From Historys Herbarium to the Garden of Forking Paths, via the Little Shop of Horrors

An essay on social change, futures studies, and gardening

Prof. Jim Dator POL672, Politics of the Future Fall 02005 Stuart Candy 1

[T]he facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a museum, or rather like plants in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive with sun... -- Andre Gide, The Immoralist 1
What is history, and what does it mean for us? This essay is, in part, a negligible answer to that vast question. At least, essay is an apt word for what you are about to read: an analytic or interpretative literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view.2 The word is also a verb meaning to try. What you hold in your hands is, then, verb made noun; the result of my trying to deal with a vast topic from a limited and personal point of view. Its etymology takes us back to the Latin exagium, the act of weighing. Here I venture to weigh in on one of the perennial debates waged endlessly in the literature of many civilizations, and its a weighty topic indeed the burden of history. Why get involved? The subject matter is so formidable, the minds who have gone before so brilliant, and the prospects of saying anything that is new and useful so vanishingly small that one is tempted to throw up ones hands in despair and go watch television instead. I might just do that. Theres nothing on worth watching. Anyway, tempted though we may be to ignore history or to give it up as too difficult, the reasons for revisiting this perennial debate are overwhelming. Few if any of the ideas in this piece are original or new but this is my own attempt to synthesize them to a useful end. How should we approach history? There is a philosophical obligation resting on the shoulders of anyone involved in futures studies to articulate a theory of social change. In my world it is important to try to be useful; this is one of my starting assumptions. This can be considered much more difficult in the absence of a theory about what usefulness means. How do you know if youre doing any good, if you can articulate neither what youre doing, nor what you mean by good? Its an irresistible challenge, and what we shall here call (following Hayden White3) the burden of history a burden we carry, whether we recognize it or not. On the bright side, it may in fact be positively worthwhile. To take notice the elephant in the room improves your chances of avoiding being crushed. Its also a boon to anyone who has ever wanted to befriend an elephant.

Andr Gide, The Immoralist (01902) quoted in The Burden of History, Chapter 1 in Hayden White, 01978, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 34 2 Merriam-Webster Dictionary, www.m-w.com (accessed 12 December 02005). 3 White 01978, above, note 1.

Now, history as its usually understood constitutes the sum of all human thoughts and actions, and responses and other inputs our environment has made to that process, so far. It doesnt include anything after the present moment, because, so the argument runs, we cant know anything about what hasnt yet happened. A conventional approach to history, then, tries to formulate a theory that best fits with the available evidence from whichever times and places in the past happen to be of special interest to the historian in question. This is a quintessentially academic activity, although different kinds of sources may be used.

EVIDENCE

produces and refines

THEORY

Fig. 1: A main task in conventional history is to gather evidence and produce a theory that coherently accounts for it

The business of understanding the whole of history, in its broad sweep, is the largest project available in this tradition, and it is not to be undertaken lightly. Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah have reviewed twenty of the grandest socio-historical theories that intellectual efforts down the centuries have bequeathed us.4 Though the list is replete with some of the all-time intellectual titans, there is a disturbingly high rate of mental illness noted in their brief biographies.5 One is driven to ask whether the macrohistory drove them mad, or if they were mad in the first place and thats what made them macrohistorians. (Perhaps history is a kind of madness, which simply manifests more clearly in people the more closely they study it.) In any case, the main question is clearis there any sense to history? If there is, its not readily amenable to consensus. Evidently the ducks of history are quite recalcitrant when they do line up, they do so differently for folks in different times and places. Some of those engaged in a macrohistorical project have been able to identify teleological forces at work. To them it seems history is pointing or even pushing in a particular direction, perhaps inevitably. For Marx it was towards a socialist paradise. For Teilhard de Chardin it was The Omega Point, a kind of collective Christhood or species-wide civilizational awakening. Others, however, such as Ssu-Ma Chien, Vico, Pareto, and Sarkar, discerned cyclical patterns.

Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah (eds.), 01997, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change, Westport, CT: Praeger. 5 Ibid: Ssu-Ma Chien (00145-00090? BCE), an historian during Chinas Han dynasty, was castrated in his forties, and responded by making his history as grand and comprehensive as possible (p. 13). The Scottish economist Adam Smith (01723-01790) suffered from a nervous affliction...had an odd gait, and often spoke out loud to himself at length (p. 41). August Comte (01798-01857) attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine (p. 55); Herbert Spencer (01820-01903) endured many nervous breakdowns (p. 69); after a breakdown in 01897, Max Weber (01864-01920) lived on the verge of a total collapse for seven years (p. 85)... And these were the successesjust try to imagine the macrohistorians who didnt manage to get into printthe ones with real problems!

