Humans do not create forests.
Humans create gardens.
A garden is a lovely thing. There is a fundamental order to it. A simplicity. Weeds are not allowed. Uninvited animals are not allowed. We can escape into a garden, numbing the noise and frenzy of messy reality outside. The lawn is neatly clipped. The roses pruned, cared for and watered. We may allow some bushy grassy shrubs give us the illusion of wild nature, but they are no more than that… illusion. If they stray beyond their bounds, they will be clipped too.
The human race was even born in a garden, according to the prevailing Judeo-Christian mythos. The Garden of Eden, tended by the Creator himself, granted to naked primitives with no sense of shame. So was it a garden or not? We tend to think that Adam and Eve lived in a state of perfect nature. But the word garden itself belies this. A garden is not nature untamed. It contains nature. A garden is theatre. Nature has been overcome and re-imagined as a simple form order. Since humans are the nature contained in the Garden of Eden, there are interesting implications to this outside the scope of this piece.
I like Wikipedia’s definition of a garden: “A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials.”
Planned. We like to plan things. We plan our houses. We plan our days. We plan our lunches. We plan our markets, despite free market fundamentalist claims to the contrary. A plan says, fundamentally, nature is messy. If we want to get something done, we had better take control of chaotic reality and exclude possibilities. I would say that the problem with strict planning is that, as they say, life is what happened while you were busy making plans.
Now this is not to say that planning is not necessary. I mean, there is shit out there that can kill ya. No doubt about it. We need to plan to be wearing clothes in the winter. We need to plan to have enough food to feed our families. But the garden provides an interesting lesson. A garden is wonderful, but a garden does not contain the necessary chaos to support variegated, thriving life. Forests do. And humans can not create forests. Nature does.
Chaos. Chaos re-imagined. Chaos is not disorder, because there is no such thing as disorder; not in the phenomenal universe, at least. Disorder very well may exist in the human imagination. But there is no material disorder. There are only orders that humans do not understand. This is self evident when you accept the causality implicit in all phenomena. Spill a glass of milk and the milk on the floor looks like disorder, but it is not. It is an order that you do not understand, because you are ignoring inconvenient variables. The glass fell at a specific angle, the milk had a specific heat, the liquid fell a specific distance. All of these contributed to the end state of the liquid on the floor. All of these contribute to an order that we just don’t care to investigate.
This false concept of order informs so much of what we take for granted that we suffer from its consequences. This false concept of order distills into what I call lazy order. Geometric order. The order of simple symmetry. The order of gold in the scales. The order of false equivalencies. Nature does not work this way. Nature works in Fibonacci spirals, fractal self-similarity, quantum non-local effects, and God only knows what else we don’t even know about.
Nature is messy. From the human point of view, that is. We seek simplicity, but rarely find it. And when we do, we are generally wrong. There is no better example of this than current ‘religious right’ and ‘free market fundamentalist’ political vectors.
Current civilization memes despise nature. Kill, tame, dominate. We are a civilization that tries to enforce our will by excluding things from our Garden. If drugs are inconvenient, make a law that tries to eliminate them. Never mind the fact that it does not work and creates host of other problems due to our lazy order planning structures. We just move right along trying the same thing over and over and over again.
We try simple tax/spend, surplus/deficit, supply/demand schemes to plan our economy when the reality has infinitely more variables than that. Of course, the problem then becomes communicating that complexity to the electorate. Systems are not controlled: they are nudged, shepherded, maintained.
Environmentalism repudiates modern conceptions of order. Because what we need is forests full of life. What we do not need is Planet Garden. Sure, make your gardens in human environments, I don’t care. But do not pretend that that is a forest. It can not be. Forests have weeds; weeds which are not weeds (a human prejudice). They have fungus. They have rot, as much as they can bear. They have insects, as many as can survive. They have death and life rolling on in an infinite cycle. Gardens have none of these. Gardens have tenders. And a garden can be tended as a closed system, but it can not pretend that it is a whole system. Whole systems do not need gardeners.
As in most polemics, it’s easy to point out the problems. I realize that that is pretty much all I have done. I have provided no solutions. But, my question remains: can true solutions come out of false foundations and falsified frameworks? I suggest that they can not. Because as we attempt to impose our human needs on nature, we can not rely on simple conceptions of order and planning.
Real order is complex. Extraordinarily so.
