Today, it seems that every square inch of the earth has been impacted or controlled in some way by humans. Paul Crutzen defines this period as the Anthropocene, where humans have interfered so much with natural environments that the planet’s climate and ecosystems are impacted in irreversible ways. (Crutzen, 2006) Scientists are still debating whether the impact caused by humans is severe enough yet to move into a new geological epoch. However, looking at the earth as not having any areas left without human intervention, the argument could be made that the planet is a garden and that humans are the gardeners.

Gilles Clément recognised this in his writings contained in The Planetary Garden. He said, “If the planet functions as a single living entity, limited by the confines of the biosphere, then we do indeed find ourselves in the conditions of a garden: an autonomous and fragile enclosure where every factor interacts with the whole and the whole with each of the creatures present. All that remains is to find the gardeners.” (Clément, 2015)

If humans are the gardeners, then we have not been very good ones. With the enormous threats to biodiversity loss, deforestation, mass extinctions, and more, our garden is crying for help. (Davis, 2020) When Clément says, “find the gardeners”, he does not mean people must plant flowers and vegetables. To Clément, the gardener understands that every action has a reaction. In order to sustain a healthy garden, one has to observe and then act, working with rather than against natural systems.

In a time when Qatar is shipping seeds of grass into the desert from the United States to create football pitches for the World Cup and small island villages are turning to digital mapping to save their culture once they are buried by water due to rising sea levels, where are the gardeners? (Ralston, 2022) (The First Digital Nation, 2022)