It is striking that these people came from a variety of different cultures, periods, and backgrounds. It should not be surprising that history seemed for them to take various shapes ... after all, they were working not only with different culturally based interpretive frameworks, but with different data. So we see that the historical elephant in the room we mentioned earlier has been groped by various blind historians, and, as in the parable, each has arrived at a different conclusion as to its true nature. Perhaps we could regard these macrohistoric frameworks as mythic structures that can help us cope with the chaos of events by providing a sort of logical grid to overlay the remarkably various facts of history, manifestations of humanity in different times and places. In general, I think of stories, including histories, as being elements extracted from the flux of events and arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The elements of our stories may be there, in a sense, but it takes a human interest to shape and render them comprehensible, the way it took Michelangelo to bring David out of the marble. He could have carved plenty of other things instead, had he so decided. If there were really regular, significant and self-evident patterns to history, would it really be such maddeningly hard work to find them?

THEORY A

THEORY C THEORY D EVIDENCE THEORY B THEORY E

Fig. 2: History contains so much of everything that different attempts to theorize it as a whole have produced very different macrohistoric theories

When history is approached only as a set of data from which patterns can be variously pulled out, as we have seen, leads to deeply inconsistent results. It is nothing new to remark that intellectual enterprises are all too frequently detached from real life. The popular image of an academic in his [sic] ivory tower, oblivious to the cut and thrust of life in the towns and villages below, is in part justified, because the study of life can so easily become a substitute for taking an active part in it.

Obviously there are many patterns that can be drawn out of, or imposed upon, the mess of events, depending on which perspective you choose or are able to take. It should also be noted that there are some very skeptical views floating around about the usefulness of taking any heed of history. For instance, after the interestingly named Great War, which ended in 01918, Valry wrote: History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect .... History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.6 (Fig. 2 may be taken to illustrate the point.) Similarly, others have averred that history is senseless, just one damn thing after another. Another famous aphorism, variously attributed to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is, If we learn anything from history its that we learn nothing from history. This is a very worrying statement implying that, even if there are lessons to be had, our mechanisms for apprehending and making good use of them are somehow defective. The justification for studying history seems to be founded on the idea of learning at a collective level, as Santayanas overused maxim reminds us. In the absence of learning we can apply, its reduced to merely a morbid albeit fascinating form of entertainment. So perhaps the patterns we detect in history tell us that history is really made twiceboth times inside the mind: the first time is in the collective minds of the people that lived it, the second time is in the mind of the person doing the detecting. So, rather than seeing history as something to be observed, more or less imperfectly explained and disposed of, I see it as a process in which we participate and for which, to that extent, we are responsible. History is not, then, a thing, but an ongoing process in which we all co-create the world, with each successive generation adding its own chapter to the story. This view of history as dynamic really takes us beyond the purview of the word history as defined earlier from here on in, history plus the future(s) will be called chronology. The need for a theory of chronology (social change, past present and future) can be stated quite plainly: 1. Here we are. (In the words of the English comedian Rowan Atkinson: Life is one of those things isnt it?that most of us find it very difficult to avoid.) We are condemned to act. 2. While were here, we have choices, within (mostly un)certain parameters, about how to act. The condition that enables choice, or makes it meaningful, is summed up in the word alternativity (the existence of many different possible worlds branching out on the basis of choices we make and chance events that occur).7 3. Our choices about how to act are informed at some level by our expectations, whether or not these are stated explicitly, about actions outcomes. Those expectations can be seen as manifesting or constituting a theory; a model of how the world works. 4. Since we have the ability, as individuals and groups, to reflect on our cognition, including our theoretical models, we really ought to exercise that ability. It might make our model, and hence our actions, better.8
6 7

Quoted by Hayden White 01978, above, note 1, p. 36. Alternativity is a word I use for the unverifiable and unfalsifiable philosophical assumption that makes futures studies possible. It also makes possible law, judgment, intention, and morality people cannot be held responsible for what they cannot avoid doing. (It also makes possible the concept of possibility itself.) It is a first cousin of the concept of free will, and of chance. 8 Better is of course about as value-loaded a term as existssomewhere between good and best on a scale of value loadedness. Better in this context can be taken as a black box meaning, literally, more like whatever you like.

