftop vegetable garden technology, which is simply illusionary at best; but instead, it is an issue regarding us and of reconceptualizing our relationship to nature.4 Humanity has become a geological force where we have severed most connection with other living organisms. As Matthew Coolidge of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation states:“Every molecule on the surface of the earth has been affected by humans.”5 Deep ecology engages with the need for a change of view from ‘Anthropocentrism’ to ‘Ecocentrism’, moving from a position that sees the human as the centre of the world to a place that is in symbiosis with the environment. Accordingly, notions of aesthetics take a crucial role in shaping new ways of feeling. 6
N. Holm and S. Taffel. Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Working with Nature, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2017, p10 3 L.Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-conceptualising human–nature relations, Routledge, 2016, p96 4 Collectif, C.Chiambaretta. Stream 04: The Paradoxes of the Living, Dijon, Colophon, Art Book Magazine Distribution, 2017, p373 5 Sonic Acts Festival. The Geological Imagination, https://issuu.com/sonicacts/docs/ sonic_acts_2015_programme, Amsterdam. 2015 6 T.Morton. Dark Ecology: for a logic of future coexistence, New York, Columbia University Press, 2016, p21 2
Therefore, we must abandon and destroy our constructed idea of nature. Instead, we must encourage a new ethic and vision, which encompasses all of its realities. Once the idea destroyed, we no longer have to maintain the imagined division between what is natural and what is not. What we thought was natural can also be artificial and vice versa; whether it is land use, rivers, ocean currents, flora, fauna and also particularly the most visible hybrid forms on earth: the urban landscape.
The sheep and the landscape
BUT
THIS IS NOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL CALL It is a political story in the form of a paradoxical elegy through more-than-human dialogues with the landscape. The ‘idea’ of nature is redefined through the eyes of a human as a new Gardener of the Earth within an urban landscape. As described by Bruno Latour, the landscape is a territory “to be reinvented scientifically, politically, and artistically”7, in order to leave this current ecological aesthetic. The Possessive: The gardener, the human The Garden: The Earth
L.M.Thorsen, A.Vandso. Can we land on earth? interview with Bruno Latour, http://s-o-c.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Can-we-land-on-earth.pdf, 2017 7
SELF-DESTRUCTION The consuming gardener Human thought was once wild and magical. Cultivated by powers of sacredness, it celebrated rites of passage, seasonal cycles, and tribal customs.8 Today, we are still predominantly influenced by the 18th century Romantic notion of nature as a beautiful garden. Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ unveils this notion fantastically. The human physical and mental state alludes to an escape - an ‘escape from reality’. The depiction of nature is manifested into a spectacle to view specific objects9: creatures, waterfalls, flowers. It reduced the landscape to aesthetic scenery carefully curated through the composition of natural objects. The totality is experienced through a frame. The emerging rhetoric of ‘green’ sees nature as desirable; monopolized and defined further by the acute bifurcation of the relationship between human and non-human. In the end, humans are left with the natural world reduced to the formality of parks, gardens, and zoos. Contradictory to its preserved blissfulness, nature as a standing reserve appears as an endless resource to be consumed. Perceived as raw material for human ends or goals that may be imposed upon or extracted from. In the 21st century, we have arrived at the point where its resource is finite. Hence, we have the urgent responsibility to redefine a completely different way of inhabiting and coexisting on the earth. Perhaps, it may be that not only new architecture, new arts, or new ways of living are radically proposed, but also new ends and forms to overcome the Anthropocentric metropolis. Whilst this geological era is a temporal condition, it forces us to question our physical and ideological relationship with the planet. We all need to become gardeners of the earth. P.Buchanan. The Big Rethink Part 10: Spiral Dynamics and Culture, https://www. architectural-review.com/rethink/campaigns/the-big-rethink/the-big-rethink-part-10spiral-dynamics-and-culture/8638840.article 9 G. Monbiot, Manifesto for a new world order, New Press, 2006 8
The gardener’s pleasure
