REDECKER, Eva von, 2023. Die Wildnis pflegen. Le Monde diplomatique, September 2023, S. 3 page 
, monde-diplomatique
The idea that about half of the global land mass should be left to itself first received public attention in 2016 when E.O. Wilson, the legendary 90-year-old conservation biologist, published the idea in his book Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. page
Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass, the authors of a remarkable manifesto entitled "Half-Earth Socialism," published by Verso in London in 2022, therefore immediately envision the liberation of the entire world from the grip of capitalist valorization. versobooks , site , play
A Planetary Crisis Planning Game site
If so, then everything would have to change. One half will be renaturalized, possibly under indigenous administration, and in the other half we will plan how much space should be used for ecologically sustainable and socially just food production, for the generation of regenerative energy, and for housing and transportation infrastructure. In the face of such hard trade-offs, gardening may seem like an unjustifiable luxury.
But precisely because our initial conditions have already deteriorated irreversibly due to warming and species extinction, the sober comparison of primeval forest and arable land does not add up. Renaturation is itself a labor-intensive process that must be managed if the result is to provide truly rich habitats.
Where drained moors cannot be re-wetted, which binds by far the most CO2, permanent grassland is sometimes a better carbon sink than forests, whose growth stagnates after a while and is also always threatened by fires, which immediately worsen the climate balance again. Basically, permanent grassland only exists where it is mowed at least once a year – as in the natural garden. The wild also needs horticultural input.
At first glance, there seems to be no room at all for gardens on the other half of the gap between virgin and utilized land, i.e. on the land that, according to Vettese and Pendergrass, is supposed to serve human needs. The authors outline a planned economy that operates with cybernetic models. Input and output of production processes are to be made recognizable on a global scale, set in relation to the planetary load limits and democratically negotiable.
How this is to be implemented politically is deliberately skipped; the authors are initially concerned with a coherent utopia. And indeed, such a use of our knowledge and our data processing capacities seems to be extremely reasonable. However, mathematical modeling is much more meaningful for industrial manufacturing processes than in the fields of work where the preservation of something alive is at stake.
Care work is not at the center of the design. But it is also of great importance in the most fundamental of all production areas, agriculture. A planned economy that focuses on short-term yield optimization would soon have to turn to the wild again, because soil is a virtually non-renewable resource. So both CO2-binding and fertility-preserving cultivation methods would have to be developed.
The most promising trends in this area are much closer to horticultural methods than to the rationalized agriculture that characterizes current large-scale landholdings just as it once did the real-socialist agricultural sector. One key trend, for example, is attempts to re-breed annual crops – primarily arable crops such as cereals, but also vegetable varieties – for perenniality. This allows the established crops themselves to crowd out the weeds, the soil biology is not disturbed by annual plowing, and the vegetated ground cover keeps carbon in the soil. Another approach builds on the integration of trees into cropland. Hedgerows and rows of trees provide windbreaks, store moisture, and in the process, yield edibles themselves.
Even if the wild moves into the field in this way, professional agriculture will always have to make its decisions in such a way that it prioritizes feeding people over feeding neighboring species. In addition, there is an urgent need for playful – and time-consuming – experimentation. Their place is the gardens, in which edible things grow for humans and yet which also aim to increase abundance for all species present. Sometimes, rather unplanned, both succeed at the same time: wildness and calorie production.
Any land reform of the future should therefore allow garden access for anyone who feels like it – especially in big cities, where there are also enough buyers to absorb any surplus harvest. We may not even know yet how much August would be possible.
What I do know for sure, though, is that I hate my desk in August. I am reduced to an animal that wants to go into the garden.
~
Thomas Knutson et al., ‘Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change Assessment: Part II: Projected Response to Anthropogenic Warming’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, no. 3 (2020): E303–22.