The roles of V and A What we value, or dont, is tied up with the actions we do and dont take. If we think our actions wont have significant consequences, for example, we might feel unconstrained about acting upon whatever impulse seizes us from moment to moment. If on the other hand we think we might offend someone we care about, or go to prison, or (more positively) help make our surroundings more pleasant to live in, then depending on our priorities we might do, or refrain from doing, things on that basis. So our interests and values (legal, social, theological) whatever they may be, are implicated in whatever theory we have, and whatever actions we take. Another way to look at it is that what we do embodies or expresses our values, or vision of how we would like things to be; regardless of what we tell ourselves and other people those values or vision are. In either case, values and actions intermingle. Someone that takes an interest in the big picture of society, as it changes over time, will then see a need for a theory of history, as well as an articulation of values, that helps us act that way. Being a someone that takes an interest in society at large, and sense that it is better to be part of the solution, or do good, whatever that might be. This can even be taken further if it is possible to evaluate the possible consequences of actions beforehand, we have an obligation to do that. It seems to me that actions taken blindly are more likely to cause harm. By what right do we act blindly if there is a way to see? This is where futures studies comes in. At the broad level of the chronology of this species and its activities, the theories we have, or dont have, as individuals and groups, are reflected in our actions. In short, what I am saying is that theory is not, in an unfolding chronological process, only connected to evidence. The actions we take, and the values we hold or the image of the world we aim to live by (vision) are involved too. One Swedish writer, Mats Friberg, has provided a very simple and useful analysis of the components of futures studies. For him there are four parts of the enterprise: Vision, Empiricism (I prefer evidence), Theory, and Action. He calls this the VETA methodology for participatory futures studies.9 Together the four constitute (one way of analyzing) a complete cycle of informed action in the world. I assert that most of the academy, including the popular image of scientific research, confines its attention to the E and T parts of the process (as discussed above, and shown in Figures 1 and 2). This is presumably because it is less disturbing to the self-understanding of objective or neutral non-involvement to do so. Anyone who denies the role of vision/values or sees action as being irrelevant to their work is probably laboring under an illusion they would do better to discard.10 As far as I know Friberg does not develop any causal chain that relates these four components to each other as part of a process, but I suggest it may run cyclically thus:

Kjell Dahle, 01991, On Alternative Ways of Studying the Future: International Institutions, An Annotated Bibliography and a Norwegian Case, Oslo: Prosjekt Alternativ Framtid, p. 32. 10 The scientists involved in the production of the A-bomb during the Second World War were, by and large, convinced of the value of their enterprise. It was not until they beheld the massive power unleashed by their efforts that many of them fully realized that their work was not simply dry inquiry-for-its-own-sake. See Robert Jungk, 01958, Brighter Than A Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (trans. James Cleugh), New York: Harcourt Brace.

VISION
which informs which is a basis for

THEORY

ACTION

which builds or modifies

which produces

EVIDENCE

Fig. 3: A participatory futures model contains the elements of Vision (incorporating values) and Action, as well as Theory and Evidence

All four components are essential: theory no less so than the others, even though it may seem at first drier and of less intrinsic interest than the others. Someone who wants to change the world, or at least minimize the harm they cause, ought perhaps to have some grasp of the role of all four of these. It is worth noting that this same cycle can describe basically any participatory, ongoing experiential learning process, including, framed slightly differently, the scientific method itself: theory gives rise to an hypothesis, rather than a vision. If action can take the more specific form of experiment, you have the same process that is used in labs for research and development. It is the fact of being an iterative process that enables it to progress i.e. hypotheses improve, by successive rounds of testing, modifying the theory and hypothesis so they more perfectly account for the evidence. In futures, the emphasis is reversed the process is vision-led, and actions are oriented to making the evidence conform more closely to the vision. One way of regarding the epistemological difference between the two is that, in science the scientific subject (the scientist herself) is distinguished from the object, while in futures the object (a community, an organization, society as a whole) is often merged with the subject. This is the reason why I believe an objective study of global chronology doesnt make sense because as soon as we incorporate the present, were part of the process. I have suggested in this section that both values (vision) and action are an integral part of being in the world. Futures studies provides a way to recognize this, by concerning itself with values driven involvement in the chronological process. There are two theories of social change which I examined closely at the start of this project. Here we shall refer to them only briefly, as our time will be better spent elsewhere.