AUTONOMOUS GARDEN Anarchist gardener Embracing a new environmental image is an act of politics. As a political project, the new gardener firstly rejects hierarchy, authority, domination and adopts an anarchist approach for a new environmental culture. This form of ecological anarchism includes non-hierarchical relationships not merely with humans but the entire composition of the garden.10 The ORGANIC CYCLE The gardener values the organic cycle of new life and destruction rather than the pleasure of the moment.11 Since nature has been shaped into an aesthetic commodity, the notion of pleasure needs redefinition with a better understanding to temporal life and death cycles. However, as toxic and idyllic as man-made construct of the landscape may offer, it reassures us with a place to be in this world but gives us direction and personal ethic as to how one needs to live. The crisis of our times has been ignored, inevitably leaving behind what the Romantics had labelled as ugly: waste. And yet, those are the gardener’s allies: animals, weeds, insects, mould, are not being romanticised but rather integrated into a permanent functional system. The gardener nurtures not merely for the garden but also for her pleasure - a contract for life, continuously shaping and learning nature. The landscape becomes a long performance. Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ calls to love: “the disgusting, inert and meaningless”’ as “the most ethical act is to love the other precisely in their artificiality, rather than seeking to prove their naturalness and authenticity”. 12 The INTERCONNECTED M.Hall, Beyond the human: extending ecological anarchism, Journal Volume 20, Environmental Politics, 2011 11 M.Casagrande, Urban Acupuncture, 2010, http://thirdgenerationcity.pbworks.com/f/ urban%20acupuncture.pdf 12 T.Morton, Dark Ecology: for a logic of future coexistence, New York, Columbia 10
Gilles Clément writes: “All life is dynamic; it is constantly inventive ... whether in migrations of nutrient and sediment flows to the Gulf or the migration of a colony of sumac
The garden’s growth
along a roadside.”13 In the garden, paths shift each year, adapting to a spontaneous spread of seeds. As a result, the landscape continuously sees new arrivals and changes in flow and vegetation. To invite in the allies would suggests reducing intervention to a minimal human stewardship and learn the complexity of growth cultivating the garden. Landscape is not in fact as silent as it appears. It holds dynamic complex systems that overlap, interconnect and allows communication as the roots of all species are linked together. The garden’s tree is most likely connected to a tiny mushroom several metres away. Some of them share nutrients and secrets, whilst others naturally obstruct one another. This ‘wood wide web’ has also its own version of destruction. It is therefore important that the garden is given a degree of autonomy, without the gardener’s large intervention. New bonds may then begin to flourish within by the forces affecting it, new species will evolve, whilst some may become extinct. François Roche’s work beautifully highlights this aspect as he focuses on the capacity for nature to grow, to change unpredictably over time and to generate alternative forms. Our knowledge is drawn from the dynamic and mutable aspect of nature’s form over time rather than at a singular moment in time.14 The SPONTANEOUS New thriving habitats grow for diverse pests and vegetation under human minimal prevention measures. The habitats, once abandoned or awaiting development can be naturally reclaimed; what Marco Casagrande refers to as ‘urban acupunctures’. The garden keeps its informal and impulsive character. It grows outside any official planning spontaneously spreading throughout the landscape as ‘needles’ for the urban flow; over time spilling and stretching the garden.15
G.Clément, The planetary garden: and other writings, Philadelphia,University of Pennsylvania Press,2015,p78 14 F.Roche, S.Lavaux, J.Navarro, B.Durandin, R&SIe(n) I’ve heard about... a flat fat, growing urban experiment, Paris, 2005, http://www.new-territories.com/download/ ive%20heard%20about/Cat_Ive_090805%20.pdf 15 M.Casagrande, Urban Acupuncture, 2010, http://thirdgenerationcity.pbworks.com/f/ urban%20acupuncture.pdf 13
The gardener’s host
LIVING GARDEN We are all gardeners To become a gardener requires us to reclaim the philosophy of pre-eminent living, as our current ecological awareness has become singularly instrumental. TOXIC The gardener must not only understand basic geological, hydrological, meteorological forces but also the potential within nature’s toxic forces, artificial or not; what David Gissen calls ‘Subnature’: “A cloud of smoke, a pool of mud, a pile of debris”16 Those may only be labelled as contaminating forces to the social and physical urban fabric but instead the gardener engages with the social processes of modernity and reinvent the toxic. Landscape and architecture can become its own reserve. For example, François Roche’s experimental architecture office ‘R&Sie’, once imagined the fabric of a building as an exhaust that could captures dust from city’s polluted air. Nature’s toxicity can also be turned into an asset that instead forces humans to face the earth’s realities. A BALANCE In describing nature, the philosopher Hegel suggests: “in her universal aspect, humans cannot overcome in this way, nor can they turn her to their own purposes.”17 The gardener can never fully control the garden as the act of control removes any essence of ‘being’. Instead, the gardener must be concerned. A concern that varies amongst all of us where one may observe the garden’s natural growth. Eventually, all man-made construction is settled and accompanied by the living that gradually creates intriguing forms. A gardener can otherwise actively participate more and add several seeds, and stimulate ways to invite certain movements and shapes to take form just D.Gissen, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments, Princeton Architectural Press, as the already existing work of a huge number of living 2009. beings. Another can take it as far as becoming a biologist, 16
17
G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Oxford University Press, 2004, p5
