Like most Americans, especially those of us in the suburban middle class, I live in a neighborhood of modest, comfortable private homes with (usually multiple) cars, trucks, vans, and occasionally boat trailers in their driveways and out front, with tidy and often attractive trees, shrubs, and flowerbeds set out, like islands, on a sea of regularly mown and watered green grass monocultures — “curb appeal” as it is called in the Real Estate trade. But in our backyards, we are all surrounded by tall wooden privacy fences, like palisades, hiding our backyards from those of our neighbors on all sides. And by and large, nobody even knows who their neighbors are, other than, perhaps, those right next to them or across the street.
Even on beautiful spring and summer days, the streets in my neighborhood are largely empty of pedestrians, except for the occasional dog-walker, or young jogger fitted with earphones to block out the world by playing her favorite tunes. But children running and playing with one another — a common sight in the suburban neighborhood where I grew up, back in the Fifties — are almost entirely absent. Other than the occasional noxious sound of leaf blowers, lawn mowers, or power saws, the neighborhood is strangely quiet.
We see this kind of mutual alienation as perfectly normal — and many people have known nothing else — because our real lives are conducted remotely, whether by phone or internet, or by getting in our cars to go somewhere else, whether to work, to go shopping at a nearby shopping center, or to visit friends or relatives across town or across the country. As a result, any attempt at making friends with a neighbor is initially viewed with suspicion, as a violation of their privacy. There are no “third places” such as public squares or plazas with sidewalk cafes and park benches — which are commonplace throughout Europe, for example — where people can stroll in the evening and hang out with their local friends and neighbors.
Such alienated lives may feel safe and reassuring — we only interact with those we want or need to interact with, and are otherwise left alone to do as we wish. But there are hidden costs to this suburban isolation. For one thing, we seldom interact these days with anyone who does not share our political leanings, religion, or business interests. Most of the news we get comes pre-selected, either by the TV channels we prefer (CNN, MSNBC, Fox, or PBS) or by algorithms on our internet newsfeeds and social media, which are designed to cater to our own interests, anxieties, and biases. So the opportunities have sharply dwindled for dialogue, or even a casual conversation, with people outside these chosen or prescribed circles of common interest or political bias.
It is no wonder, then, that the pathologies of alienation, such as paranoia, fanaticism, or simply withdrawal and chronic depression, have become rampant throughout our culture. If someone rings the doorbell or knocks on our door whom we don’t know, we seldom even open it, preferring to communicate through an intercom, a cracked open door, or a locked screen door. It doesn’t matter if they live nearby; they are immediately regarded with suspicion bordering on hostility. For this reason, many of us spend little to no time in our front gardens, no matter how impeccably landscaped they may be (usually, by outside contractors); instead, our outdoor time is restricted to our fenced-in backyards, where we feel safe from prying eyes of neighbors or strangers.
Not only is this mutually alienated suburban way of life unhealthy for us and our communities, but also it poses potentially dire threats to our future. As we all know, even if we spend most of our lives in denial, the larger (regional, national, and global) infrastructures we all depend on for our accustomed way of life are all growing increasingly fragile due to what is now often called the “polycrisis” or “global predicament” — a broad term which refers to the mutually reinforcing dangers of runaway global warming, fossil fuel depletion, killer heat waves, vulnerability of our communities and our electric grids to extreme weather or terrorist attacks, growing international tensions and threats of war, breakdowns in supply lines, pandemics, domestic polarization, ecological and agricultural collapse, runaway inflation, environmental refugees, homelessness, and so forth. Yet our mutually isolated lifestyles are utterly dependent upon these infrastructures; without our supermarkets burgeoning with food, how would we eat? Without gas for our cars and SUVs, how would we flee a wildfire or go stay with friends after a flood or tornado? How would we even get to work? And what happens, if, due to a breakdown in the global financial system, our savings become worthless — just a set of numbers on a page?
Money is, after all, just arithmetic; the value we ascribe to dollars and cents is arbitrary, and it depends on a complex social consensus which, itself, is fragile. We cannot eat, drink, or power our homes and vehicles with money alone! The actual basis of any economy — and of any ecosystem as well — is not money, but available net energy, which is the energy we have left after the energy we spend to get that energy, and money is therefore a transform of information about the marginal value of commodities made with that energy. When the investment of energy for more energy rises, relative to the return on that investment, prices go up — inexorably. So as our global fossil fuel reserves are depleted, and as the ecological costs of those fuels (due to climate destabilization worldwide) skyrocket, it is inevitable that the prices of everything will skyrocket as well — which is another way of saying that the value of money will plummet.