The first is international relations critical theorist Robert Cox, who propounds a version of (macrohistorian Marxs) historical materialism, invoking the dialectic as a mechanism of social change.11 As he observes, Theory is always for someone and for some purpose12 I have been suggesting that our purpose should be the actively creation and shaping of change, since change seems to happen whether or not we take responsibility for it. In Coxs model, the context for world order is provided by three interrelated categories of forces: ideas, material capabilities (power), and institutions.13 A period of stability exists when the three interlock and synergize to support each other; this stability may also be called (macrohistorian Gramscis word) hegemony.14 World order itself, he suggests Cox, can be placed in a kind of triangle of mutually dependent factors (each one of which consists of variations of the three forces above), representing an historical structure which is stable in hegemonic periods, and changes or reconfigures in between times. The three elements are world orders; forms of state, and social forces organized by processes of economic production.15 For Cox, it is the last of these three changing social forces arising from changing production patterns that drives changes in the other two. While there is surely some truth to this, it is a rather unwieldy and diffuse place to identify as a starting point it begs the question, what causes production processes to change? My contention is that, if ideas (in dynamic tension with power and institutions) underpin not only social forces, but also forms of state and world orders themselves, then this may be the leverage point we are looking for. A theory for the purpose of shaping change making history, so to speak ought to offer something to do, an agenda. In my view, such an agenda would include the formulation and dissemination of counterhegemonic ideas, eventually aiming to effect a transformation of world order. The philosophy underpinning futures studies, including its outlook on time itself, are, to my mind, exactly that counterhegemonic ideas that encourage people to take greater responsibility for their lives, for the unfolding of society generally, and for the interests of future generations. I base this claim on the premise that, if futures ideas were to be taken seriously in the political arena, the current ethics and practice of governance would have to undergo substantial change.16 The second theory is an evolutionary philosophy delineated by Jan Huston. In it he identifies a definite overarching tendency towards greater complexity, running through not just human history, but the entire unfolding of the universe, from the big bang onwards. In his analysis, a system passes through five stages:17 emergence, development, maturity, chaotic destabilization, and finally break which may mean either collapse, or transformation as the system gives birth to a new, even more complex, subsystem. In this way we can see the development of nested systems, like Russian dolls, from the largest and earliest astrophysical system, to the biological, the brain/mind, the sociopolitical,
Robert Cox, 01986, Social Forces, States and World Orders, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 204-254. 12 Ibid, p. 207. 13 Ibid, p. 218. 14 Ibid, pp. 222-223. 15 Ibid, p. 221. 16 The creation of a public philosophy expressing commitment to future generations is explored in a collection of writings edited by Tae-Chang Kim and James A. Dator, 01999, Co-Creating a Public Philosophy for Future Generations, Westport, CT: Praeger. 17 Jan Huston, 01996, Framework for Designing Architectural Futures, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. See also the elaboration of these ideas in Jan Huston, 02000, A Passion to Evolve, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Political Science.
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and finally the most recently embedded technological layer. According to Huston these nested systems co-evolve.18 While I find this analysis excessively tidy, especially the separation of systemic layers, it is after all a model and as such provides a useful way to try to understand both the direction and shape of change. The most interesting aspect may be the description of how stage four resolves into stage five, a systemic oscillation between criticality and supercriticality until a break resolves the tension.19 Huston observes that in a biological setting, extinction of the species is the outcome in the vast majority of cases.20 His argument is that by exploring transformative options, humans as a species (and by extension, organizations or professions such as architects) and consciously decide to change in a transformative direction. The title of his doctoral dissertation, A Passion to Evolve, is an expression of this message of empowerment. Although they deal with very different contexts, I have come to see the theories offered by Cox and Huston as complementing each other. The former tries to account for how stability (hegemony) occurs in the social setting, through the interlocking of ideas, power and institutions. The latter shows how, in a shift from one system to another, intelligent actors can embark on a deliberate and strategic exploration of alternatives to improve the prospects for their survival, or transformation. It is interesting, I think, to consider that futures studies may itself be regarded as part of a civilizational strategy to improve the prospects of survival in the face of radical uncertainty, and perhaps impending supercriticality in our environmental context. The spreading of its ideas can thus be thought of as part of a counterhegemonic strategy intended to bootstrap the species to a more self-conscious and responsible phase. That is, maybe futures is, in a chronological sense, an emerging issue? So, it seems that futures offers a superior self-understanding than does history, as I have portrayed it, because it adopts an active and values-based approach to chronology, while history typically denies or downplays these dimensions of experience in the historian herself. Theory considered alone suggests it can be separated (through a cycle involving only the progressive matching of T, theory, and E, evidence). This neglects the fact that peoples visions and actions are constantly changing E anyway so its no wonder we have never found a consensus on T. What all this points to, it seems to me, is a need to develop an ethic of involvement rather than detachment; of cultivation rather than of spectatorship. All people could, and should to the extent of their ability, take part in making history the active and conscious shaping of chronology. This calls for a different approach to theory, one integrating other parts. Whether futures has an adequate theoretical basis or not is a significant question for the field. In a 02005 review of futurist Richard Slaughters book Futures for the Third Millennium: Enabling the Forward View, the following statement is made:21