whilst further challenging the limits of environmental imagination by harvesting water from fog or inviting worms for fertilizers. Human-driven environmental modifications are not necessarily detrimental to nature and can on the other hand be beneficial to more than human beings. The LIVING ART
The garden’s words
The undesirable could therefore be transformed into a commodity, what most current forms of art already do. Instead, the garden can be practiced as an artistic and performance over time. Its growth and transformation happening on a geological scale that can be mapped and recorded to better understand how it can become something humans can experience, feel, and touch. Manmade constructed nature suggests a permanence that can never be maintained. Flexibility, mobility, softness and weakness have a sense of life to them. The experimental work of Mark Dion beautifully unveils growth and reactions between invisible and visible events through his installation of a tree laying down whilst inhabiting an art system of bacteria, fungi, insects and plants.18 The EXCHANGE
R.Erickson, Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-century Naturalist, Yale University Press, 2017 19 L. Head, Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia As Aboriginal Landscape, New York, Syracuse University Press, 1999, p225 18
Landscapes provide the most precious encounters between all species. Although, the sense of ‘territory’ is inevitable, the planetary garden can be seen through the form of common ownership. Beyond individual possessions, streets, squares, transport, the landscape is not a single element but is rather synergistic, active and yet almost invisible. The gardener must cultivate the urban landscape and inhabit it without owning it; instead of living on its resources and reserves. The land continues to be nurtured whilst also being occupied by many who act as guardians as the Aborigines community would “tread lightly on the earth”.19 The gardener is encouraged to care deeply for the garden’s precious resource. An exchange can be drawn between species and agriculture, challenging normative exchange value of ownership.
The gardener’s treasure
HYBRID GARDEN Haunted gardener Underneath the shades of the bright green lies a strong emotional and motherly tie with the ‘natural’ that makes the human feel loved. If man-constructed idea of nature is destroyed, what are we left with? There is a clear need to nurture motherly instincts. The SACRED
T.Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. Verso, 2017.
20
The current and most common sources of motherly qualities extend further with spaces inhabited with animals, insects, sounds, materiality, seasonal changes and sacredness. Timothy Morton once asked for all beings to become haunted. Similar to the child fable, the Little Prince and the Fox, children are almost defined by their magical capabilities to communicate not only with the living but also stuffed animals as if they are alive, and is encouraged to without being seen as strange. But the system brings them to a point they are supposed to let go in order to grow up.20 Yet Morton asks for a system where we hold on to these companionships. Children understanding transcends notions of life and death seeing instead the phenomena of continuity. Surely, animals have the power to alter our way of thinking and forms we make, live in, and respond to. This is not about replicating other species’ habitats but about becoming aware that other species already inhabit a world shaped by the urban and affected landscapes. If we turn to the example of some Indian societies, we find within a dense urban context, the streets and temples are overpowered by all kinds of living things such as monkeys, cows and birds. They are more than inhabitants and their presence is part of a symbiosis. The human encounter with them is profoundly influential which requires them to be in true harmony with one another. The animals are sacred and bring good fortune. It is also common in some places that animals are considered as protective and lucky presences. As an illustrative example, the architect Andrea Branzi proposed to introduce 50,000 sacred cows and 30,000
free monkeys into the parks and avenues of Paris for a competition of a new vision of Paris’ future in 2008. It aimed to open people’s minds to the idea of biological diversity in an urban environment.21 However, the fact that this never happened demonstrates the failure of our imagination.
The garden’s host
Often it is not simply the presence of humans that affects the presence of animals, since even the house sparrow is a disappearing species although it is generally tolerant to human activity. It is rather the way humans re-organise the environment through clearing vegetation, removing soil, hard landscaping and the removal of penetrable structures resulting to a loss of habitat. The MYTH The garden could be translated with even more synthetic form of thinking tied to artistic and mythical. The narrative form of the myth enables knowledge to be transmitted with deeper and lasting emotional responses, rather than objective or scientific practice.22 This artistic sense can go as far as to consider the existence of strange landscapes and architecture. The peculiar makes space for new synthetic and semi-natural forms, such as a mountain of fortresses or a mountain of micro-organisms solidified in a refuge of waste glowing in the dark with bioluminescence that responds to associated levels of toxicity.