These are terrifying prospects, which are a lot easier to simply ignore than to contemplate. And so in general, people tend to respond in one of four ways — denial, delusion, despair, or determination. Only the latter is adaptive. Denial is easiest — we are all in denial, to one extent or another; otherwise, we would not be able to function effectively from day to day, whether sending our children to school to prepare for a bright future, planning our next European vacation, or reviewing our stock portfolio to save for a comfortable and affluent retirement. But those who are addicted to denial may well be those who suffer most, when things fall apart.
Delusion refers to those who, while fully cognizant of our global plight, cling to dreams of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to tackle climate change and pursue our present, affluent lives based on business as usual — the infinite growth of production and consumption on a finite planet. The deluded include many otherwise brilliant people with truly inventive ideas — like cheaper geothermal energy, breakthroughs in solar, wind, and wave energy, carbon removal technologies, or even space-based shields to block solar radiation. These might have been worth pursuing 40 years ago, but with climate chaos now going into runaway feedback loops and wreaking havoc worldwide, it is probably too late for any such massive interventions; besides, building any of these to scale would require a huge infusion of cheap net energy, for which the only available source is…burning yet more fossil fuels.
Recognizing these sobering facts, many have collapsed into despair, especially the young, whose suicide rates are rising rapidly as they measure out the growing distance between their plans and dreams for the future and the encroaching reality. But despair, however understandable, is futile and self-validating; if we assume that nothing can be done, nothing will be done. Furthermore, it leads only to psychopathic behavior, whether suicidal or violent or both.
So what is the alternative? Determination.
To do what?
To prepare mindfully for a largely unpredictable future of successive, accelerating collapse of the global infrastructures we all depend on.
After pondering this question long and hard for many years — since I am a lifelong environmental activist and have been following climate and related crises closely, I finally hit upon an idea that, I think, has legs.
Imagine, then, that people (like me) who live in the typically alienated, sprawling, auto-dependent middle-class suburbs surrounding major cities throughout Europe, Japan, and North America started actually getting to know one another, and formed neighborhood Garden Guilds with neighbors within easy walking or bicycling distance. These guilds are autonomous, managed by a steering committee, and they meet once a month (more or less, depending on the season and the preferences of participants) for potluck dinners, either at the homes of volunteers, or at an available public space, such as a church fellowship hall, a public park, or a school cafeteria. The rule for the potluck dinners is that people must include, in their offerings, at least one item they have grown themselves, even if it is only an herb, such as mint or parsley.
The other element of each Garden Guild potluck is that it must include an educational component related to gardening. This could be either (1) a presentation by one of the participants — including the host — demonstrating a specific skill or technique he or she uses in their garden; (2) a presentation by a guest speaker, likewise on topics related to growing our own food; or (failing that) (3) simply a YouTube or Vimeo presentation on growing fruit or vegetables, cabled into a big-screen TV for easy viewing by the group. The presentation would take place before the potluck dinner, so that the general topic of conversation among participants is more likely to focus on gardening, rather than veering into hot-button political issues that might cause tension or strife. Garden Guilds, in short, would be all about helping each other to survive — and even thrive — in our time of accelerating climate chaos, and not about political debates.
The main challenge, of course, is in getting started — in breaking down the mutual estrangement, mistrust, and suspicion that haunts most suburban neighborhoods these days. For this reason, it might be best to begin by soliciting volunteers throughout the community — including elected officials and other influential citizens — to form a Garden Guild Network to guide and support the development and proliferation of Garden Guilds in individual neighborhoods.
The long-term benefits of Garden Guilds in a world of accelerating climate chaos are fairly obvious — neighbors helping neighbors to survive the progressive breakdown of the vast infrastructures (energy, electrical grid, commerce, finance, agriculture, political stability, etc.) that we all have taken for granted until now. At the same time, contiguous, mutually cooperative Garden Guilds would form a strong defensive bond against chaos threatening our communities from outside. And finally, they might plant the seeds for a regeneration of real community — neighbors who know each other, help each other through hard times, and regularly share ideas and skills with each other, all while still respecting one another’s privacy and autonomy.
The slogan I have developed for the Garden Guild initiative sums up the mission very concisely:
“Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness…by Learning, Teaching, Healing, and Creating.”