18 19

Huston 01996, ibid, p. 6. Ibid, p. 10. 20 Ibid. 21 Michael Hollinshead, 02005, Book review, Futures 37, pp 337-344, pp. 337-338

What futures studies has never done to my knowledge is study how societies have learned in the past and continue to learn today. In short, it has no data based model of societal learning on which to hang all its prognostications about content and process. [] This is, to say the least, an enormous technical hole in the discipline. The discipline is trying to improve the efficiency of a process for which it does not have an empirically defensible model.

In part I agree: an empirically defensible model (a theory informed by evidence, in the language we were using earlier) is a crucial part of integrating futures into an action-oriented process, and it was in recognition of the importance of theory that I embarked on this inquiry. Others are much better placed than I to judge the fairness of the accusation that there is no such model in futures: I suspect the problem is more that there is no shared model of social change, or history. And why would there be? Many futurists are post-postmodernist sharing the belief that knowledge is situational, possible only because of the knower. It would arguably be inimical to the openness of futures to seek to establish a unifying theory. This may seem to dodge the issue, and Id be interested to hear other viewsbut I think its possible to see futures itself as an attempt at or evidence of social/civilizational learning. It responds to indeterminacy with the concept of scenarios (probably the single most widely used futures method), being derived from a theory that says no coherent predictive theory is possible. Since the future is fundamentally unknowable, we adopt this meta-theoretical strategy to cope with the limits of theory, so each scenario can be based on a different theory about what could happen. The lack of a fully articulated model for social learning is hardly a fatal criticism of the developing practice of futures if we see it as striving towards the realization of an unprecedented phenomenon social foresight.22 Scenarios posit that change emerges from a set of options (alternatives, possibilities) which all through history people have been choosing between, even if they didnt always see it that way. History is, in this view, not something were simply studying, but rather a process of which we are part. The articulation of scenarios from this standpoint is neither strictly predictive nor explanatory, but facilitative. This is a fundamentally different way of looking at change. Indeed, we have already seen how intriguingly different the maps of history can be, which strongly suggests that a universal account of historys shape is either impossible, or extremely general (eg Hustons complexification, or cycles of rise and fall), and therefore of an inappropriate scale for use on a day to day basis. A world map doesnt help you find the bus stop. bI am not sure that historical theory qua theory can help us much in conditions of radical uncertainty, where unprecedented developments (novelties) far outweigh in impact either cycles or linear continuities. Therefore, rather than proposing my own version of a social change theory in this mould, I will spend the remainder of this paper elaborating a protocol for change management, a metaphor to live by. The historian serves no one well by constructing a specious continuity between the present world and that which preceded it. On the contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot.23 This calls more for futures than history: here I propose one way of understanding, an orientation, an attitude, an approach -- to encourage and enable learning in a context of active pursuit of lived values -- one strategy to cope with this uncertainty.

See for example Richard Slaughter, 01999, Futures Studies: From Individual to Social Capacity in Futures for the Third Millennium: Enabling the Forward View, St Leonards, NSW: Prospect, pp. 305-318. 23 White 01978, above, not 1, p. 50.

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Cultivating preferred futures A friend of mine, an anthropologist from Vermont, likes to go to the East-West Center garden, a small plot at the eastern end of the campus near the Manoa stream. He enjoys weeding because it is to him a meaningful thing to do, what he calls the practice of metaphor. He is engaging in a personally significant, symbolic activity when he cares for the plants, the well-being of the garden, and seems to identify this with his own self-directed growth and development as an individual. As Gides quote suggests at the start of this paper, change is always going on, but history stops at the present just as it starts getting interesting. To look at the past in isolation is, he says, like trying to learn about the growth of plants by confining ones studies to a herbarium. I am proposing that we step out of the herbarium of history and into the fields of experience. History as the study of evidence followed by the formulation and refinement of theories is inadequate to the needs of living, breathing human beings. It is about what brought us to where we are today. In its herbarium is a place where we can learn to some extent about plants, how to identify them, how they look inside... they can be dissected and analyzed, yet this learning exercise is but a prelude to the field work, which I want to argue ismust beparticipatory. The real value of history is not in the storage and classification of dessicated facts. History is just training for the real challenge; how to manage change. The herbarium is a symbol of the accumulation of knowledge. But the application of that knowledge happens outside; in the field, and in the garden, where you get your hands dirty. Below we explore seven ways in which gardening is a suitable metaphor for managing change.