By the end of the 1970s , the metaphor of the parasite ‘infecting the city’ drove new architectural visions confronting societies’ social structure. The metaphor underscores the tension between an existing world and a new architecture directed against this world. The parasite could potentially manage to balance its strange existence with the planetary garden. Can the same positive feelings and reaction from Pino’s personalized paintings through his gradual transformation of cosmic landscapes be achieved but instead with landscapes of dirt and A.Renna, Andrea Branzi: Bringing Animals at the Centre of the Urban Project, DOMUS, Editoriale Domus, 31 May 2018, www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2018/05/31/andrea- strangeness? 21
branzi-bringing-back-animals-at-the-centre-of-the-urban-project.html. 22 H.Steiner. Nature Created? Or, the Gentle Touch of Artificial Snow, University of Copenhagen, Montreal Architectural Review, 2017
The gardener’s path
NATURE’S WAY “Constant gardener”
23
Indeed, this is not an environmental call. Instead it is a manifesto that reconsiders the human role as an emphatic gardener. It redefines all living, toxic, and artificial landscapes in order to deconstruct the man-made ideology of nature, which heavily relies on environmental romanticised aesthetics. The time has come to recognise this current ecological crisis primarily as social issue between man and nature concerning our value system, lifestyles and economy. The manifesto proposes a new set of ethics and radically reshapes architectural space of the future. It is a complex vision of landscapes, which network more sensitively to all forms of life. Environmental aesthetic is redefined as a paradoxical elegy: a story perceived through the lens of a new gardener of earth. The gardener is human, and the garden is the Earth; the living, artificial and the nonhuman. New mutations and speculative forms of hybrid living are then evolving rather than being reduced to the commercial aspects. The gardener of the earth asks us to remember the mythical thinking of our ancestors in order to redefine and co-exist with the dark and earthy dominant forces of nature. For Vitruvius, the human body represented the only correct measure of architecture. Today’s environmental causalities call for one that encompasses meteorology and spiritual exchanges between the human and all other living organisms, natural, artificial and toxic, within the wholeness of the garden.
23
J. le Carré, The constant gardener, United Kingdom, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001
REFERENCES A.Renna, Andrea Branzi: Bringing Animals at the Centre of the Urban Project, DOMUS, Editoriale Domus, 31 May 2018, www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2018/05/31/andrea-branzibringing-back-animals-at-the-centre-of-the-urban-project. html.
BBC, Hinguism and Animals, UK, BBC, 2010 Collectif, C.Chiambaretta, Stream 04: The Paradoxes of the Living, Dijon, Colophon, Art Book Magazine Distribution, 2017 G.Clément, The planetary garden: and other writings, Philadelphia,University of Pennsylvania Press,2015
M.Casagrande, Urban Acupuncture, 2010, http:// thirdgenerationcity.pbworks.com/f/urban%20 acupuncture.pdf N. Holm and S. Taffel. Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Working with Nature, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2017, p10 P.Buchanan. The Big Rethink Part 10: Spiral Dynamics and Culture, https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/ campaigns/the-big-rethink/the-big-rethink-part-10spiral-dynamics-and-culture/8638840.article F.Roche, S.Lavaux, J.Navarro, B.Durandin, R&SIe(n) I’ve heard about... a flat fat, growing urban experiment, Paris, 2005, http://www.new-territories.com/download/ive%20 heard%20about/Cat_Ive_090805%20.pdf
G. Fuentes, Beyond Nature: Architecture and Environmental Aesthetics for the Anthropocene, New York, DA | S, 2015 R.Erickson, Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-century Naturalist, Yale University Press, 2017 G.Monbio, Feral:Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life,Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014 S.N.Arel, Post-traumatic public theology, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p138 G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p5 Sonic Acts Festival, The Geological Imagination, https:// issuu.com/sonicacts/docs/sonic_acts_2015_programme, H.Steiner. Nature Created? Or, the Gentle Touch of Amsterdam. 2015 Artificial Snow, University of Copenhagen, Montreal Architectural Review, 2017 T.Morton, Dark Ecology: for a logic of future coexistence, New York, Columbia University Press, 2016, p21 J. le Carré, The constant gardener, United Kingdom, G. Monbiot, Manifesto for a new world order, New Press, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001 2006 L.Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Reconceptualising human–nature relations, Routledge, 2016 T.Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. Verso, 2017 L. Head, Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia As Aboriginal Landscape, New York, Syracuse University Press, 1999 L.M.Thorsen, A.Vandso, Can we land on earth? interview with Bruno Latour, http://s-o-c.fr/wp-content/ uploads/2017/07/Can-we-land-on-earth.pdf, 2017 M.Hall, Beyond the human: extending ecological anarchism, Journal Volume 20, Environmental Politics, 2011 M.Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2003