1. Gardening comes naturally

Cultivation is practical development and application of knowledge, with a pedigree in human affairs as long as civilization itself agriculture was the trigger for civilization.24 As a practice it has been with us for ten thousand years, or about 400 generations. As Brand writes, Those original farmers ten millennia ago were the first systemic futurists. They mastered the six-month lag between sowing and reaping, and they remembered enough crop experience and matched it with enough astronomy to be able to use the sky as an accurate signal of when to plant.25 Professor Daniel Janzen, Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and Technical Advisor to the Area de Conservacin Guanacaste, Costa Rica, argues that the whole planet now needs to be managed. We are acting, thinking culturally, genetically the same animals that made these spear points. And since that time, weve had gardens, in a very literal sense, as part of our behavior, our culture, our social organization, our way of doing things..26 In an article in Science he writes:27 Kids
24 25

Stewart Brand, 01999, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, New York: Basic Books, p. 30. Ibid. 26 Daniel Janzen, Third World Conservation: Its ALL Gardening, Seminars about Long-term Thinking, Long Now Foundation, April 02004, quote at 10 mins 40 sec, available in audio format at http://www.longnow.org/shop/freedownloads/seminars/ (accessed 14 December 02005). 27 Daniel Janzen, 01998, Gardenification of Wildland Nature and the Human Footprint, vol. 279 no. 5355, pp. 13121313, available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/279/5355/1312 (accessed 15 December 02005).

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do it, agroindustry does it, grandparents do it, astronauts do it, and Pleistocene Rhinelanders did it. And we will all still be doing it 10,000 years from now. The garden is a somewhat unruly extension of the human genome. The key to preserving biodiversity is, then, recognizing and relabeling wildland nature as a garden per se, having nearly all the traits that we have long bestowed on a garden--care, planning, investment, zoning, insurance, fine-tuning, research, and premeditated harvest. His conclusion: Stop labeling the wild as the wild. There are simply many varieties of gardens. There is no footprint-free world. If cultivation, agriculture, gardening all these practices are fundamentally the same thing are basic to humanity, then they might offer a way to understand and work with change that makes sense, that resonates with people.

2. Gardeners think ahead

Gardening is anything but instantaneous. It requires forethought, a decision-making process attuned to the rhythms of nature as well as to the needs of those tending to the garden. The 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now was in part inspired by a story about the oak beams in the ceiling of New College, at the University of Oxford. Writes Danny Hillis:28 Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. While the story is probably apocryphal, the point is its symbolism. Such foresight is virtually unthinkable today which is partly why the clock project has gathered the momentum and interest it has; its an exception to the rule we witness almost everywhere else go faster. The fact is, an oak tree grows only as fast as it grows, so if you think you might want one for future use, forethought is of the essence. Even as social change accelerates, the point remains that the futurist, the social gardener, must accommodate things occurring at their own rate.

3. Gardening is personal
As we have seen, both actions taken and values embodied in action are personal. The garden, whats there and is not, how it looks, the way its arranged, all reflect the personal aspirations, preferences and habits of the gardener. Or we could be more accurate make it gardeners: social change is nothing if not collaborative, a synthesis of the will and efforts of many. The level of care and attention, or conversely of neglect and disinterest, that is shown in the garden is directly expressed and can be felt in what kind of place it is to be. Our communities and countries are much the same. The exterior is a reflection or manifestation of interior knowledge, intentions, and commitments. At the same time, of course, to paraphrase Marx, men make their gardens, but not in circumstances entirely of their own choosing. The experience, attention and care that the gardener is able to bring to cultivating the place are crucial. Yet whats possible is constrained by and depends on specific details, location-bound, such as climate, soil, weather, availability of different plants.

Danny Hillis, 01995, The Millennium Clock, (originally published in Wired ), Long Now Foundation, http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/ (accessed 15 December 02005).

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4. Gardens give back

There are both aesthetic and survival components to cultivation: as a category of activity, it is associated with neither exclusively, and each is bound with the other. Even areas managed purely for survival or economic purposes fields of grain stretching to the horizon in Kansas, gentle slopes lined with grapevines in Tuscany, precious arable hillsides terraced to grow vegetables and rice in Yunnan, have an order and a beauty about them, a sort of harmony. At first, the other extreme, gardening for aesthetic purposes only, may seem unnecessary. But the tiny backyard near downtown Toronto, with ten square feet of garden lovingly tended by its urban inhabitants provides them with a few vegetables, some fresh herbs to add to the cooking each evening. The few potplants crammed in a Manhattan apartment may seem unnecessary from a survival perspective, but the attention bestowed upon them is reciprocated, as they keep their stressed Wall Street caretaker from cracking up; the botanical gardens in a city like London provide an invaluable green space to breathe, even though they may not be regarded as a central to the economy as the stock exchange The management and cultivation of social change is also an inseparable mix, not oriented merely to sustaining societys basic needs, but aspiring to higher, subtler things, transformations. In short, we take care of our plants so that they will take care of us. We give to gardens, and gardens give back.

5. Gardeners have options

If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favours nor your hate. 29

We awaken to find ourselves in an immensely fertile temporal field, surrounded by trees, ferns, bushes, and seeing a ground covered with seeds each bearing the potential for future change, yet not knowing which will grow. Many potential futures are in a sense already present around us, which we can imagine as scattered in seeds of time, or change. This again illustrates the idea of alternativity, of the plurality of futures; a profoundly empowering notion. Now, here is the thing. In this garden, in this field, whichever way we turn we run into something. Its not possible to be neutral in here. Perhaps the seed we trample inadvertently could have borne fruit, perhaps the plant we choose to water and care for will be poisonous. There are lots of unknowables. But the main obligation is surely, take care we must try to learn about the plants, and what works for us, as well as for them. Rather than attempting to say which grain will grow and which will not, since we live and work in this field of possibilities, it seems more useful to accept a certain responsibility for which ones grow, and which do notto be productive rather than predictive.

William Shakespeare, 01605, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act I Scene III. Available at Wiki Books, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Macbeth_-_Act_1,_Scene_3_-_A_heath_near_Forres (accessed 15 December 02005).

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To bring this back to futures as a social activity, as we have suggested above, the predictive mode is, in the social setting, frequently epistemologically flawed for the simple reason that the subject and object are one. The attention of futurists makes a difference. We may know this, but we dont know it deeply enough. Even to write or speak about about possibilities, or comment on emerging trends can (un?)wittingly affect whats done about them it forms part of the knowledge economy, the ecology of media through which ideas and images circulate through the social mind it is thus excluded on principle from being mere commentary. So, a report about falling confidence in financial markets, or increasing fear of terrorism, or the burgeoning popularity of an emerging novelist, or rising antiChinese sentiment in Japan, can have a self-reinforcing effect on each of those things. Some decades ago, Paul Ehrlichs dire Malthusian predictions about skyrocketing population, and Rachel Carsons image of a Silent Spring attracted enough attention that they fed into an ecological movement that then tried, through various interventions, to slow down environmentally destructive social and industrial processes. A few weeks ago, a production of the musical Little Shop of Horrors was put on at the theatre here at the University of Hawaii. I had never seen it before; neither the theatrical version, nor the 1960 Roger Corman-directed B-movie, nor the 1986 version starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin.30 The story concerns a mysterious plant which Seymour, an underpaid clerk in a skid row flower shop, finds somewhere and takes into his care. The plants curious form, which resembles a Venus Flytrap, begins drawing new customers from far and wide, reversing the florists flagging fortunes. The hapless Seymour, although riding high on a sudden wave of fame, respect and a slight pay raise, has a secret which he cannot afford to share at any cost: the plant feeds on human blood, and as it grows larger he has to find some way to keep it satiated with a steady supply of victims. The story seems to be a parable, a sort of lowbrow retelling of the Faustian bargain but its lesson for us, surely, is the question of how to recognize emerging trends that are contrary to the values we collectively want to cultivate in society. One of the challenges that gardeners of change must face is to decide which possible emerging futures which seeds of change, which growing plants are ultimately detrimental to the overall design. The tagline Dont feed the plants! is a fine strategy for the ones that suck blood, but not every pernicious change comes in a form thats so easily recognized as malign. The unintended consequences of intended actions are, and will remain, the greatest challenge to our gardening efforts. There is in my view, nothing to be done about this, save the articulation of the garden we desire, and learning about how different plants respond to different treatment. This is perhaps more art than science, but it is a challenge we cant ignore. In the social context of the early 21st century, were all contributing to the shape of the garden anyway, whether we like it or not. The best approach in recognition of this uncertainty may be one that simply encourages us to become more responsible caretakers. Gardeners can decide what kind of garden they want to grow, to strive towards. Gardeners do have options.

30

http://www.imdb.com Little Shop of Horrors (accessed 15 December 02005).

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6. A garden is never complete

A garden cannot be maintained with a flurry of attention every so often, whenever we feel like it. Being neglected, the plants we care about are likely to become lifeless and parched, and may die for want of attention. In different conditions, neglect allows carefully tended plots to give way to the chaotic designs of weeds whose voracious appetites use any available resources for themselves, turning the space from a liveable garden into inhospitable tangle of unwanted scrub. Attention must be regular, measured, consistent. Gardeners dont build everything themselves, they help to shape natural processes, in accordance with a vision of the garden they want to have. Choices about what to grow, where, and how; what to pull out or harvest must be made continually, and of course over time the vision that guides the garden will co-evolve with it. It is also a process that is never perfected or completed: the cycles of growth to maturity, and death, take place alongside seeding, germination life and death are daily, yearly, centennial facts in the garden, with different processes operating on different timescales. A garden is forever a work in progress.

7. Gardening is no longer optional

Janzens argument, which we encountered earlier, was: Stop labeling the wild as the wild. There are simply many varieties of gardens. There is no footprint-free world. So gardening, in the literal sense of managing nature, as well as in the metaphorical sense I have been developing to refer to social change, is a skill we are all going to need. Similarly, Dator has argued that as a species we now need to acknowledge the responsibilities we have incurred through the profound and irreversible impact we have on biology on this planet up to now. 31 He quotes Walt Anderson:32 [W]e are already governing evolution. This is the great paradox about the threshold: It is not out there ahead of us somewhere, a line from which we might conceivably draw back. We are well across it. To say that we are not ready for evolutionary governance is equivalent to saying that a teenage child is not ready for puberty; the statement may be true, but it is not much help". It is thus incumbent upon us to learn to direct change the way an expert gardener does.33 With unprecedented, unrecognizable seeds sprouting left and right, this will not be an easy task. But those seeds are not from outer space they are the offspring of plants we can know about, and make educated guesses as to how they might look fully grown. Whether they deserve our care and attention or ought to be weeded out, whether they can be fertilized, what kind of a garden they have in mind for themselves these things must be the subject of our careful deliberation.

31

Jim Dator, 02002, Assuming Responsibility For Our Rose, , Paper for "Reconceiving environmental values in a globalising world, An international workshop at Mansfield College, Oxford, July 11-12, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. 32 Ibid, quoting Walter Truett Anderson, 01987, To Govern Evolution, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 3. 33 You will have gleaned from this essay that I personally know next to nothing about gardening. This is an oversight I hope to correct in coming years.

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The process continues We are in the throes of creating a new culture. I suggest that the development of futures studies is part of the conscious development of a new cultural approach to its own evolution, a major tenet of which is optimistically to regard history not as a burden, the boulder of Sisyphus, but as his hill, on which we can sit and contemplate more distant horizons. In what does this cultural change consist? Part of it is in revisiting and remodelling our philosophy of time. History as a set of dried facts remains part of our dominant cultural approach to time we need look no further than the still prevalent study of history in the universities of the world, and the fact that plural futures remains a novel concept to most people. In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges the narrator learns of a manuscript created by his ancestor, a chaotic novel which is at the same time a labyrinth called The Garden of Forking Paths.
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me a forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pn, he chooses-simultaneously--all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.
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So, then:
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pn conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, [he] did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.
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In this view, which is implicitly that of futures studies, in my understanding, the idea of alternativity is taken to its logical conclusion: we create the world with the decisions we make, we end up in different places in the vast space of possible worlds according to the passage we choose to take in times garden of forked paths. This puts the constraints imposed by history in a different light: rather than the default being a singular future, there are many, depending on how we choose to behave. We are taking about cultivating the garden of forked paths, an emancipatory conception of time, in the social mind. I have argued here that the ethic of careful attention to consequences and the development of our collective actions, on the model and in the manner of gardening, which has a venerable history if history began with agriculture, then in a sense gardening is history. And todays challenge is to creating a wise culture, or social foresight. Did I mention that cultivation of culture is a tautology? Culture is cultivation culture is gardening.

34

Jorge Luis Borges, 01964, The Garden of Forking Paths (trans. Donald A. Yates), in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New York: New Directions, pp. 19-29, p. 26. 35 Ibid, p. 28.

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The word culture first appeared in 1440, meaning "the tilling of land," from the Latin cultura, the past participle stem of colere, meaning to "tend, guard, cultivate, till". "Cultivation through education" dates from 1510; "the intellectual side of civilization" from 1805; the "collective customs and achievements of a people" from 1867. 36 In the very words we use, history reminds us that as a species, one way or another, were all about continuously reinventing ourselves and the world. Futures studies as I envisage it accepts this and takes it forward. Happy gardening.

36

http://www.etymonline.com/, culture (accessed 15 December 02005).

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